Projects

SKETCHING designing a capital: crafting a city

2007: SKETCHING is the next edition of the Designing a Capital: Crafting a City program. Entertaining audiences in early 2007 this ongoing annual program of events is designed to probe and explore the role of the arts in establishing a Canberra culture.

In the lead up to Canberra's Centenary celebration in 2013, Craft ACT jumped upon the celebratory band wagon and threw our own ideas into the mix, developing Designing a Capital: Crafting a City. The inaugural program encouraged open dialogue through exhibitions and public events which were designed to reinvigorate community awareness and involvement in the culture-scape of the extraordinary phenomenon that is our National Capital.

Memories in place: art in high country huts

2006: Memories in place: art in high country huts was a project incorporating an exhibition at Craft ACT and three discrete temporary installations located in the Brayshaws, Westermans and Waterhole huts within the Namadgi National Park. Bringing together environment, heritage and the arts in a unique collaborative project, sharing resources, and extending possibilities of how we tell our regions stories to ourselves and to the world.

This project successfully renewed interest and curiosity not only in these huts, but also in the environment that they are situated in, the Namadgi National Park, the Brindabella ranges and the Australain alpine country. It was a project that brought together people with different relationships to these sites, including the KHA volunteers, the Park Rangers of the Namadgi National Park, the art community and many others.

Content(s): significance and complexity in everyday objects

2004: Why do we attach such significance to objects. How do they shape our identities, the spaces we inhabit, and our engagement with these spaces? Craft ACT's one-day forum Content(s) investigated these ideas (and more) through a range of challenging talks and papers. Content(s): significance and complexity in everyday objects presents these papers and talks in printed form.

Still lives

2004: Craft ACT presented Still Lives in 2004, an exhibition and a series of screened films, which delved into the carefully constructed narratives and identities of objects. Each film was selected because of the way the filmmaker had used objects, causing them to be: emotionally charged; corrupted; excessive; representative of status; humorous or alienated. Each artist responded to one of these themes. … In both environments of gallery and film, the selected objects become paramount - they are both narrators and entities. They are the necessary props defining and describing our stories: displayed, used or hidden they punctuate our desires, our needs and our secrets.

Rings of history: Contemporary craft from historical timbers

2001: Rings of History toured around Australia, between 2001 and 2003. The contemporary works in this exhibition were carved, assembled and turned from de-accessioned timber from the Dadswell Collection. Eric Dadswell was a pioneer in native forest research. His work during the 1930s documented, for the first time in Australian History, the diversity of Australian Eucalypts. It is a unique collection containing some rare and now extinct species of timber. Since this collection was established some of the forests where the timbers were harvested have been declared National Parks, reflecting our changing value of this natural resource.