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Articles About / Transformations: The Language of Craft

R Bell, Transformations: The Language of Craft, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2005.

Transformations is a celebration of the recent work of 85 leading international and Australian artists working in the area of studio craft and forging new expressions within the fields of glass, ceramics, textiles, furniture and wood, metalwork and through a variety of materials in furniture, jewellery and sculpture. The work of those international artists most prominent and influential in these fields is seldom seen in Australia and this exhibition offers visitors a chance to encounter compelling objects that challenge our perceptions of design, function and the meaning of materials. These works reveal the creativity, skill and ideas of the contemporary craft practitioner in the articulation of materials, structure and production technology; the passionate expression of the languages of abstraction, narrative, design and ornamentation; and their in skills which transform materials from the everyday to the extraordinary

The artists whose work has been selected for this exhibition are among those leading their fields of practice at the turn of the 21st century. The Australian exhibitors have been selected from those whose practice has demonstrated strong conceptual and technical development over the past 10 years, among them established practitioners whose work, while well known, is seldom seen in the international context, which this exhibition provides. Several of the international artists are those whose significant influence on craft practice in Australia resulted from visits, workshop engagements, lecture tours, artist-in-residences and the exposure of their work in major survey shows. This exhibition of their recent work creates a bridge to their earlier work that has remained in Australia, much of which is known through the collection of the National Gallery of Australia and state and regional art museum collections.

From the early 1970s craft organizations and government funding agencies, such as the Australia Council Crafts Board, and later Visual Arts/Craft Board, collaborated to offer networking and financial assistance for visits to Australia by overseas artists, often in the form of workshops, lecture tours and residencies. Some of the artists in the "Transformations" exhibition undertook such engagements, building enduring networks with Australian artists who hosted them or worked with them during their visits and facilitating further opportunities for them overseas. These include Giampaolo Babetto, Alison Britton, Michael Brennand-Wood, Dale Chihuly, Edmund de Waal, Arline Fisch, Warwick Freeman, Yasuo Hayashi, Ritzi Jacobi, Hermann Junger, Jun Kaneko, Albert Paley, Gerd Rothmann, Michael Rowe, Wendy Ramshaw, Michael Rowe, Helen Shirk and David Watkins, all of whose recent work has been selected for this exhibition.

The development of the National Gallery of Australia's (NGA) decorative arts and design collection took place during the burgeoning craft revival that occurred in Australia from the mid-1960s and in its scope and depth, reflects the diversity of practice which has flourished since. A large proportion of the works in the exhibition has been recently acquired by the NGA, providing a tangible expression of its commitment to. The acquisition and exhibition of contemporary craft within the broad historical framework of Australian and international decorative arts and design. While the integration of decorative arts and design with other art is central to the gallery's collection and display policy, this exhibition, focused on contemporary Australian and international studio craft, is the first of its kind in the NGA's history.

The works selected for it are drawn together in themes of narrative, materiality and structure, encouraging visitors to explore the relationship of contemporary craft practice to broader areas of current interest and concern. These include innovationsim the use of materials and technologies; narratives on nature and the urban environment, communications and the human body, the expression of personal narrative and the reflection of regional identity.

An examination of some of the works in each section of the exhibition reveals connections across a diversity of work practices, approaches to materials and personal backgrounds. The first section explores translation, transience and memory as points of departure for a variety of narrative objects, including complex works by Edward Eberle, Bern Emmerichs, Patrick Hall and Helmut Lueckenhausen. Other works in this section use and metaphor and realism to invite an exploration of cultural resonance, mythology and our relationship with the natural world.

Edward Eberle has moved away from the classically derived pot, plate and um forms that have characterised his work and, with Tin Feathers Metal Wings, reassembles the deconstructed elements of a vessel, painting and drawing figures on its surfaces in a black terra sigillata slip. Drawing from the language of classical Greek ceramics in their implied relationship between figural imagery and form, his vessels become tableaux in which a variety of human figure types and characters plays out a linear drama. In this work he has torn the vessel apart and reconstructed it; an intervention into the form, which further energises the loose and vigorous figures, painted upon it.

Bern Emmerichs uses a decorative approach to local narrative derived from the forms of the ubiquitous under-glaze-painted English ironstone ceramic meat platters that were exported to the Australian colonies from the early decades of the 19th century. In Who are you? She uses imagery of an Aboriginal man and a British colonial settler against a background of colonial
buildings and Aboriginal artefacts, revisiting a colonial narrative of arrival and dispossession with wry irony and humour.

Drawing from the tradition of the domestic china cabinet, Patrick Hall makes elaborate cabinets as containers for linked groups of his own constructed objects, often overlaid with applied texts. His Bone China Cabinet is designed to suggest a 19th-century museum specimen case, but its taxonomic imagery, on close inspection, is revealed as a visual pun. In the 19th century, immigrants arrived in Australia with large quantities of industrially produced bone china, giving it currency as an aspirational material. The "bones'' in Hall's cabinet are made from shards, of this domestic bone china crockery, found in Tasmania's beaches and rubbish tips, documenting this history of materials with eloquence and humour.

In designing furniture for religious, educational and civic ceremonial purposes, Helmut Lueckenhausen has researched the history and symbolism of the Ark and translated it into a work of contemporary relevance to not only Jewish culture but also as a valid extension and expression of his own interest in the history and meaning of furniture. Lueckenhausen interprets this aspect of the tradition of a religious faith in Ark of the Law (Aron Hakodesh), using native acacia (Blackwood) for the case and applied anodised and engraved gold and silver aluminium plates for the decoration of the doors, depicting abstract delineations of the lion of Juda, a leopard, a deer and an eagle. Its overall design, based on a precise mathematical system of grids, reflects the formal order implicit in the sacred contents that it was designed to contain and the symbolic function it was intended to serve. As any cabinet can conceal or reveal its contents, so too can this Ark suggest the possibility of order, the persistence of tradition and the world of the spirit.

Dale Chihuly's glass "baskets", consisting of a large undulating bowl containing a number of smaller blown glass vessels, trumpets and bowl forms, have become one of his most recognised forms. The large basket, Polished Ivory Seaform Set with Charcoal Lip Wraps, from his continuing "Seaform" series and blown in the filigree technique, is a refined and disciplined assemblage of forms, its alternating white and clear glass giving it a Strong graphic quality. It evokes the undulating forms of marine invertebrates, a recurring theme in his work. Works in the second section of the show are defined by an expression of their materiality. The transmutation and metamorphosis of materials as a form of performance is illustrated in works by Robert Marsden, Jiri Nekovar, Bill Samuels and Irene Vonck. Other artists in this section exploit the sensuousness and tactile properties of materials, allowing their particular physical poetics to reflect a different experience of existence.

In exploring the difference between reading and understanding, Robert Marsden's forms suggest the blunt functionality of mass-produced machine components. The precisely detailed construction of Open to Question is deliberately obscured through the application of textural patination that suggests the passing of time and the inevitability of decay and dysfunction. The tension in this ambiguity is heightened through Marsden's use of slit-like apertures into the object and the elevation of its visual weight off the surface, which, along with a rhythmical pattern of bolted fixings, suggests functionality beyond our grasp.

Balancing the physical and visual weight of a powerful material, Jiri Nekovar's work. Arch I, is characterised by vast, angled and cantilevered blade-like elements, dense colour and coarse surfaces. In this work a sharp, thin, ridge-like blade runs down the convex side of the curve, which when lit reveals a rippled texture similar to drapery. The dramatic angle of this form, resting on three points, and the elusive translucency of such a weight of glass, brings strong visual tension to the experience of viewing and interacting with this work.

Bill Samuels is a potter whose work deals with the Australian landscape. His open bowl forms and complex, rock-like glazes are inflected with the spirit and technique of traditional Japanese shino tea ceremony ceramics, but, through his use of common materials such as gravel, become strongly linked to place and his observance of its nuances. Visually precarious, but balanced on three shard-like ceramic legs, the elevated plate, Studio Road 2, offers itself to the touch, inviting meditative contemplation of the subtle complexities of its transformed materials.

Irene Vonck's ceramics give the impression of having been formed with powerful brushstrokes, arrested for a moment but retaining the potential for further transformation. In Urubamba, she limits her surface colour to a deep brown felt-like pigment, its density obscuring a complex form and evading the eye's desire for delineation and definition. A powerful object of ambiguous function, its subtle convex and concave surfaces and opening force the eye to reinvent its form from different viewing angles.

The third section of the exhibition brings together works that are defined by a concern with structure, rhythm, reductiveness, balance, the organization of elements and the nature of time. Artists articulating these qualities include Gordon Baldwin, Ron Nagle, Michael Rowe, Martin Smith and Alice Whish. Others deal with the nature of objects in relation to space and light, or the nuances of groupings and variations of forms, colour and texture.

Michael Rowe's work, in a long series titled Conditions for Ornament, has followed a strict program of formal investigation of the vessel, characteristically abstracting its qualities of containment and its relationship to surrounding space. Cornerwork is a recent extension of his investigations, with the precise placement of the object.