Art Square Sake Cup 2000, Art Large Square Vase 2000, Art Organic Small Round Dish 2000, Art Voluptuous Vase 2000, Art Genie Vase 2000, Art Bond Shot Glass (x2) 2000, Art Dirk Vase 2000, Art Japanese Cup 1997

Dinosaur Designs has been navigating the complex world of fashion and style for 18 years. Their history is a happy, good-luck story, which commenced when three arts students Louise Olsen, Stephen Ormandy and Liane Rossler began selling hand painted fabrics and jewellery at the Paddington Markets in 1985. (Clearly fertile ground, for fashion designers Collette Dinnegan and Nicole Zimmermann may well have been a few stalls away.) To edition their jewellery, the trio began to use cast resin, at first painting over a basic black base before realizing the possibilities of colour and transparency inherent in the new medium. Their works sold well enough for the business to expand to overseas sales and two shops by 1990. Today Dinosaur Designs has stores in Sydney, Melbourne and, the holy grail of all Australian businesses and craftspeople, a dedicated New York outlet. The exhibition at Object Gallery celebrates nearly two decades of production and popularity.

Rock 2000, a colourful, fifties-inspired mobile - half chandelier, half door-curtain for the corner shop - which epitomizes the tack and grandeur of Dinosaur Designs, hangs dramatically in the void of the Customs House building to introduce the exhibition. Indeed, like the chandelier, the entire display is one of the most elegant hangs in town. Curator Brian Parkes, whose previous exhibition of Akira Isogawa’work was considered one of the best exhibitions in Sydney last year, put the exhibition together. In addition to the chandelier, Parkes rings the exhibition with large-scale works to arrest the eye. Two outfits, a twigs and string sundress Sun and Sea and Marinara Tiara, a siren's hula dress of plastic sea shells, star fish and sea horses, evoke the paradoxical world of the Dinosaurs: nature meets lounge room. The last 'big' work is actually a composite, a massive single shelf lined with vases ordered by colour and size to make an undulating spectrum. The rainbow parade compensates for the petite to domestic size of the majority of objects in the exhibition, likewise grouped in artful scatterings and formal arrangements. While such clusters sacrifice the gem-like appeal of an individual piece, the massed displays highlight the evolution of form or genre, and show the Matissian 'themes and variations' approach characteristic of Dinosaur Designs. The visitor first encounters three vitrines illustrating the varied use of pattern, of colour and of form. Then, lesson over, viewers are released into a lolly shop of jube, toffee and liquorice allsort colours, textures and surfaces. It's quite delightful, but the risk of toothache is there.

The Dinosaur Designers balance the sugar with visual roughage, using chunky oversized forms and bumpy surfaces on their earlier wares, recalling the crockery used by Fred and Wilma in the television cartoon, The Flintstones. While the latest output is very polished, Dinosaur Designs maintains something of the crudity and gangling asymmetry of their Paddington Market origins. The use of the sensitive resin manages to convey the sensation of the one-off, and some wares bear the unappetizing surface of the plasticine form from which it was cast. The rough dimpled surface is not my ideal for eating from, but locates the plastic crockery as tribal village craft. The idea of the tribal artist in a post-industrial landscape found expression in many forms, including tagging and graffiti art, and Peter Tully’s Urban Tribalware series. Dinosaur Designs resin brooches took this kind of street cool and bravado into the swish openings, soirees and premieres of Sydney. Their pendant of tribal affiliations and charms in the delightful Fish, cross and heart pendant1992 and its kin, recalls that moment of invasion. The fleur-de-lys motifs and asteroid jewellery of 1989 shows the influence of the Post-punk look epitomised by designers such as Vivian Westwood and role models such as Madonna. The ‘look at me’ colours and distinctive materiality of Dinosaur Designs was a boon for attention seeking celebrities, extroverts and stylists. A wall of magazine covers in the exhibition, overwhelming in numbers, bears witness to the stylists’ appreciation of the engorged, ‘up front’ audacious Dinosaur style. The wearer’s attitude to society, emblazoned on lapel or earlobe or dangling from wrist, was declared as daringly conformist with a hint of studied insouciance and overlaid with lashings of taste and wit. The Dinosaurs capitalised on the allure of ‘radical chic’, so perfect for a generation making the transition from off the streets and into the boardroom. This was as natural as the group’s subsequent expansion into designer homeware. The move has been very successful, though ironically, the new lines of jewellery in metal are restrained to the point of being inoffensive, lacking the flair of the earlier resin work that first distinguished it from the rest of the market. Their line of glassware, a fifties moderne homage to Murano and Orrorfors, is as formal, but less sober, rejoicing in the fluid shapes and swirls of colour of the medium. The magnificent range of sandblasted glass with its delicate sfumato dappling comes closest to the look of resin without imitating it and constitutes one of the best groups in the show. The work of the last decade continues to exploit bold shapes and bolder colours. While more refined and a tad less exuberant, the original eye-catching and memorable signature style is still evident in the resin jewellery and mass-produced vessels. The play of svelte curves, capricious, swirling hues of scarlets, lemons, chartreuse and turquoise, browns all dappled and speckled, is a delight.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition posits the Dinosaur Design biography as a heroic journey of success, following the group from local market to mini-empire, culminating in a New York store. The inference, given the lack of bibliography, is that commerce determines their place in history. It is probably true that there is no real critical trail for the Dinosaurs or indeed for many other Australian makers. For that reason, the catalogue produced by Object is welcome. The essays by critics and friends are useful but are predominantly descriptive, rather than analytical. In some ways, the catalogue leans to the promotional side. This is further emphasized by the selection of images, displays of vessels grouped as if ready for the sales catalogue, seemingly sourced from the company’s marketing department. Photographs of number of individual major works are absent and there is no checklist of the exhibition in the catalogue.

The catalogue and labels in the exhibition refer frequently to artists: Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Giorgio Morandi, Bridget Riley, Henry Moore, and others were mentioned. This is part of the mythology that surrounds Dinosaurs Designs, namely that they are more than craftspeople, at the very least designers and quite possibly artists. This hierarchy is, I feel, more a confession of popular prejudices than a means to useful insight. Decorative drips and dribbles on the sides of ceramic vessels pre-exist Pollock and the kinship here is more to the elegant spaces of art deco and the staccato lines of Memphis than the painterly energies of the American painter. The referencing of a small body of ceramics to Morandi, while appropriate, for me only conjures up Gwyn Hansen Piggott to unfair effect. After all, what work can stand up against the severe goddess of acetic forms? While I see greater allegiances to craft and design in Dinosaur Designs’ colours and forms than to art, the spectre of fine art does serve a purpose in highlighting the group’s predilection to favour decorative appeal over mere functionality.

Dinosaur Designs creates homeware, plates, bowls, dishes and vases that look like functional vessels but somehow I can’t imagine them actually being used day-to-day, in spite the assurances on their website that they are dishwasher-safe. Rather than use their products, you show them off: It’s a Picasso; it’s a Pollock; it’s a Dinosaur Design. The intrinsic ‘fakeness’ of resin has always been a feature for me at least. I like the fact that their objects mimic utilitarian objects, that somehow it’s not a salad bowl it’s a sculpture of a salad bowl. But what gives the game away is the fact that these colourful charlatans, who have barely done an honest days work in their lives, have moved from cupboard to mantle piece. This is no scary ‘invasion of the body snatchers’ however, but a droll confusion of roles: is it craft pretending to be art, or art masquerading as craft? No matter, these exquisite props to adorn body or home are above all a celebration of visual consumption. Crafted for the delectation of the eye, this is aspirational décor, symbolic of middleclass luxe, even to the extent of an innate and self-effacing modesty, that of faux fur or costume jewellery.

It is a commonplace in the world of contemporary culture to remark how effortlessly retrospective exhibitions are come by and to point out that Piet Mondrian was 69 before he had even his first solo exhibition. In part this is to highlight the immaturity of artist X or Y but also to put forward the pedantic view that a retrospective must reflect a lifetime’s practice rather than only a part. The retrospective customarily confers respectability on artist or maker and their works become acknowledged as classics, part of the cannon. The alternate term, ‘survey’ tends to suggest a particular slice, an appreciation of but one aspect of a larger whole. The exhibition at Object covers the work of Dinosaur Designs from 1985, when the threesome formed, to the present. The catalogue advises that this is a ‘major survey’ and while it doesn’t give the dates of birth of the three members of the group, it is probably safe to say this is a mid career, mid life show. Perhaps the difference is pointless: the world has changed since the mid twentieth century starved Piet of due acknowledgement. Survey or retrospective, this is a chance to assess and to reflect upon, and ultimately honour the contribution of one of Australia’s most interesting design teams. But if there is a distinction to be made, it is that a major exhibition at the end of a career is a summation while in the middle, it’s always a crisis point.

This is the crisis that all Australian artists have to endure—how to make the transition from fresh young thing to sophisticated maturity. The question is not whether to follow your clientele into middle age or to take the Peter Pan option and stay perpetually young or even how to age gracefully. Piet will tell you that the question is how to sustain a relevant practice over a long period in the face of a fickle, often indifferent world. The answer is hard work and commercial acumen, to be sure, but it is also to pretend to be an artist, to swallow the myth that you have to be crazy to do it and just do it. Dinosaur Designs has institutionalized this lunacy—a sort of folie à trois—and endured. While Flamingo Park was a bright comet that came and went and while Country Road has expanded beyond its resources, Dinosaur Designs is still small enough to be a design vehicle for its three principals. Louise Olsen, Stephen Ormandy and Liane Rossler are still being artists, still producing design that matters to their client base. The exhibition of Dinosaurs Designs at Object Gallery is a history of change and adaptation. It is also the story of a constant, irrepressible joi de vivre.