Comment on this article

Fundamentally craft explores the relationships between objects and people. The people who imagine, make and remake things. The people who see, enjoy, collect, discard, discover and use these things. The most ordinary teapot; the simplest jewel is a language in common that can travel from Adelaide to Edinburgh; Zhingdezhen to Stoke on Trent. Objects, both extraordinary and everyday, can cross time and space offering the possibility for dialogue rather than conflict: communication rather than misunderstanding; sharing rather than exclusion. My own and developing interest in Australia was born of an encounter with objects, and the people behind them.

My first trip to Australia was through a picture of a teapot. A Robert Foster teapot. There was an exhibition, in the late 1980s I think, of three metalsmiths Werner Bunck from Germany; Robert Foster from Australia and Michael Rowe from London. This show toured in European Museums, and had a catalogue picturing the teapot. It was made from aluminium but was a world apart from the cheap kitchenware that design in aluminium meant in the UK. It had sculptural presence, brilliant colour, brio. It suggested another, exciting everyday world: confident, unexpected; aesthetically pleasing.

There followed a series of second-hand encounters with Australia through British travellers. The UK jeweller, Wendy Ramshaw, produced a catalogue called Collected Feathers in the early 1980s for a show at Pforzheim Museum in Germany. The catalogue contained a series of images of dazzling feather headpieces and necklaces in oranges, reds and greens (one subsequently acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum) inspired by her 1978 invited residency in Australia. The exotic attraction of a distant place (and pre cheap air travel, distance was a greater thing than now) and the well planned offers from Australia of residencies and teaching posts drew in many European makers. Some, like the late glass artist Stephen Procter, settled for life. Others like the potter Robin Welch settled for a period and then returned to the UK, their work re-imagined, as with Ramshaw, through the physical impact of the Australian land and its people.

Julie Blyfield
Silver vessel from Paris Series, 2007
Photographer: Grant Hancock

Then, increasingly, Australia came here. In quick succession from the late 1980s, or so it seems in retrospect, I saw a parade of extraordinary Australian things. Firstly, the exhibition Australian Fashion at the V&A in 1989 included a Paco Rabanne style dress constructed out of cast resin elements by Dinosaur Designs. Its witty insouciance was matched by clever merchandising of inexpensive Dinosaur jewellery with the same elements. I still have a necklace, bought at the time ; treasured, worn, admired. Then, in the early 1990s Australian jeweller and metal designer, Susan Cohn, had a show at Glasgow School of Art, with work which suggested another brilliant engagement with the contemporary everyday, with her Cohn-dom Box and Cohn-cave designs for Alessi. A year or two later an Australian Leverhulme Trust fellow at Oxford University, Ian Ferguson, brought examples of his bonded metal bowls to show me in Edinburgh. His exceptional practical research had resulted, amongst other things, in a unique bowl in which he had bonded titanium and silver as a form of decorative mokume gane. The piece is now in the collection of the National Museums of Scotland.

The National Museums of Scotland also developed the Australian connection. The Museum hosted in 1998 an international jewellery show, Jewellery Moves, which I co-curated with Elizabeth Goring, here in Edinburgh. This brought us into closer contact with the work and lives of nine Australian jewellers, whose work we brought over for the show: Robert Baines; Helen Britton; Pierre Cavalan; Susan Cohn; Rowena Gough; Fiona Kwong; Carlier Makigawa; Sally Marsland. The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh subsequently hosted a solo show from one of the nine, Pierre Cavalan, who had been invited over by a Welsh Gallery, Ruthin Craft Centre, to celebrate historic links between countries. The works were brilliant, skilled, reverent and irreverent interpretations of jewellery and its histories. Australia still dazzled and attracted.

Pierre Cavalan - Elevation, 2008

In 2007 I made the actual journey, to Sydney, to the Smartworks conference at the Powerhouse organised by Grace Cochrane. Grace and I had met a couple of years before at West Dean in England at a conference organised by the Goldsmiths Company on contemporary silver. Objects, and their makers, were in both cases the reasons for my keeping in touch with Australia . At the Scottish Gallery we had begun, in a modest way, to show Australia. After Cavalan, came Julie Blyfield; Robert Foster; the potters Pippin Drysdale and Pru Venables; glass designer Nicole Ayliffe and culminating this year, August 2008, with senior ceramic artist Gwynn Hanssen Piggot. This latter show was a direct result of an initial meeting at Collect Art Fair in 2005 when Piggott was visiting London.

Collect, the art fair for contemporary objects organised for five years from 2004 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London by the British Crafts Council, was a good meeting point for international makers and gallerists. Australian Contemporary; Glass Art Gallery and others brought strong profile to Australian work which, when combined with strong Australian presence on European galleries such as Galerie Ra (and remember Paul Derrez of Ra had been an invited visitor to Australia which paid demonstrable dividends for Australian jewellers) and Galerie Marianne Heller, offered a dynamic and tempting sense of the contemporary material world in Australia. Gallerists, and collectors saw, and bought, Australian quality and innovation. At similar events in USA, like SOFA Chicago, Australian glass held its own despite the overpowering virtuosity of American works.

The creative buzz of these objects that drew me to Australia, were made more apparent by being there. Not for the first time, and with no great originality, I observed the extraordinary human and material melting pot that is Australia. In the Powerhouse collection the first object that greeted me was an exceptional plastic Bangle by Liverpool born, Glasgow based artist Peter Chang. In a nearby glass case the powerful porcelain self portrait bust by Chinese/Australian artist Ah Xian was a spellbinding example of the power of modern ceramics and the role of China. Collections and their most imaginative curators, like Cochrane herself, are of immense importance in making these creative links. Temporary exhibitions too make links: an important recent Australian example is the international Transformations show curated by Robert Bell. Other cultural entrepreneurs, to use a current British term, would have to include Stephen Bowers of the JamFactory who has brought so much Australian work to UK at Collect : who has fostered so much Australian work in Adelaide and whose own witty, knowledgeable contact with making and curating - as in From Ming to Bling - keeps links alive, everyday and contemporary.

So, from the outside at least, Australia is a place of impressive richness in human and material terms. Contemporary Australian objects have travelled far and wide through well planned exchange programmes; international fairs and exhibitions. Australian makers and curators have shown enviable degrees of entrepreneurship, vision and talent in reaching beyond Australia to create markets and contacts internationally. There is to me, and to many others, a resulting quality and creative buzz which is growingly irresistible.

Amanda Game
Edinburgh 2008
August, 2008

Amanda Game is currently Consulting Lead Director for the new Edinburgh based organisation IC:Innovative Craft. For 21 years she established and ran a programme for contemporary crafts at the Scottish Gallery in the same city.

Robert Foster with Teapot, 2008

Pippin Drysdale
Tanami Traces Series IV - 2007
Red Dawn Rising
Porcelain vessel
H:30cms x Dia:27cms

Susan Cohn
Cohndom Box
Plastic, fuscia, blue, green
64mm square
Production condom boxes manufactured by Alessi
Photographer: Greg Harris

Related links