Is craft a dirty word? So it would appear on visiting what was clearly a craft exhibition, and a fine one at that, at the National Gallery of Victoria’s new, tomb-like premises at Federation Square.

Here the word craft, one which went to the heart of this exhibition, had apparently been deliberately purged in favour of its more fashionable bedfellow, design. The exhibitors were ‘artists’, the gallery’s What's On booklet referred to an award for ‘designers and makers’, the curator’s essay in the exhibition catalogue—itself an over-designed victory of style over substance —was careful not to use the taboo word at any point.

Yet the $30,000 Cicely and Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award, a triennial award this year devoted to textiles (in 1994 it was ceramics, in 1997, metalwork), was, and remains, a craft exhibition. It remains so despite a change of name from Craft Award by the gallery earlier this year—a change NGV director Gerard Vaughan said was, a broadening, ‘to reflect the perceived shift in the scope and nature of the award’.

What shift? This year's 13 short-listed participants work was all made by those participants. Yes, they were making statements through that work, using it to express concepts as varied as the childhood turmoil of a boy whose father disapproved of his embroidery skills (Mark McDean's Unbearable Situation #169 and Unbearable Situation #272) and the threat to endangered native plants (Nicola Cerini’s Flora Neglecta, a printed tribute with gaps representing plants already beyond salvation). But they were also demonstrating their amazing mastery of technique. And in certain works— Patrick Snelling’s Capricious Blur, for instance-mastery of production techniques, pushing the boundaries of those techniques, drawing on the old to create the new, was fundamental.

Capricious Blur, an array of delicately and intricately screen and digitally printed fabrics, each piece wall-hung in an embroidery frame, and supported by a series of the most beautiful hand-made books, is a fine example of just why this award was not about design.

The work was a culmination of Snelling’s decades of printing experience and his engagement with his materials—something few designers actually do—drawing on his knowledge of and fascination with Japan’s culture and long textiles tradition. It was impossible to calculate how many hours Snelling had spent creating these works, aiming not simply to show how clever he is, but as he puts it ‘to illustrate a premise that working with dyes, screens and fabric continues to challenge me’.

Vera Moller's work, less complex in terms of its actual production, was a fine example of craft as a form of expression, with superficially simple objects taking on new meaning. On the face of it the actual works-coockooland (model); coockooland; marqueedesade; pippi; and josephine-'designed' by Moller, were simple black and white knitted tubes which could be interpreted in various ways-as garments, as quasi-architectural spaces. But as Moller herself explained in the exhibition's companion video, when visitors came to her studio they were fascinated with trying to see inside these tubes, lifting themselves up in their efforts to do so. And so it was that they came to be more about the nature of space and privacy.

Issues of space were also raised by the venue itself—when one eventually found it. How to find the third floor, how to find the lift or stairs, how to tell when the lift reached the third floor when there was no floor indicator inside?

Things started well enough-the exhibition began in a kind of lobby leading into the main room. A wall scroll explained the background the award-a truncated version of Dr NGV director Gerard Vaughan's catalogue introduction, notably without mention of its previous incarnation or of the dreaded 'c' word.

Beside it rested Karen Ferguson’s Floral Tributes, two 'vases' of flowers made from recycled clothing, the vases themselves covered with recycled jumpers. The works, a comment on the recycling of 'rubbish' into items of value-one man's rubbish...etc-were extremely beautiful and that beauty, combined with the realism of the flowers and the skill with which they were fashioned from fabric and wire-the lilies from old brassieres, the button-adorned 'ferns'-struck at first glance. But there was something hollow and not a little superficial about this work. I was uncomfortable with the reminder of school projects. Yes, rubbish can be recycled-And? Ferguson seemed to have no more to say.

I was uncomfortable too with Ferguson’s claim that in reworking the material she reworks its prior meaning. Can that past be ignored, even eradicated?

This same unsettling claim was made by Mary-Louise Edwards for her formally loved, again using old clothes but this time in hundreds of tiny balls, with dishcloths prominent. The work was fun and attractive, but Edwards also made the important point that her materials resonated with traces of their former lives and histories of their previous owners.   

Around the corner into the main component of the little clutch of rooms used for this exhibition and first impressions were not of the works, but of white—so much white. In this low-ceilinged venue reminiscent of a phaeronic tomb with a new coat of paint, noise echoed from white walls, ceilings and floors even when it was empty. Alone in the room, quiet contemplation was out of the question as the noise of visiting school parties bounced in the door-less openings at either end, while cavalcades of school children marched through, the space apparently a useful cut-through.

There was nowhere to sit, but hopes that the sideroom with the video on continual loop would offer some respite proved vain. Here visitors perched on rock-hard, backless cubes, endeavouring to concentrate on the incredibly short cuts of the ‘artists’ discussing their works despite the noise, the bright light and the disconcerting floor to ceiling window beside the screen which gave a view of several floors of the gallery.

It was not a venue which served the ‘artists’ well. Award winner Louise Weaver’s Taking A Chance On Love was plopped in the middle of the floor in the main room, a red carpet island inhabited by three red animal forms, a bear, a squirrel and a mink, a cage of twigs and assorted shapes such as red rock and stones.

Weaver says these creatures activities are defined by the viewer’s imagination, which is just as well, since it was virtually impossible to find the descriptive plaque, which was on a distant wall beside Moller’s entry. The work itself, with its ideas relating to the evolution of the natural and the man-made in response to environmental forces, was both stimulating and impressive in the skill with which it had been created. A worthy winner, it not so much dominated the room as was gobbled up by it.

That was the story of so much of this high quality exhibition. It is impossible here to mention all the works in detail: of those not touched on. Georgia Chapman’s Japonism deserves mention for the beauty of the layered fabrics which have been a hallmark of her fabric label Vixen, though this work appeared to push few new boundaries.

All the participants-Weaver, Snelling, Moller, McDean, Cerini, Ferguson, Edwards, Chapman, Laurie Paine, Rosslynd Piggott, Tim Gresham, Sara Lindsay, Kate Derum-submitted high quality work invested with decades of hard-won skills, often with interesting and challenging ideas, always with something of themselves.

It would be interesting to know how they responded to their hanging of their work in the NGV’s new white cocoon, how they felt about being short-listed for a ‘design’ award and described only as artists; how do they see themselves and their place in the context of this arbitrary redefinition of craft?