Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre is the peak professional body for contemporary craft and design in the Canberra region. Over the past thirty years it has promoted and supported all areas of the craft and design sector, covering textiles and fibre, metal and jewellery, glass, ceramics, furniture and design objects. Craft ACT brings new and innovative work to the people of Canberra through a range of activities that includes an exhibition program, offsite projects and a public program to encourage audiences to participate in the arts. Craft ACT works with artists and in partnership with other organisations to explore ideas through the crafted object and to create projects that inspire and engage audiences. Memories in Place: art in high country huts is one of these programs.

Memories in Place: art in high country huts is a dynamic project presented by Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre in association with the Namadgi National Park. Inspired by and utilising three pastoralists huts located within Namadgi National Park, artists Paull McKee, Daniel Maginnity and Joanne Searle create discrete temporary installations that respond to the huts, their original inhabitants and the natural environment.

Based upon ideas of interpretation and drawing together the cultural dialogues of environment, heritage and the arts, this project encompasses an exhibition at Craft ACT Gallery 1, an on-site installation at the huts, and a forum highlighting the possibilities of interpretation and interaction made possible through the arts. The project aims to create a path for audiences to connect to and value our local heritage, environment and arts culture. Through this project art acts as an agent to expand ideas and enhance the quality of the experience of viewing the huts for all audiences.

Memories in Place: art in high country huts considers the huts both as a heritage and crafted object within the context of memory and place. As heritage objects the huts have a long history of interacting with local and non local transient peoples, combined with a close interaction with their immediate environment. As crafted objects the huts signify the amalgamation of the handcrafted and the functional, eventually resolving into an object of deeper meaning and appreciation.

Paull McKee, a textile artist, is interested in social histories and is creating a map for memories. Embroidered images of artifacts and objects used in the huts will adorn a floor covering in a soft fabric that will be placed inside the Waterhole hut. The intention is that as people walk over the covering they move through a remembered and implied domestic landscape. The very act of walking on the "map" and artwork is a strategy employed by McKee to remind audiences that not only do we walk through heritage sites, but that we also walk on these sites.

Joanne Searle, a ceramic artist, is interested in the life of Edward Brayshaw the original inhabitant of the Brayshaw Hut. Searle is fascinated by the impact that Brayshaw might have had on his environment and vice versa. Searle has created work using existing Scotch Thistle flowers, a plant that has become a noxious weed in the Namadgi National Park. Referring to the nostalgic practice of early settlers who were intent on modifying the environment to remind them of home, Searle gently reminds us of the far reaching implications and the threat to native environments from introduced species

Daniel Maginnity takes a different approach to the huts. Daniel is interested in the broader context of how memory and history creates a space and/or a place. Space is the physical trapping of the here and now and Daniel uses material objects to shift the viewers' sense of a place. By gathering found objects (under heritage and environment guidelines) Maginnity will highlight the distinctions between a pastoralist's experience of the land and the often commodified urban perception of rural and natural environments.

Through the notions of memory and place the artists and artworks provide a contemporary translation of these rudimentary but important dwellings which have survived from early European settlement of the area. By presenting an exhibition located in a formal gallery space and an installation renewing the huts themselves, contemporary craft and art creates a narrative link which refocuses attention on this little known historic site. This project will develop a dialogue regarding the importance of heritage, its incorporation into our current environment and the nature of art to provide new ways of understanding.

Program