Craft Unbound » New Zealand

Australasian Craft Network calling

Kevin Murray — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:37:36 +0000

The Australasian Craft Network has been established as a bridge down-under with the World Craft Council.

The World Craft Council is the umbrella organisation of five regional associations (Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America), within which are various sub-regions. Historically, Australia and New Zealand have been in the South Pacific sub-region of the Asia Pacific region. The WCC General Assembly meets every four years. Regional groups meet annually.

The WCC has two main goals:

To disseminate knowledge, to help craftspersons and revive languishing crafts in these regions and to provide a network and fellowship among craftspersons of the various nations, and to ensure that they are in communication with each other.
To bring crafts and craftspersons into the mainstream of life, connecting with the past through maintaining inherited traditions and looking into the future through the use of modern technology to experiment, innovate and reach out to new markets.

In 2008, the Pacific Craft Network was established as a means of disseminating information from the World Craft Council to the island communities, as well as providing a platform for development of projects particularly in association with the Pacific arts festivals.
To complement that, the Australasian Craft Network provides those non-islanders of the South Pacific with a similar conduit to the World Craft Council and also a means of organising activities to the broader benefit of craft culture.
In particular, there is interest in a future conference to consider the relevance of craft today in our region. Initial questions include:

Should craft, as a form of tactile literacy, be an essential part of education?
How does craft contribute to a healthier society?
Could the Global Financial Crisis lay the ground for a craft renaissance?
How does craft related to emerging practices such as ethical design?
How is a professional craft practice viable when there are no more collectors?
What are positive models for the relationship between craft and design?

Are there questions that you would add to this list? Please feel free to reply with your suggestions.

Members of the Australasian Craft Network will:

Receive emails of World Craft Council activities, including upcoming workshops and forums
Contribute to shaping events in the Australasian region that connect with the international craft world

To be part of this network, please submit your details here. You can also ‘like’ the Facebook page here.

ACN coordinators:

Dr Kevin Murray, vice-president, World Craft Council Asia Pacific Region
Lindy Joubert, Australian national entity, UNESCO Observatory
email australasiancraftnetwork@gmail.com
website: www.australasiancraftnetwork.net

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Wellington charm school–power jewellery for today

Kevin Murray — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:41:51 +0000

Wellington charmers relaxing after a two-days of intensive talking and making

Peter Deckers’ jewellery course at Whitireia Polytech has been producing a generation of particularly active contemporary jewellers. With projects like See Here, they have been not only making engaging art works but also finding new contexts for them to be seen.

The Wellington Charm School was one a series held in New Zealand, Australia and Chile. Around 24 jewellers, mainly from the Wellington region, spent a sun-blessed weekend in Porirua designing new charms for specific contexts. We had four particular themes: disaster, illness, travel and love.

One of the highlights was the session where each participant brought out their example of an existing charm. Most had objects of extraordinary poignancy that created links across generations, often to deceased parents. For the Maori participants, it was interesting to hear stories of how their charms were ‘activated’ through pilgrimage. It’s tempting to think that ‘power objects’ are a particular feature of the New Zealand upbringing, for both Maori and Pakeha alike.

An especially poignant moment when Vivian Atkinson laid down a seemingly endless charm bracelet

Another notable feature of this workshop was the plausible medical applications of charms. The relevance of such objects to conditions such as blood pressure and asthma make it seem quite reasonable to imagine jewellers-in-residence at health clinics.

A charm for bushfires made by the workshop technician Matthew Wilson in trans-Tasman solidarity

Typified in the Bone, Stone, Shell exhibition of 1988, modern New Zealand jewellery has been defined by the adaption of materials and techniques from Pacific adornment traditions to Western culture. The children of that generation seem interested not just in the process of material translation, but also the spirit of the taonga, the empowered object.

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Niki Hastings-McFall–the new Pacific art of welcome

Kevin Murray — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 01:36:10 +0000

Niki Hastings-McFall

Niki Hastings-McFall was born in Titirangi, West Auckland, NZ. Much of her work is inspired by her Samoan heritage, discovered when she first met her father in 1992. She trained as a jeweller, and has a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Auckland at Manukau School of Visual Arts. Both her jewellery and her larger assemblage works directly reference her urban environment whilst maintaining strong connections to Polynesian culture.

Much of her earlier work is a response to the stereotyping which so often surrounds the South Pacific. As a Pakehaa / Samoan she uses the iconic to question the myth as a way of exploring the liminal space which both separates and unites the different cultures that represent her place within a contemporary Pacific context.

Niki Hastings-McFall Too Much Shushi Lei

Aesthetically speaking some of the work she is presently engaged with is not necessarily overtly Polynesian. However it is still generated by her signature understanding of past and present Pacific material culture twinned with an urban sensibility of post colonial Aotearoa

Hastings- McFall has exhibited extensively during the 15 years of her practice both nationally and overseas in Australia, France, the USA, South America and the UK. Her work is held in public and private collections in NZ (Auckland Art Gallery,Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland University, Chartwell, Victoria University, Auckland Museum etc) and internationally (British Museum UK, Museum fur Volkekund Germany, Queensland Art Gallery Australia, Tjibaou Centre New Caledonia etc)

Niki Hastings-McFall’s work features in the exhibition Welcome Signs.

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Fran Allison–the lei of another land

Kevin Murray — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:53:43 +0000

Fran Allison

Fran Allison is a New Zealand jeweller who interprets the ornamental traditions of her region within the context of her own cultural heritage.

Fran was born in New Zealand but graduated from Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art, London. She has shown her work in number of solo and group exhibitions including Assorted Titbits at the Dowse Art Museum and JOC (Jewellery Out of Context), which toured internationally. She currently lectures at Manukau Institue of Technology.

Her work for Welcome Signs is a Daisy Doily Chain, made from deconstructed crocheted white doilies collected from second hand shops. The daisy stems are made from lollipop sticks. According to Fran, ‘Each doily retains some trace of the women who lovingly crafted and used them.’

The daisy chain is one of the most common childhood encounters with the idea of jewellery. After romping through fields, children settle in a daisy patch and start making chains for each other by knotting their stems. Fran combines this game with the doily, which was one of the most common forms of needlework producing covers for household objects.

Living in the Pacific, Fran’s work also connects with the lei, the floral neck wreath used to honour guests. Fran’s Daisy Doily Chain creates a kind of lei for someone of European heritage (Pakeha) who is born in the Pacific.

Fran Allison 'Daisy Doily Chain' on France

Fran’s work will feature in the Welcome Signs exhibition.

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The world needs your luck

Kevin Murray — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 02:46:52 +0000

Southern Charms: New Power Jewellery across the Pacific

Call for Expressions of Interest

How do we make luck where it is needed today?

Southern Charms is an exhibition of ‘power jewellery’ that demonstrates the relevance of objects to hopes and fears. It includes work designed by jewellers, designers and artists from Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Bolivia.

The exhibition will open at RMIT Gallery in February 2012. You are invited to submit an EOI, due by 4 December 2010. Please download the EOI details from here (or Spanish version). For more information about the project, visit www.craftunbound.net/projects/southern-charms.

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From a hard to a soft place – national identity in metal and fibre

Kevin Murray — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:45:16 +0000

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It’s always enlivening when Damian Skinner comes to town. We gave at talk together at RMIT in the unusual setting of Hoyts Cinema 7 in Melbourne Central. It was disconcerting to see the students and jewellers lying back in their comfy seats as though waiting for a blockbuster.

Damian began with his reading of the ‘Provincial Problem’ – how antipodean jewellers reconcile their desire for recognition in Europe with their artistic drive for independent identity. Damian tries to turn this around by deconstructing the relationship of original and copy, claiming that the original needs the copy to assert its originality. It would be interesting to have a European response to Damian’s argument, or is the absence of north-south dialogue about this part of the very issue?

I chose to use Damian’s visit to consider what Australian jewellery is not. You would think if Australia followed the New Zealand path of Bone, Stone and Shell that it would have made much more of its national stone – the opal. Damian and I spent the rest of the day testing this out with the multitude of opal stores around town. We eventually found an underground jewellery scene (featuring Marcus Davidson and Dan Scurry) that had an entire project taking an Opal-Scope to Lightning Ridge. There’s always an underground if you dig deep enough!

I should reassure you that I didn’t just talk about the absence in Australian jewellery, but also spoke of jewellery with a social conscience as something marking our scene as distinct in the mid-1980s, and the issue of how national identity aligns with Melbourne’s Euro-centrism. But that’s to come in the book.

From a hard to a soft place, I spent the rest of the week in the Selling Yarns conference. This began with a burst of enthusiasm from Alison Page, who promoted the idea of a National Indigenous Design School. Her provocation provided the basis for many conversations to follow, as papers looked at community development and codes of practice. The participants included a strong mix of makers and shakers from all parts of Indigenous Australia. The mood on day one was extremely buoyant and affirming. On day two, that had turned towards potential threats, particularly from shady operators bringing in overseas fakes.

In a way, the conference seemed to offer two paths. One was to commercialise Indigenous craft and design so that it can compete directly with mainstream businesses. The other was to open up communities to cultural tourism – with much consultation.

Selling Yarns 2 managed to meet a great demand for discussion and support of Indigenous craft and design ventures. There was already talk of Selling Yarns 3. Why not? In a way, it seems to fill a space for fibre and textile arts which has lacked the regular conferences of ceramicists, glass artists and jewellers. Though a future challenge is to find a way of broadening the focus to include other media and opportunities for Indigenous men.

Reflecting back on the initial dialogue, it seems that in Australia the non-Indigenous response to Indigenous identity is largely bureaucratic, rather than creative. Perhaps we can think again about the staid image of bureaucracy and see it instead as an adventure in national identity.

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Wellington I wonder

admin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:59:00 +0000

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Damian Skinner and I continued our jewellery journey down to Wellington principally to see the objects that featured in the Bone, Stone and Shell exhibition that toured Australia in 1988. While Te Papa had collected this exhibition as a historic moment in New Zealand culture, we found it scattered across the museum in different displays, telling different stories. The same could be said of their jewellery collection as a whole, which is spread across different artistic, historic and cultural areas, something which seemed to concern Damian.

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Collection manager Anne Brooks with photography curator Athol McCredie and Damian Skinner inspecting one of Tania Patterson’s ingenious flower pendants.

Wellington seemed like Melbourne to Auckland’s Sydney – darker, more cerebral and fashion conscious, though if only Melbourne had Wellington’s rain! While there weren’t jewellery exhibitions in galleries like Auckland, Avid and Quoil profiled the medium strongly.

In step with the city’s more speculative culture, Peter Decker’s students had a playful little exhibition at Wellington museum which used jewellery to forge alternative histories.

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From a distance, I’m stuck by what a powerful role jewellery has played in New Zealand cultural life. Bone, Stone and Shell has probably more detractors now than champions. Yet it continues to resonate as testimony of how jewellers can forge a place for themselves which both asserts a sense of belonging and makes space for individual imagination.

This story certainly raises expectations of the role that craft might play. So let’s see what’s emerging in a country where the idea of craft as an art form is still relatively young. Bookending the other end of the Pacific is another thin vertical country, with distinctive indigenous craft traditions, neighbour to more powerful nations. What’s emerging in Chile…

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The silver bridge across the ditch

admin — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:33:00 +0000

The work on the book about Australian and New Zealand jewellery continues now with an evening at Objectspace in Auckland. I gave an outline of rich and poor craft in Australia, while co-author Damian Skinner gave a response from a New Zealand perspective. Damian queried the essentialism in the way I had associated silver a medium of authenticity in the work of Marian Hosking. There was a considerable and engaged audience that joined in the discussion, which ranged from specifics about the rich/poor binary to the very question of categorisation itself.

The work continued the next day with a visit to the jewellery collection of the Auckland War Memorial and Museum. Here I am with Damian Skinner, Warwick Freeman and the collection technician Anne Harlow. It was an amazing opportunity to see at first hand (albeit with surgical gloves) the masterworks of recent NZ jewellery, from the first experiments with paua shell to the sophisticated use of mediated materials like photography.

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This was followed by a meeting of local jewellers at Warwick Freeman’s to discuss the book. It was heartening to listen to the warm support for our venture and many interesting questions were raised. Given the difference in size between the two jewellery scenes, the question of equity was raised. Warwick said that the book is about becoming less parochial for New Zealanders, while for Australians it is about being more parochial. There’s a grain of truth in that. Areta Wilkinson suggested perhaps there should be some parity based on ratio of sheep.

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Areta’s show Waka Huia at Anna Bibby Gallery consists of a baroque sideboard whose shelves contain metal objects related to the life of her great great grandfather Teone Taare TIkao to Herries Beattie. The mostly silver objects are made with great care and their variety testifies to the incredible life of their subject.

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Meanwhile, on the inauthentic side, a collective of New Zealand jewellers call Weeds invited guest jewellers into an installation at Masterworks. The monumental sideboard here was replaced by a heap of garden chairs, each of which contain it its seat quite exquisite work as you might find under a rock somewhere. There was work by Fran Allison, Roseanne Bartley, Renee Bevan, David Bielander, Andrea Daly, Sharon Fitness, Shelley Norton and Lisa Walker.

There’s such an abundance of innovative jewellery in New Zealand, I don’t think there’s any question of finding a scene that can balance that of Australia. The challenge is to find something with equivalent focus in the wide brown land.

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Rich and poor, Australian and Aotearoa

admin — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:13:00 +0000

If you’re around the north island…

Rich Craft, Poor Craft – Thursday 2 October

Writers Kevin Murray and Damian Skinner will present two illustrated talks about Murray’s concept of ‘rich and poor craft’ in contemporary jewellery from Australia and New Zealand.

Baroque ‘n’ Roll: the forest versus the street in contemporary Australian jewellery. In this talk Kevin Murray will discuss concepts of rich and poor craft drawn from the alternative classical and modernist strategies that have characterised much of recent southern arts.

Native/Natural, Settler/Silver: Considering Murray’s Theory of Rich and Poor Craft in Contemporary Jewellery from Aotearoa. In this talk Damian Skinner argues that Murray’s dialectic of rich craft and poor craft in Australian jewellery can be mapped very differently within contemporary New Zealand jewellery.

Dr Kevin Murray is a writer who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His book, Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious, was published by Craftsman House in 2005. Dr Damian Skinner is a writer who lives in Gisborne. His book, Between Tides: Jewellery by Alan Preston, is being published by Random House in October 2008.

Thursday 2 October, 6.15pm, Room WE 230 AUT campus, Auckland, New Zealand

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