Make the Common Precious features the work of 19 craftspeople, thus providing an unusual breadth and variety, and setting the tone for the imminent publication of Kevin Murray's survey work of current Australian craft practice: Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious.

The featured craftspeople have been loosely grouped under six themes or types - gatherers, fossickers, gleaners, alchemists, dissectors and liberators - gatherers being designated as those who "draw from the Australian land to produce work, fossickers, those who "discover materials in manufactured environments" and gleaners, those who "use what gets left behind." The alchemists are described as those concerned with the "physical transformation of materials", the dissectors as exposing "beauty through the act of destruction" and liberators as those who "take the precious out of the gallery and onto the street".

Beautifully mounted with burnt red feature wall glowing amidst regulation gallery white, perhaps the standout of the works is that which one sees first: the very moving and tender "Dilly bags" by Lorraine Connelly-Northey. Connelly-Northey takes the scraps of chicken wire and corrugated iron that she finds scrounging around her home in Swan Hill and folds and bends them till they become things of the finest, most delicate beauty. The wonder of it is that, ostensibly at least, so little lies betwixt scrap and gossamer. How can it be, one ponders, that an elongated satchel of corrugated iron should look so moderne, so covetable even, and that chicken wire "tote", so utterly inevitable? The group of half a dozen or so dilly bags, of varying sizes, textures and metals, hang suspended from the ceiling and are lit so as to show anew their structure and integrity in shadow on the near wall. It is a marvellous introduction to the exhibition, all the more for leaving unglossed the symmetry of making dilly bags, the bags used traditionally by Aboriginal women to gather food, out of that which has itself been gathered.

David Herbert's work, situated against the right-hand side of the gallery, features two monumental resin pieces, "Doorway" and "Double". Appearing to be cast from the polysterene foam that cradles such technical items as TVs and computers inside their cardboard packaging, the works are strong chambered beauties of ruby and menthol green, respectively. The works solicit the touch as if one could determine in such a way what kind of beast be this - animal, vegetable or mineral, alive or inanimate, pulsing or composed? For all options seem possible. In particular, one registers somewhere deep down the absence of the squeak of foam. The works address both each other and the room itself, with the tall cool forms of "Double" complementing and appearing within the hot aperture of "Doorway", and their mutual solemnity and openness balancing the softer, muted works opposite. The works also make one realise how rarely do we see trapezoidal shapes and planes in the things around us for in Herbert's works they have the freshness and slight awkwardness of the unexpected.

If Herbert and Connelly-Northey most clearly explicates the exhibition's title, Tiffany Parbs's work can seem somewhat the interloper. In a disturbing, mystifying photograph entitled "Blister ring" we see a close-up of the fingers of the artist's hand, the third finger encircled by a yet-to-burst blister edged in the pink of incipient infection. One doesn't know whether to wince or salute. Indeed, after an initial excitement, one is left with the aftertaste of the cheap thrill and all the more disgruntled by having been susceptible. The accompanying photo shows the rash-like marks made on the artist's inside forearm by a set of exquisite silver instruments, shown together in a glass case below the photo. Looking like tiny boot brushes, or alternatively, deadly brooches, the matt silver ovals hold serried ranks of pins which, when applied to the soft underside of the arm, result in circular scarifications. For this reviewer, if pain and pathology be beauty, it is too hard-won to be entirely satisfying and Parbs's work remains somewhat opaque.

Damien Wright's "Black" is also opaque but in an entirely different sense. The extreme ebony of his dressed stumps of ancient red gum seem to swallow the light. Five squared-off stumps, around five foot high, and of the blackness of charcoal, stand in a pre-recessed base which functions like the support used by florists to organise and stabilise their arrangements. Some of the recesses are unoccupied perhaps so the artist can rearrange the stumps, or perhaps as a comment on all that has vanished since this particular gum first sprouted. Wright's work is superbly counterpointed by the white lace deconstructed embroidery that hangs in a black frame nearby. The work of Louiseann Zahra, the dazzling white delicacy is produced by taking the found remnant - in this case, what might once have been a placemat or large, rectangular doily - and pulling from it the weft thread. The result is a horizontal tracery of white threads held in suspension by that which remains unexcised: the appliquéd flowers and overlocked edging.

In the most intimate of the exhibition spaces, Anna Phillips's "Frillies" shows what might be done, should the need overtake one, with "used bathwater". Troubled by that "used" and its odour of gimmickry, this reviewer was prepared to resist, but the work is strangely compelling. A set of eight or nine transparencies are pinned to a wall. On each is spread a perfect circle with a pie-crust edge of some material that looks like a kind of gum, but is, we are told, a mixture of said bathwater, shampoo and solidifying agent. Within each prosthetic-pink circle there are trapped on its underside grains of rice, looking for all the world like small maggots or the mitochondria within a cell. Under this set of transparencies, there stand rough moulds of the same mixture, now penned into deep cup-cake shapes. Looking slightly more used, but no less plastic in this form the mixture surely extends the meaning of the common beyond the curator's broadest imaginings.

These artists, together with Kantjupayi Benson, Kate Campbell-Pope, Ari Athans, Roseanne Bartley, Paul McKee, Sally Marsland, Fleur Schell, Nicole Lister, Stephen Gallagher, Mark Vaarwerk, Nicholas Jones, Caz Guiney and Honor Freeman, present a stimulating survey of the "growing inventiveness"^[1] in the field of craft and will repay fourfold a visit to Craft Victoria before the exhibition's close on 24 September.