Kate Cotching Production line 2006 paper , starch 350 x 800 x 120 (approx)

Victoria's craft guilds are an under-acknowledged repository of knowledge, skills and traditions, guardians of ancient crafts but also comprising practitioners eager to engage with the 21st century and to apply their skills - knitting, embroidery, spinning, weaving, lacemaking - in a contemporary way.

Even less well known is the fact that some of the guilds are also repositories of historical artefacts, precious in both the financial and heritage sense. Key amongst them is the Malvern-based Embroiderers' Guild. Founded in 1960 it has, over the past four-and-a-half decades, developed a collection of more than 3000 examples of embroidery, lace, beadwork and other stitched textiles.

It is to the guild's great credit that it not only wants its collection to be seen and to serve as a promotional tool and a teaching resource. It is also happy to have contemporary artists and practitioners interact with its pieces and derive inspiration from them.

This is the genesis of The Presence of Things , curated by Stephen Gallagher, whose long-standing relationship with the guild began with a Craft Victoria mentorship which led to his winning a guild research scholarship.

Under his auspices 14 Australian artists and craft practitioners (two working as a team) have created new work inspired by pieces in the guild's embroidery and lace collections. Over three months late last year they viewed the collections, selecting pieces with which to work - pieces which, while not necessarily the most precious, give an insight into the diversity of the holdings, Gallagher says.

It is interesting to note that while the curator is male all the artists are women. Were no men invited? Is this a reflection of the age-old stereotype that "domestic" crafts such as embroidery are women's work?

Although the craftsmanship here is of a uniformly high standard - clearly male participation is not a prerequisite for a successful exhibition - it would have been interesting to see what a man, drawing not only on his skill but on his upbringing, values and attitude to gender stereotypes, would have made of this historic material, some of which was most probably created by men.

The women's works and the pieces which inspired them are, with a couple of exceptions, shown together to great advantage in the light and airy surrounds of the two room Art and Design Faculty Gallery at Monash University, supported by a beautiful and very useful catalogue (well worth the $12 purchase price).

The works, created with materials including porcelain, metal, glass, paper and, of course, textiles, are inspiring and surprising in their variety and innovation.

Most successful are those by artists who, having studied their chosen pieces, played with the ideas they drew from them, twisting and extending those ideas, following chains of thought and inspiration sparked by the original, but going far further than simply reproducing motifs or ideas in a more contemporary format.

One of the most obvious and successful examples, and, according to gallery staff, one of the most popular with exhibition viewers, is Kate Cotching's Production Line , a breathtakingly detailed paper cut out, worked with a scalpel on fine white paper, later starched.

Cotching's inspiration was a c1800s white Irish needle lace flounce, a beautiful piece comprised of tiny stitches, with some small age marks but otherwise in immaculate condition.

Cotching has not settled for a literal interpretation of the lace patterns, as for instance, Julie Blyfield did in creating her five rather cold and lifeless silver brooches, each based on one of the boldly-coloured crochet native flower motifs bordering a c1900 linen map of Australia.

Rather she has taken her idea and run with it, creating a streamer-like cutout which curls its way deceptively casually across the display case, depicting the evolution of industry from the handmade, through to mass production. It begins with a single woman, creating needle lace, her lower half merging into fine cutout patterns based on those on the flounce. Then comes a row of women, a cottage industry; then, almost spectral figures plying their trade in a sweat shop, and on to people, Chinese in appearance, working with machinery.

This is a piece that rewards lengthy and close study - clever, delicate and thought provoking, it alone is worth the journey to this show.

lka White Life blood 2006 (detail) collected buttons, cotton/rayon gabardine, embroidery thread 2450 x 890

Another who took an interesting journey from her original inspiration is Ilka White, with two large works, separately displayed. The first and most successful is a simple but highly effective wall hanging of red buttons stitched on to gabardine. This was inspired by two historic textiles: a c1780s - 1800s Italian linen bobbin lace flounce with a twisting, vine-like pattern and a fragment of Moorish textile, boldly satin stitched in red silk.

White's work Life Blood echoes the blood red of the Moorish textile and the buttons create a sinuous pattern reminiscent of that on the flounce. Her own interpretation (the catalogue provides this for each artist) is illuminating; the buttons depict the ancient, life-giving boab tree which stores water for dry seasons - a quality White sees in the guild, whose members are its lifeblood. The pattern created by the buttons, while similar to that on the flounce, also mirrors marks made on the tree trunk by burrowing insects.

White's second piece is less successful. Her Mantle was inspired by a c1920-40 black and off-white satin and needle lace Rouleaux cape and recreates it by different means; hers comprises off-white felt pieces, small ovals with pointed ends, each centred by a black acetate circle. These shapes reproduce the design on the body of the cape. They are hung together by lengths of fine thread to create and open and airy cape. Unlike the original, with an elaborately worked border and collar, this is decorated with an unsettlingly large number of guinea fowl feathers. A lush collar is also created from the feathers.

The meaning of this is unclear to the observer but White says the reference to the feathered area of a bird's back and neck reflects her recent Central Desert travels to research birds. The guinea fowl in question having been unlikely to have shed such copious quantities of feathers are, unlike those she studied, undoubtedly dead, adding an uncomfortable dimension to the work for this viewer, at least.

The work of Korean-born, Sydney-based Joungmee Do also has a meaningful back story which viewers would be hard-pressed to deduce without the aid of the catalogue. Inspired by a pair of c1850s embroidered silk Chinese sleeve bands, an embroidered butterfly slip and two floral slips, she has created three beautiful, covetable works in a traditional Korean metalwork technique with materials such as steel, fine gold and silver and copper.

Two feet, worked in an elaborate cutout pattern, are mounted above a traditional Chinese lotus flower with characters at its centre. This is My dearest wishes (No 1 Footprint) , while My dearest wishes (No 2 Butterfly) is a beautiful, mournful black cylindrical container, fine metal butterflies atop its lid, others, imprisoned and apparently doomed, are visible through the lid's cutout pattern.

My dearest wishes (No 3 Fish) is a fish, depicted with several other items it takes some concentration to deduce: a bamboo shoot, a fan and a Korean harp.

The works are beautiful for their own sake, the butterflies particularly moving, but are given an added dimension by the catalogue note explaining that together they read as a narrative of Do's thoughts of her parents. The footprints are Do awaiting reunion with her family, the fish fable tells of a son who saves his mother from death while the butterflies are not so sad, it seems - they symbolise sleep and dreaming of one's parents, sending good wishes.

Two other artists impressed with their novel approach to their task, though their works are in complete contrast: while Melanie Hill uses recycled materials such as used teabags, Nicole Welch creates hers through digital printing.

Hill, 44, is described as a "young gun" from the Embroiderers Guild (so how old are the old guns?) and took as her inspiration a rather crudely worked c1960s Noah's Ark wall hanging, stitched on tapestry webbing and depicting, in large, sometimes ungainly stitches, Noah and several animals.

Hill's inventive work, How many frocks to fit on the Ark? is given an interesting aged appearance by the use of the dark teabags as a background. The wall plaques are needed to define which is the inspiration, which the new work.

On the bags, stitched to a background to create a wall hanging, she has machine embroidered playful images of animals and people, apparently inspired by children's books. These are outlined in rough zig zag stitch, echoing the somewhat primitive/childlike quality of the earlier hanging, and surrounded by paper borders printed with statements such as, "Meanwhile Mrs Noah could not decide what frock to wear" and "quite a crowd".

Welch, on the other hand, chose two much older and very finely worked pieces from the collection - a black silk c1870s-90s Chantilly lace mourning scarf and a c1800s bobbin lace pricking in ink on parchment paper. To create her large work Momento Mori ( meaning "remember that you are mortal"), more than two metres high and displayed hung and framed behind glass, she creates a background of blood red on which is printed in a darker shade with the lace pattern from the scarf.

It's beautiful and eye-catching, but there is a hidden picture here, visible only in close-up. Welch has handpricked the figure of a woman, head down perhaps in mourning, outlining both the figure and the lace pattern within. The image, says the catalogue, is Welch herself. It is a clever and compelling use of 21st century techniques yet with haunting references to the past.

So high is the standard of this exhibition that each artist deserves mention, at the very least for the quality of the work. But those singled out above are those who have come up with the most interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes playful and certainly most innovative responses to their historic inspirations.

Only one of the works - one of three by embroiderer Lesley Uren - would be deemed unsuccessful by this viewer. Inspired by a c1860-1900 white ladies' Brittany bonnet edged in Valencienne lace, Uren created a bonnet box embroidered in gold with the rose motif found on the bonnet itself and made a three dimensional, machine embroidered rose tassel. These works, while not particularly inspired ideas, were skilfully executed. But she also created a portrait, Girl with a Brittany Bonnet , the bonnet embroidered in gold thread. This framed picture described as " a witty interpretation of Jan Vermeer's Girl in a Turban , simply did not work. It was, to this viewer's eye, simply tacky.

The other seven artists' works, all worthy of inclusion, were more derivative; they were more inclined to reproduce images. Julie Shepherd's four pieces of pierced porcelain, for instance, were beautiful and calming to view. The bowl-like sculptural forms represented four stages of a flower opening - its petals closed, then two partly open, and finally, wide. But this response to a 1911 ecru linen and cotton table mat in open whitework floral embroidery seemed somewhat obvious, as did Gretchen Hillhouse's 11 off-white porcelain bowls in a lace design, each with a royal name but basically straightforward interpretations of the four c1800c Flemish lace collars and edgings which she chose from the collection.

The three lampshades by Rina Bernabei and Kelly Freeman (Sydney lighting design team bernabeifreeman) in screen-printed fabric and anodised, perforated aluminium were lovely, both to look at with the light shining through their perforations and for the patterns the lace-patterned shadows made on the walls. Inspired by a c1850s white broderie anglaise child's carrying coat, this was the most commercial application in the exhibition. Although a reasonably obvious use of the broderie anglaise inspiration it did make an interesting statement about the use of light and shade, negative and positive images and ways of looking at lace, a textile in which is not there is as important as what is. But the team was done no favours by the hanging - their lightshades were so high that having studied the child's coat I could not see what had inspired it until a gallery staff member told me to look up.

So too, the separation of Nicola Cerini's sampler, a concertina created from A4 sized panels of her trademark screenprinted fabric featuring native plants, insects and bird, from its inspiration was unhelpful. While it was in a glass case in the centre of a room the c1900 mixed textiles (though mostly embroidered) sampler which inspired it was hung on a wall and it was unclear what went with it. Cerini's work, while competent enough, broke no new ground. Although some had a little embroidery on the printing, the panels which created it could easily have been the sides of one of her ubiquitous handbags. And while the catalogue said she also drew inspiration from two other textiles and pictured one of them they were not in evidence and gallery staff knew nothing about them.

Jill Dickson, who selected an 1800-40 reticule purse and a rather uninteresting black glass beaded flower medallion created her own containers, two small and beautiful lidded cylinders in a self-supporting bead-weaving stitch in response to the reticule. She also created nine glass seed bead versions of the flower medallion, hers more three dimensional and in bright, modern colours, but nonetheless a somewhat predictable response.

Less predictable, but a response which did not seem to come to grips with all the possibilities offered by the c1800s multicoloured tumbling blocks patterned patchwork quilt which inspired her was Laura Healey's glass interpretation of it. Created from thousands of soda glass beads, fused and slumped, her three part work Connectivity takes aspects of the three-dimensional-looking pattern and reproduces it in black, white, green and clear glass. Sadly, part three, which introduced a pink, broke in transit and was not on show.

But while Healey's catalogue comments included a reflection on watching her mother piece together a quilt, one of the most interesting aspects of the old quilt - the fact that it was unfinished, that the paper and tacking stitches were still in place over most of it - was unexplored. Surely these are intriguing questions with great potential for exploration? Who made this quilt and why was it never completed? But of course it would be a boring world if we all responded to works in the same way and were inspired to explore the same aspects of them.

Luckily that is not the case, as this exhibition illustrates so effectively. The artists have chosen very different pieces from the thousands at their disposal, have responded in different ways, with a wide variety of techniques and in very different materials. And though it may also be said they have responded with varying degrees of success, ultimately success is, as with so many things, in the eye of the beholder.