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Content(s): Significance and complexity in everyday objects

Foreword

Alison Munro
The Grimwald Effect, performance: Barbara Campbell

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. As with the forum the publication has been divided into three sections: From Space to Place; Objects and Narratives of Identity; and Getting a Handle on the Object: Physical Interaction and Concrete Engagement.

From Space to Place

How and why do we place objects into a domestic space. How does this then create a sense of 'place'. In 2003 Craft ACT's Exhibition Home project adopted one of the Northbourne Housing Group apartments as a gallery space, transforming the empty rooms into a temporary gallery and challenging the boundaries between domestic and public domains, gallery display and homely arrangements, spaces and places. Papers in this section address objects and architecture in reference to embellishment, decoration and emotional and intellectual investment in spaces.

Objects and Narratives of Identity

The relationships between humans and objects can be complex. Objects both shape and reveal our identities and narratives are woven consciously and unconsciously around objects in the construction of self. The papers in this section further develop ideas framing Craft ACT's recent Still Lives project and focus on objects as projections of identity, as focal points for nostalgia, and as vehicles for personal narrative.

Getting a handle on the object: physical interaction and concrete engagement with the object

The there's no time project brought together performance artists with crafts practitioners to explore the significance and complexities of everyday interaction with objects. Papers in this section revisit and expand upon the relationships of object, body, space and time. It will examine some of the physical and temporal factors influencing our interaction with objects such as ritual, ergonomics and the relationship between physically handling objects and the 'knowing' of objects based on intellect and memory.

In publishing Content(s): significance and complexity in everyday objects Craft ACT hopes to provide a written record of the thought-provoking and challenging presentations given at the Forum, and to promote further discussion and consideration of the role and function of objects in our lives.

An introduction

Barbara McConchie

The focal points for the Content(s) presentations are a series of projects I curated on behalf of Craft ACT over the last twelve months. The projects - Exhibition Home, Still Lives and there's no time - have all, in different ways, examined our relationship with objects, and the complexity and significance these relationships can develop.

Exhibition Home

In 2003 I had the opportunity to curate an exhibition in a Canberra apartment, architecturally designed by Sydney Ancher. Exhibition Home was a part of the first 24:7 Temporary Public Art Program, which linked arts organisations with government agencies. Jane Barney, the Public Art Program Manager at artsACT, approached Craft ACT to work with ACT Housing and present an exhibition within a domestic interior. This was a fantastic opportunity for Craft ACT to present contemporary craft and design outside the context of the gallery space. It was particularly interesting for me, as placing objects in the home environment felt like an entirely appropriate setting for the objects that Craft ACT regularly displays in a more formal gallery setting.

A month out from the exhibition, we had finally secured the location with permission from ACT Housing, and more importantly, the other residents of the apartment complex. Then, I began to think about what it was that I was trying to do. How do I furnish an empty apartment with an exhibition, and what does that mean? Should the exhibition in the apartment reflect the principles of its identity as a domestic space? Should the apartment reflect the principles of the architecture attributed to this apartment, those of modernism? Should it document the social history of the apartments as government housing? Should it read like those sterile and generic contemporary mega furniture store catalogues, which present a showroom and not a home - the completely contrived look of king-size bed with white sheets with a bold coloured throw rug and a stylish storage unit with a glass or ceramic vase like thing, sitting on top of it.

Pearl Gillies

Ultimately it seemed to me that domestic interiors are made up of an eclectic mix of objects. A selection of things collected at different times with different influences. They do not look amiss altogether, but rather add up to the bigger picture of the individuals that own them. These things, often quiet and still, expose the character of a person in a completely unique way - subtly they reveal the ideas, memories and passions of the person who belongs to them. Interestingly perhaps this is what Exhibition Home lacked, a strong sense of an individual or family or group… it lacked that 'lived-in' feel. This exhibition house - not home - was focused on the architecture and the objects, but ultimately lacked the glue of life.

It was these questions and observations that led me to ask why objects are so paramount in our lives. What is our obsession with objects, and more objects, and how do we live with them? How do we interact with objects, imbue them with our dreams and desires and needs.

Still Lives was 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 in the Still Lives exhibition responded to one of these themes. In both environments of gallery and film, the selected objects became paramount - they were both narrators and entities. They were, and are, the necessary props defining and describing our stories; displayed, used or hidden, they punctuate our desires and our secrets.

Common Time

there's no time was a project that examined objects through physical interaction by presenting two performance art works: The Grimwade Effect by Barbara Campbell, who worked with craft artist Helen Aitken-Kuhnen and other artisans; and performance artist Ellis Hutch collaborating with Christina Merry, a maker of knitted lace. Performance art often incorporates the object and this project realised an unexplored interest between the crafted object and performance. It also presented an opportunity to think about how we live with and insert ourselves amongst the vast array of objects that culminate in our lifetime.

Why do we make objects, covet places to keep our objects, bind ourselves to objects and mark our passage through life with objects? The papers presented at the Content(s) forum provide the opportunity to touch on these ideas and take them somewhere else, present alternative perspectives, and raise yet more questions.

Catalogue cover

The above foreword, introduction and images are from the 39 page Contents(s) catalogue which can be ordered form Craft ACT for $12 (inc. GST)

Phone 02 6262 9333 or email craftact@craftact.org.au

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