Lueckenhausen,H, The Art of the Object - Aspect of Landscape, Craft Australia. (Bell, R, curatorial consultant), catalogue essay, 1994.

Australians generally consider themselves part of a young, supplanted culture. No longer quite so British, coming to terms with an eclectic 'multi-culture', resulting from a continuum of post-war migration, Australians may seem to others to have adopted adolescence as a national ethos.

Aborigines, the indigenous Australians, thought to be the oldest surviving race of people on the earth, now inhabiting the fringes of this oldest of continents have good reason to be contemptuous of that particularly Euro-centric interpretation of our cultural timeline.

However for non-aborigines, the adherence of a significant number of us to the model of Australia as the displaced child is an example of how we can tend to define ourselves by the qualities we fear we lack rather than by those we have.

The beginnings of the Western chapter of Australian history shared manifestations of colonial, frontier hardship with other new world societies. Contemporary Australians (as do contemporary Americans) cling to a rich mythology of men and women pitted against the wilderness. In our terms - the 'bush' or the 'outback'. We gloss over the reality that, the privations of earlier times not withstanding, most of our population hugs the coastline and most non-aboriginal Australians have always lived in a few, large, urban centres.

To this 'bush- romance we add the primal, intuitive response to timber shared equally by craftspeople and consumer/appreciators and tap into an ancient, mythological value-system in which trees are one of the archetypes of creation. In this context, wood, its smell, its texture, its colours and patterns is as often the starting point for objects as is function or design.

In modern times, 'truth to materials' fabrication techniques celebrate process in an aesthetic that wears its heart very much on its sleeve. The social upheavals of the 1960's and early 1970's involving a move to the left in popular politics, with a redefinition of the values of work, domestic life and national endeavour saw many of the ideals of William Morris' Nineteenth Century Arts and Crafts Movement revived. For woodworkers, as with many craftspeople, this involved a reaffirmation of the ideal that beauty results from an accord between object and the forms of nature.

Early settlement techniques and attitudes where much was made out of little have been passed on to us in an almost unbroken line of succession. Furniture made from branches utilised largely in their natural forms evolved into a mannered style, which far outlasted a lack of alternatives. In fact, the romance associated with this work has been extended into industrial processes with the forms being reproduced in foundries. It certainly speaks of nostalgia for a long remembered (imagined?) bush youth. In Pip Giovanelli's hands it also speaks from a sophisticated, highly educated vantage point allowing him to invest the work with theatre and sculptural presence. As an architect able to bridge an interest in bush vernacular such as wattle-and-daub construction with contemporary attitudes to the built environment he is well placed to tap something of our cherished mythology and present it in an urban, 'high art', context. Furthermore, in a country with a bush mythology but in terms of its area, precious little actual bush, ecology-friendly design practice becomes a contemporary form of making do.

The lack of an indigenous successor style to settlement furniture is no doubt part of the reason why the contemporary crafts landscape is predominantly peopled with first generation designers and tertiary graduates. Perhaps our self-consciousness is related to our need to evolve an ethos in place of having inherited one, why the development of our material culture depends as much on visionaries as journeymen. From British graphic designer to Welsh traditional carver to Australian artist/craftsman; from intricate detail to large structure and back to tiny exquisite bowls, Barry Mills exemplifies the search. Born out of, but not dominated by the material, the classic forms in this selection represent the quiet, introspective, almost Zen edge of Barry's spectrum. While not anchored exclusively in any one culture, this work depends on, at the same time as helping define, a local context.

Our nearest neighbours, the countries of the Pacific and South East Asia treat Australia's newly found geographic and (not coincidentally) economic identification with them with some caution. Little wonder, considering we are having to work as hard redefining a history and a mythology for ourselves as we are in presenting it to the world.

Susan Wraight is an Englishwoman working in Australia in a Japanese tradition for an international (largely American) market. What better
metaphor for the eclectic mix that is slowly reforming itself into an Australian culture? Until recently, many of the Asian cultures on our doorstep might have been on another planet for all the attention our New York and Euro-focussed contemporary art world paid them. Japan has long been the exception, not least in its influence on the crafts. The 'internationality' of the growing Netsuke movement, its popularity having to some extent outstripped that of the craft within Japan itself is an example of one of the benefits of cultures holding up mirrors to one another. Netsuke - highly refined miniature carvings, having lost their traditional function as cord toggles, have been 'reborn' as sculptures. Susan's hybrid style, incorporates her own western art traditions with their emphasis on individualism, with the discipline and traditionalism of the east. Over these she places a layer of figurative representation, often drawn from the Australian environment. The result, while not indigenous to Australia, is neither entirely foreign to it and begins to take root.

In a technocratic, I-me-now era crafts still represent a significant link in the continuum of a considered material culture. For one thing, crafted object still acts as a commodity, the production of which enables us to link creative thinking with the wealth generating part of our community. For another, crafts practice allows the individual to utilise domestic and public objects as signposts of intellectual and physical space against an impersonal and possibly alienating backdrop. The desire of some object makers to rationalise their work within a dialogue, to present images and contexts of meaning, has lead to the work adopting the status of symbolic object. Each of the woodworkers represented here has been able to make a critical success of exploring object as cultural artefact. Each has been able to celebrate the primacy of the object in the uncomfortable context of the waning period of a post-object or at least an anti-technique arts culture.

In my own work that manifests as zoomorphic although not literally figurative imagery. My objects exhibit a romantic nostalgia for 'other-culture' references teetering on the edges of a northern mythology, race memory and fantasy. Perhaps that's a reflection of myself, a conscious attempt to reconcile a series of personal and cultural opposites, manifesting in the work as opposites of material, of technique, of form and aesthetics and of image.

Convinced, as I am, of the potential for craft object to be a prop and an anchor in the ceremony of ordinary living my pieces call up an edgy, albeit benign visitation. They have a sense of watching or guarding. It's that 'edginess' where design touches craft, craft touches art, art touches story telling and story telling touches memory, memory doubt, doubt irony and irony humour, that almost completes the circle of an emerging if hybrid 'Australianness'.

Australian crafts practice has as many (and probably stronger) roots in the country and urban conservatism and a solid trades base as it does in the fleeting, if periodic movements to the left. In fact, one of the most often repeated criticisms of contemporary crafts practice as a whole (and of woodcraft in particular) is that it is luddite, clinging to responses that are inappropriate to contemporary culture.

I doubt that the icons of our culture are as specific, as pointedly industrial as this criticism suggests, especially in the face of the dogged success of an approach which inherits traditional materials and technologies with a practical as much as a spiritual commitment. In one sense, this pragmatic/reactive response recognises that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It responds to a number of particularly Australian phenomena, which include geographic isolation and a small population (and therefore a small domestic consumer base). It calls for almost as many models as there are workshops, which need to be matched to specific niches.

With craft, whatever the thought, one is never far from the vocabulary, whatever the image; one is never far from the material. A designer with one eye firmly on one of those pragmatic niches, Donald Fortescue closes the circle with Pip the architect by anchoring his imagery in the material. He differs however with a further commitment to highly refined and hard-won craft skills. Donald shares the national propensity (at once our weakness and our strength) for looking outward and most often he seems to have looked to Japan. There he can find at first hand what most of us have been conditioned to at a second remove via Modernism, a minimal, sparse aesthetic. It's an aesthetic that will evolve in Australian conditions however, what is brought changes and that to which it is brought also changes. Japanese discipline evolves into Australian tension.

It's a mistake to see mythology entirely in negative terms. A healthy culture needs its parables and metaphors to mirror and even seed its truths. The objects of our material culture, including woodcraft with the provenance of these exhibits, are markers in the process of our maturing.