Sean O'Connell, Leach, 2006, graphite, rag paper.

On one level, the rosary is simply a string of beads; part of a very long tradition of body adornment that stretches back into the murky mists of prehistory. In fact, archaeological evidence suggests that the craft of jewellery predates the art of painting by some 5,000 years.1 Neanderthal people fashioned pendants from shells, teeth and bones. These early beads were talismans, designed to increase potency and physical prowess or provide spiritual strength and protection. And here the rosary slots into another ancient and ongoing practice, the intermingling of the symbolic and the sacred.

Since the very beginning of the Western art/craft tradition, visual images have been linked to religious notions. Cave dwelling peoples, including Australian aborigines, drew their gods, spirits and myths on the walls of their shelters. Classical Greek and Roman statues, ceramics and metal work depict a pantheon of deities with perfect unattainable bodies. For centuries, the church was the driving force behind artistic production in Europe, from illuminated manuscripts, to reliquaries and the soaring grandeur of gothic cathedrals.

Like the father, son and the holy ghost, art, religion and dogma have been an inseparable triumvirate for millennia. So perhaps it shouldn't have come as such a shock to find heavy weights of the country's contemporary jewellers scene, and other high profile crafts people, involved in the inaugural Madonna Del Rosario Acquisitive Art Award, an exhibition that was clearly given a big thumbs up by the invisible hand of god.

Yet it was a surprise. Since the legacy of the eighteenth century enlightenment, which successfully wrestled power away from the church and gave it to the state, art has continued to become increasingly secular, irreverent and even iconoclastic. Contemporary galleries are more likely to be filled with the scatological scrawlings of Australia's favourite bad boy Adam Cullen, the attention grabbing posturing of American photographer Andreas Serrano's Piss Christ , or the clean, cold blankness of minimalism in its many guises, from German jewellery to home-grown neo hard edge painting, than anything devoted to the act of worship. Even in Sydney's annual Blake Prize for Religious Art you are hard pressed to spot anything overtly related to any organized religion.

So, on the opening night, it was an unexpected and pleasant surprise to hear a church choir singing in the secular space of the Wollongong City Gallery. It even more startling, and considerably less pleasant, to suddenly find myself in the middle of a sermon. The discomfort of half the audience (the half that wasn't the local Italian Catholic community) was as audible as the shifting of feet as a small man with a big voice instructed us on the official meaning of the rosary, reminded us that Jesus had died for our myriad sins and preached a doctrine of religious intolerance. Thankfully the artists and craftspeople in the show took a much more open minded approach to the challenge of responding to the Catholic rosary.

Julia Moretti's Found Crucifix , a giant rosary made from crunchy uncooked pasta and a battered family heirloom, has a quirky domestic charm. It is reminiscent of rainy day, childhood craft projects. Her use of pasta, the quintessential staple of the Italian diet, also places her piece firmly in the kitchen. It conjures up the smells of cooking and evokes a strong feminine presence. Moretti's rosary comments on the role women often play in families as dispensers of physical comfort and spiritual guidance and strength.

Annabell Collet made her deliberately un-wearable, massive Mosaic Wall Jewellery with a message in mind. As she says, ‘I made my rosary so big and heavy to comment on the weight of religion and the grand scale of the church.' Wearing Collet's piece would literally be a burden. Its heavy steel clasp, apparently fashioned from hardware store components, links her piece to much cruder chains, like the shackles worn by convicts. Collet seems to be pointing towards the darker side of Catholicism, a shadowy zone steeped in fear, guilt and punishment.

Sean O'Connell makes the invisible visible. In his almost abstract rosary, Leach , O'Connell has embedded graphite balls into a thick sheet of white paper. They are arranged in a blatantly feminine shape, a reminder of Mary's fecundity and central role as a mother. Radiating out from this primal void, O'Connell has methodically written thousands of ‘hail Marys' in a looping intricate web. Leach is a visual document of muttered prayers and the silent act of devotion.

It is fitting that creative minds such as these should be invited to contemplate and adjust the rosary, for its form is not fixed, but has been modified several times since it was supposedly invented by Saint Dominic sometime in the eleventh century.2 Like all elements of a living culture the rosary should be susceptible to current circumstances and subject to change.

Carlier Makigawa, Rosary, 2006, sterling silver, red coral, textile

Yet, despite all the wild and wonderful variations on the theme of the rosary and meditative devotion in the Madonna Del Rosario Acquisitive Art Award , it was predictable (and in fact I did correctly guess the winner just seconds before it was announced) that the winning piece would be one of the most conventional.3 Internationally respected Melbourne jeweller Carlier Makigawa took home the $5,000 prize money and the Madonna Del Rosario committee acquired her piece which will be displayed annually at the Wollongong City Gallery in conjunction with the Rosario festival. In her Rosary , Makigawa has used her signature style cage forms threaded on a knotted red cord and broken up into the standard format of ‘decades'. Her piece is an easily wearable string of beads which terminates in a crucifix. It is very beautiful, but not challenging. I guess the winds of change are still not strong enough and the roots of tradition run very deep.

Notes

1Lois Sherr Dubin, The History of Beads: From 30,000 B.C. to the Present , Thames and Hudson, , London, 1987, 21.

2 In the mid sixteenth century, Pope Pius V officially declared that Saint Dominic invented the rosary, despite evidence of its previous existence. ibid.

3The judges were Grace Cochrane, Deborah Ely and Helen Crocco (the latter is a representative from the Madonna Del Rosario committee and Master of Theology.)