Projects

Designing a Capital: Crafting a City

2010 -2007: In the years leading up to Canberra's Centenary celebration in 2013, Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre presents Designing a Capital: Crafting a City, an annual program of exhibitions and events designed to probe and explore the role of the arts in establishing a Canberra culture, highlighting Canberra as a breeding ground for artistic expression.

Artists in Place: Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage Residency

2009: A pilot artist in residence project at the Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage located in the Namadgi National Park, Australian Captial Territory, presented by Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre and the Namadgi National Park. The pilot provided two residential periods of five weeks each to two artists, Paull McKee and Kirstie Rea.

The Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage is an early example of a ready-cut or prefabricated Hudson's kit home purchased and constructed by its original owner A W Bootes in the Gudgenby Valley in 1927. It later became the farm manager's home and fell into disrepair after the local government reclaimed the land for a National Park. It was through the efforts of a volunteer group, the Kosciuszko Huts Association (KHA), together with assistance and support from the ACT Government and Namadgi National Park staff, that it was restored, thereby ensuring its survival.

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.