Early notice of an exhibition of jewellery from the Asia Pacific region The World Craft Council are hosting a conference in New Delhi, 4-6 February 2011. The event is titled Abhushan: Tradition & Design – Dialogues for the 21st Century. A key element in this event is a series of exhibitions surveying jewellery from different [...]
Posts under ‘small things’
A charm bracelet for our time?
image The charm bracelet was once a common gift used for the transitional age when a child looked towards becoming an adult. It was once the subject of fine craftsmanship as each charm contained delicate castings and intricate mechanisms. Today it has been largely replaced by the Pandora, which is a closed system of crudely [...]
Cheryl Adam – ‘bat people’ fight back with plastic
image image Cheryl Adam is a recycle artist from Melbourne associated with the Philippine organisation Peace Women Partners (PWP). In her previous work, Cheryl collaborated with the Moro women from the Philippines’ Muslim population. For The World of Small Things, she is working in collaboration with a group of extremely poor homeless population from Manila, [...]
Polly&me – masterpieces in idle chatter from Pakistan
image ‘GupShup’ means chit chat in Urdu and Hindi. It was the title of an exhibition by Polly&me, a group working on an embroidery project involving women in Chitral, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The results of their workshops were displayed in Islamabad and Karachi, where half of the works were sold. The [...]
Embroidering survival in Palestinian refugee camps
image Though you might lose the world around you, you still have your hands. The Palestinian refugees have been living in refugee camps for almost sixty years. Women maintain their culture partly through embroidery. Luckily, there’s an organisation that can assist in helping their work find a market. For a modest price, you can obtain [...]
Fulidai-dai – another way of thinking about craft
Deb Salvagno works for the East Timor Women’s Association, which runs tours of the Lautem district in East Timor, where traditional weaving flourishes. They also are involved in broader community development including health and education. Here she answers questions about the nature of this exchange between those inside and outside East Timor. It’s particularly interesting [...]
Where in India is Australia?
image They’ve been some invigorating Melbourne-India exchanges lately. The first occurred at the RMIT Design Research Institute on Friday during a discussion about the Code of Practice for Craft-Design Collaborations. We discussed the arrangement whereby the Touareg nomads were paid half a million dollars for the use of their name in a new model of [...]
An Africa of Small Things
The jewellery scene in South Africa has kept a very low profile. Perhaps here’s why. Three jewellers from Johannesburg have an exhibition at Bell Roberts Gallery titled Tales from the Mantelpiece. Philippe Bousquet, originally an architect, works with family identity as a link between vintage objects. Geraldine Fenn, with a background in archeology and art [...]
