Art Gallery of Western Australia
Published 04 May 2022
Adelaide Railway Station
Monash University Museum of Art
Published 30 March 2022
Edited by Brad Haylock & Megan Patty Sternberg Press, 2021, 288 pages
Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh (eds.) Griffith University Art Museum and Power Publications, 2020 66 images, including colour plates 216 pages
The Substation
Published 15 December 2021
ACE Open, Tarntanya/Adelaide
TarraWarra Museum of Art
Exhibition review Hossein Valamanesh: Recent Work Greenaway Gallery Adelaide South Australia 3 May - 3 June 1992
Will the computers, mobile or immobile, take over craft work in the near or medium future? Are craftspeople doomed to the fate of the Indian hand loom weavers of the last century-- will their bones bleach the plains? The answer is........
Published June 1992
Written with Phillip (Piri) Everett Over the last year Tandanya (National Aboriginal Cutural Institute) has received much bad publicity but is carrying on and slowly and steadily making history. It opened in 1989 with celebrations featuring Ernabella Inma and Yothu Yindi. Includes photographs of indigenous women at weaving workshops in the South East of South Australia at Camp Coorong Cultural Centre.
When travelling by car over long distances the landscape outside the window endlessly unfolds as a field of subtly carying colour and texture punctuated by the irregular rhythm of straggling trees and bushes.
With increasing anxiety, we face searching questions of the viability, the integrity, the destiny of craft. In themselves, the questions are salutory and point to an intellectual vitality in craft culture, a vigour and toughness which have not existed since the Arts and Crafts Movement. Responses to the challenge vary from relish in the contradictions of craft practice to the old-fashioned despair for any debate whatsoever.
In her introductory notes to the exhibition 'Glass: Material in the service of meaning' the artist Ginny Ruffner comments on the current field of glass art as "being awash in objects, some beautiful, some ugly, most about glass itself - material as content."
Design Visions; The second Australian International Crafts Triennial on show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in August September 1992 provided a chance for local viewers, historians, critics, artists, designers and 'craftspeople' to discuss and possibly take stock of our place in the international arena.
Exhibition review Superimposition Ann Newmarch Prospect Gallery Adelaide South Australia 23 February - 22 March 1992
It turned out that 95% of the symposiasts were blissfully unaware that, starting with the TAFEs, they are already in the era of funding allocation on the basis of conceptually incoherent doctrines of an 'arts industry' with about as much relevance to their interests as atonal music has to the board of BHP.
It is not accidentatl that amongst the Tiwis of Bathurst and Melville Islands, fabric printing has become such a significant craft form. Of all indigenous Australian cultures the Tiwis historically have perhaps the richest tradition of body painting.
There seems to be a consensus that craft is in a state of crisis. But consensus or not, the observation of this alleged crisis is sterile if we do not place it against its background. Is this crisis unique to craft, or is it a manifestation of a more general crisis which extends across other cognate areas? If it is more general, does it nevertheless have special implications for craft?
Now as a much older woman with another career as an artist I have been reconsidering my experience in Museums, reconsidering the structures of archaeology which grid and measure the chaotic site.
David Walker, craft practitioner from Western Australia and active in the Craft Council within his State, writes his prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
