Tasmania is a small state, with a population of just under half a million people. It has a correspondingly small, albeit very active, visual arts community. It is also without a state craft / design organization or publicly funded exhibition space for contemporary craft and design. In recognition of this shortfall Contemporary Art Services Tasmania (CAST) includes exhibitions of craft and design in its program and has established an informal craft and design advisory group. The exhibition, Making Relations , curated by Suzie Attiwill, is the first in what is anticipated to be a series of exhibitions, for the first two of which funding has been provided by Arts Tasmania. The advisory group determined that the critical perspective of a curator living and working outside of the state could provide unique insights into contemporary craft and design practice here. It is also hoped that the exhibitions will encourage critical discourse and exchange in the craft / design area within the state and beyond.
These projects are, in a sense, an experiment in which the curators, approaching the Tasmanian scene as outsiders, are invited to travel throughout the state visiting artists and galleries and to then put together an exhibition of contemporary Tasmanian craft and design based on their findings. The advantage of this lies in both the fresh eye of the outsider and in the critical approach adopted by the curator. There was no particular brief for the project, except the recommendation that the work should be chosen from the established practice of the artists/designers rather than commissioned especially for the exhibition.
Attiwill has, rather than orchestrating an exhibition around a unifying theme or visual approach, eschewed obvious links to create a truly polyphonic conversation that reveals the apparently disparate as emeshed in a complex web of explicit and implicit relationships. The works selected included many by established practitioners that have been represented in a number of recent survey exhibitions of Tasmanian design such as Kevin Perkins and Patrick Hall. In addition to these is the work of others that perhaps do not fit as comfortably within the local understanding of cutting-edge contemporary "design". These include those who's work is more often seen in a "fine arts" setting such as Megan Keating's paper-cuts as well as that of more traditional craft practices such as Rynne Tanton's crystalline glazed ceramics.
Suzie Attiwill, finding herself in the potentially uncomfortable position of professional outsider, approached the situation as one of establishing relationships. On one level these are relationships necessarily established between herself and the craftspersons / designers, on another they are the relations that need to be established between objects and practices that will produce a coherent and meaningful exhibition. More critically, however, she has taken the relations created, made, through making as the central proposition of the exhibition. In the exhibition this was manifested through various strategies adopted to focus the viewer's attention on the materiality of the objects themselves and encouraging a non-prescriptive dialogue between the viewer and the objects and between the objects themselves. The works were placed on large unpainted MDF trestle tables and plinths in the centre of the room, arranged as much as possible as continuous flow surfaces of different heights. This strategy created a fluid conversation between objects rather than isolating them for discrete analytical consideration; it also, to some degree, undermined the conventional exhibition emphasis on the individual artist.
Another strategy, reflected in the raw MDF surfaces, was to focus on the materiality of the works, rather than accretion of expectations that appends itself to artists' names, careers and individual practices. While these things cannot realistically be excluded they were, here, played down, allowing the works themselves to relate to one another, filling the room with conversations and encouraging the viewer to speculate about the infinite relational possibilities of this contingent community of objects.
Patrick Hall When my Heart Stops Beating 2006
MDF, aluminium, LP records, glass
93 x 93 x 15 cm
These conversations establish relationships on many levels, and they do so not simply through similarity but also through disjunction. These similarities and disjunctions function on many levels, refracting across the space and through the objects. The found materials in Patrick Hall's When my Heart Stops made up of spirally cut and motorised LP records, converse, despite their emphatic artificiality, with the found and arranged natural materials of Siglinde Karl-Spence's installation mandala for the path of awakening. Both share formal characteristics in their circular compositions and ordered repetition, but both also speak of time, mortality and loss. Kevin Perkin's stools use found materials of a different kind; the seats that have been cut from a naturally occurring curve in the blackwood tree and retain their bark on the lower side while the finished upper section both reveals the beauty of the grain peculiar to that point in the tree's form and that moment in its history. While providing and elegantly curved seat they are also sensuous invitations to touch. That natural curve find a resonance and disjuncture in the perfect geometry of Pippa Dickson's Variable Coupling seating made from curved laminated plywood and in the rolling surface of Mark Bishop's Huon pine Undulating Bench. The organic curve and invitation to touch speaks across the gallery to the smooth organic surfaces of Belinda Marquis's slip cast Untitled objects.
Shaz Harrison-Williams (knitting) and Penny Malone (printed fabric).
'Palray' shirt and knitted hat
Hat: mohair, wool, glass beads,
Late 1960's shirt: cotton
Hat: 28 x 28 x 28 cm
Shirt: 57 x 42 cm
Marquis's smooth surfaces and assiduous avoidance of corners (but not folds) is a counter point to Rebecca Coote's Corner Study # 2 with its bristling waving glass fronds refracting and dissolving the corner of the room. Both are self-sufficient objects, avoiding history and functionality. In contrast works such as Linda Fredheim's Table and Chair for Mr Wedge , which takes the form of meticulously made campaign table and chair, and Petra Meer's Mother and Child 2002-2005 , an intimate figurative piece assembled from reused clothing with surfaces intensely worked in embroidery and appliqué buttons, are animated by history. While one is the public history of the exploration of Tasmania and the other a much more personal private history, both are about making sense of a place in time and our relationship with it. Such relations between the works can be drawn endlessly, each eventually being caught up in a web with all of the others. This connecting and refracting, continually forming and dissolving relationships, creates a radically decentred and non-hierarchical order in the gallery that focuses the viewer's attention not so much on the individual works as the ground that connects them.
Making Relations both explores and creates relations, generating a charged potential in the space, theoretical and actual, between objects and their making. The exhibition also reminds us that these relations stretch across space, within the gallery, across the island and beyond. They also stretch through time, through the history of the materials, the history of the artists and their practices, through the history of these particular objects and of all objects. In so doing Making Relations , while very much and exhibition of contemporary craft and design in Tasmania, dispels persistent notions that there is a tradition, a style, or a way of working peculiar to this island. It shows the works to be very much connected, even the most intensely locally engaged, to the broader concerns of making; making things and making relations through making.
Suzie Attiwill, by creating the ground for these relationships, some flickering and unstable and others seemingly opaque and immutable, has sidestepped many of the anxieties that inform surveys of contemporary craft / design practice, such as the need to be contemporary itself and the distinction between art and craft or craft and design. The craft / design world that she has allowed to speak is a particular diverse ecosystem of interrelated objects, concerns and histories that cannot be captured in a single monumental theoretical or historical framework.
