Glen CLARKE Winning entry (detail) Australia 1954
American crater near Hanoi #2 2005 (detail)
Vietnamese and US currency, cotton thread, wood
180.0 (h) x 300.0 (w) x 300.0 (d) cm
The artist wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Australia Council through its New Work Project Grants

Language is a bit like magic, it only works if you agree to believe. Words are just symbols, they don't mean anything on their own. They stand in for objects and ideas; they allow complex concepts to be communicated easily and succinctly, but only when there is a consensus. However, language is not static, it shifts and mutates conforming itself to common use. In this way language is also a bit like politics. It is full of democratic uprisings, heated arguments and protracted tussles over borders. As the meaning of words become unstable, stale, irrelevant, people begin to change their definitions without asking permission. These changes may be slow but they are inexorable, eventually even the academics have to concede defeat; an example of the true power of democracy.

I read an article last year about one of these quiet mass revolutions in which the editors of a famous and respected dictionary had to bow to public opinion and actually reverse the meaning of a word. The word in question was nonplussed. I have to confess that I too had always thought that nonplussed pretty much meant "not-fussed" and I happily used it incorrectly for years. However it really meant bewildered and befuddled; quite fussed actually. But not anymore, so many people used it incorrectly that it had to be changed. So those of us who thought it was onomatopoeic have been right all along (thanks to a neat trick of revisionism.) I mention all this here because while viewing the National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2005 at the National Gallery in Canberra, I was shocked to see evidence of this process. I saw for the first time cracks in the meaning of the word sculpture.

Those of us in the craft world are used to wrangling over the definitions of words. The whole what is art?/what is craft? thing has been going on for decades (or maybe forever?) without coming to any definite conclusion. Art can be craft, and craft can be art; we have become used to blurry borders and shifting definitions. But for some naïve reason I thought that within the art world itself things were a bit more stable. While I am not going to pretend to understand what painting is, or can be, I did think that I had a reasonable grasp on the concept of sculpture. I thought sculpture was about form, objects in space, a preoccupation with three dimensions. But apparently not. Apparently sculpture, at least in the 2005 version of the National Sculpture Prize, also includes video.

The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2005 has a little bit of everything, and this may be how video pieces got in. It almost seems like the selectors had a checklist with boxes that needed to be ticked. (Works needed: huge modernist monuments, some traditional figurative bronze casting, an installation, some aboriginal work, a postmodern, ironic art in-joke, some model making, oh yeah and some video.) Either way the exhibition reads like a sampler of current sculptural practice. And what is most interesting about this hypothetical checklist (besides the videos, which I promise to stop raving about now) is that it seems to have also included a big box for craft.

In fact, craft makes a substantial contribution to this sculpture exhibition. Simeon Nelson does nifty things with a jig-saw. His wooden Wall Zip (for Brancusi and Barnett Newman) is a cheeky poke at the self importance and high-minded seriousness of Minimalism. It is refreshingly, unashamedly decorative. Heart shapes, ellipses and elaborate curlicues in dark stained plywood are layered in a narrow vertical pattern running down the gallery wall. Nelson's sculpture doesn't so much look like a big zipper as a playful arrangement of the off-cuts from a Giant's scroll work project. Nicole Byrne has transformed the extremely humble kiddies craft materials of masking tape and paper into sophisticated and delicate organic forms. Her large swollen shapes have a honeycomb structure and resemble pollen or fungi spores viewed under a microscope. While Byrne's statement expresses her concern for human degradation of the environment, her installation actually highlights the patient ability of nature to reclaim its territory. Her fragile sculptures resemble natural parasitic growths feeding off the man-made gallery walls. In addition to these two pieces, Paul Procee presents finely crafted shoes made from lead, Mona Ryder uses textiles with humour, and Patrick Hall's Stack doubles as functional piece of furniture. And the sculpture that took out the big prize, American Crater Near Hanoi #2 by Glen Clarke, is very crafty.

Clarke's sculpture is crafty in all the best senses of the word: clever, cunning, and dexterously made by hand using craft skills and a sensitive selection of materials. Clarke uses the traditional techniques of origami and sewing to create a contemporary sculpture that maps the physical spaces and emotional territory of war.

In 1998, Clarke spent time in Vietnam. While there he became fascinated with bomb craters from the Vietnam war; physical scars that have failed to heal. Clarke's American Crater Near Hanoi #2 is like a large floating cube. He uses Vietnamese and American currency (folded into the shape of tiny shirts) to delineate the depression of the crater in a 3D grid of red thread. Like any good craftsperson Clarke allows his materials and techniques to tell a story in their own language.

His use of money highlights the economy of war; political gains and big business profits balanced against heavy human costs. The tiny folded shirts evoke a sense of loss. Even at this miniature scale the form of a shirt inevitably conjures up the presence of a person, a poignant reminder of the absent bodies of the dead and the missing. The way Clarke folds the currency also conveys meaning. The Vietnamese money is folded to expose the portrait of Ho Chi Minh, giving a human face to the Vietcong casualties, while the US dollars show only the American Eagle: aloof, aggressive and defiant; the faceless symbol of a relentless military machine. The thin red lines of Clarke's Cartesian grid resemble the laser tracers of high tech weapons; his linear red cube effectively marks out a territory shaped by mechanised violence. But Clarke's choice of material is actually very low-tech, he has used thread, not weaponised beams of light, and he intentionally left the loose ends visible. This deliberate focus on craft material and technique accentuates the handmade nature of the piece. Clarke's sculpture is clearly labour intensive; it took time and effort, it didn't just happen. And here is the message in the medium, looking at Glen Clarke's American Crater Near Hanoi #2 we are forced to acknowledge that wars also don't just happen; they are deliberate human constructions.

Very crafty indeed.