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.
Margaret Kirkwood, craft practitioner from NSW and active in the Craft Council within her State, writes her prediction for the future of crafts in Australia.
One need not restrict this semiotic approach to an analysis of the objects of fashion given that the major role adopted by craftspeople in contemporary times is that of drawing attention to otherwise ordinary objects and processes by remaking them in a mode other than mass production.
For centuries now, textiles and the skills required in their creation - spinning, weaving, embroidery, sewing, quilting - have been considered women's work, occupying them indoors while men engaged in more serious activities like warfare.
I view my memories as a fragmented collage of life, constantly in review and abstracted through the shifting of time and place. Taking and putting together some of these fragments I recall how I became a taxidermist.
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........
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.
Exhibition review ...but never by chance
(eroticism) editor/curator Linda Marie Walker Exhibitors Jennifer Hamilton, Melanie Howard, Bronia Iwanczak, Sheridan Kennedy, Rosemary Laing, Rosslund Piggott, Carol Rudyard
Skin
Curators Annette Bezor, Julianne Pierce, Exhibitors Maria Kozic, Jan Nelson, Sally Smart, Josie Starrs
Contemporary Art Centre Adelaide South Australia
May 1 - 31 1992
From Women
Curator Vivonne Thwaites
Exhibitors Maria Cruz, Michele Elliot, Nicole Page-Smith, Lucia Tancredi
Artspace Adelaide Festival Centre
10 April - 23 May 1992
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.
Looks at the ceramic practice of Jill Smith. It often happens when people with different views and areas of expertise are brought together to solve a problem that something new emerges.
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.