Craft Australia Research Centre
presents the forum paper, Australian contemporary craft, an innovative player in the creative industries, delivered by Christine Ballinger as part of the Interpreting Contemporary Craft forum held in association with Transformation: the language of craft conference held at the National Gallery of Australia in November, 2005. Christine Ballinger is Executive Director of Craft Queensland. She has academic qualifications in science, mathematics, education and has just completed a Masters by Research focused on artist-in-industry partnership models. Her creative professional practice spans 25 years and includes solo exhibition in Australia, Japan and Europe. Her previous consultancy practice includes cultural policy development, cluster dynamics and the establishment of creative businesses.

I would like express my apologies for Lynda Dorrington who is unable to attend the conference. Her presentation would have provided another extraordinary example of how contemporary craft and design practice and a state-based craft organisation is responding to the creative industries paradigm.

Due to the limited time available prior to flying to Canberra, I have not prepared a visual feast to share with you of the programs Craft Queensland has nor is currently developing. Instead I am going to look at the past, consider the present and perhaps herald the future.

A few weeks ago in Brisbane, Brian Parkes, Associate Director Object, and I were involved in the ARC Biennial. Brian was a panel member and I the facilitator. The topic was the crossover between art, craft and design. Fiona Hall, a well-known Australian visual artist was also involved. Her work, recently exhibited in a major retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery, is very innovative and rich with craft understanding and methodology. When asked why she employed craft disciplines, she responded by saying that she uses whatever technique is required to achieve her concepts. This was aptly described yesterday in one of the presentations by the phrase ... the craft of making art.

Prior to the current hats I wear, I was a professional creative practitioner for 20 years. During this time, paper was the medium I explored through research into its traditions in Asia, Italy and Europe and the commercial papermaking industry.

My undergraduate degree was in science and mathematics; a degree course based on quantifiables. Hence when I decided to pursue creative practice, it was under one condition ... it must be sustainable. And in retrospect, I gained as much pleasure from my mind imaging the van de waal forces operating in pigment loading systems and the electrostatics of deliberately coagulating pulps as I did the pleasure of the resolved artwork.

But making a living from papermaking is not easy unless you are the Reserve Bank.

Thus, over those 20 years I exhibited, designed and made thousands of species specific papers, artist books, participated in trade fairs, gave workshops, lectures, wrote papermaking manuals, licensed paper designs for commercial production or sold my copyright outright, curated exhibitions and, in the later part of those 20 years, developed and managed substantial creative projects.

In 2001, I first heard of the creative industries. The Queensland University of Technology - QUT was re-packaging large areas of its coursework and developing new content. They called the faculty - Creative Industries and it was a very smart move.

The term gained my immediate attention for a number of reasons - it recognised creativity as an industry; it seemed to promise a pathway to sustainable practice; it recognised that content was more important than our obsession with the digital; it invested in people because only people can be creative; it recognised the strength of hybrid practice to generate new content, that is - new intellectual property.

It also came with a warning. If the sector did not engage with the new paradigm, it would become a marginalised, self-interest group only.

Hence in 2002 I decided to find out more and test the paradigm against a very large project I had previously developed. The project titled New Possibilities for Paper involved seven visual artists who were partnered with the biggest members of the Australian paper industry - Visy, Australian Paper, Spicers Paper, the Australian Pulp and Paper Institute (APPI). Some of the partnerships are still continuing.

I enrolled in post-graduate research with the Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre (CIRAC), Queensland University of Technology and closed the doors of my studio.

Australia has closely followed the UK model of the creative industries. The definition employed is much the same as when the Blair government defined the creative industries in 1997. The taxonomy of the creative industries ranges from the digital content industries - games and software to the visual arts, craft and design.

Now to cut a long story short, my research discovered that very few of the artists neither knew effectively how to trade on their intellectual property and some had no intention of doing so.

Another problem was the definition adopted here in Australia was too narrow. Those practitioners who did have a sustainable and innovative practice operated across a broader spectrum of modalities than simply the exploitation of intellectual property. In fact, they were and are building, nurturing and exploiting their intellectual capital.

In other words, they were exploiting their talent. The term 'talent economy' instead of 'knowledge economy' has recently been coined by Malcolm Gilles, Chair of Council for Humanities Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).

And now to the future, there are ambitious programs such as Freestyle by Object, Vast Terrain by Form and the Australian Concept Home in SE Asia by Craft Queensland. These programs are export focused. But export, as many who have undertaken it, is not for the faint-hearted especially if they are considering selling their work outside the exhibition-based process. Export is high risk.

These programs require the practitioner to move beyond studio-based production and consider manufacturing as an imperative. Craft, is now a very small c compared the very large D for designer.

And the problem I am finding, that while Australia has very talented and innovative makers, we need many more with the capacity and skills to engage with the manufacturing process. I applaud what was the VACB, now the VAB, for the MMM initiative - Maker to manufacture to market. But we need to develop and support many more.

The reality is that if you send your work into SE Asia you will have no control over your IP. You can trade on it for a while before it is being made at a fraction of the cost in China.

And this is where Australian designers are innovative. They have an enormous capacity to conceive and generate new content.

To conclude, I will go back to the New Possibilities for Paper. While CSIRO was not one of the industry partners, they observed the processes of many of the artists and in particular Australia's first Indigenous hand paper mill - Euraba Paper. The chief scientist (who was also an artist) saw the possibility of modifying a process on a paper machine - a fordrinier and has taken out a patent application. This is creative industries. He has assured me that he will donate any profits to Euraba. But the point must be made that Australian artists do not have the skills to truly benefit from their innovation.

And now to the more recent past. I attended a lecture recently in Brisbane; its title ... Designed in Australia ... Made in China.

At the lecture, a young Chinese designer provided the audience with an insight into such a future ... She explained that manufacturing in China is like two popular sayings ... Everything is possible ... Nothing is simple.

Much like the future for contemporary craft.

Christine Ballinger, Canberra, November 2005