Uncommon | Exuberance Exhibition Opening

Craft + Design Canberra warmly invites you to join us for the openings of UNCOMMON + EXUBERANCE exhibitions

UNCOMMON

7 July - 26 August 2023

Eliza-Jane Gilchrist

With a mixture of older and new work, Craft ACT presents Eliza-Jane Gilchrist's ongoing practice of making abstract sculptures based on plant/seed forms using cardboard. Gilchrist combines craft techniques such as paper-cutting, folding, paper-engineering, papier Mache, and pattern-making, with non-traditional materials, creating works are unusual, accessible and thought-provoking.

EXUBERANCE

7 July - 26 August 2023

Curators | Sharon Peoples + Carol Cooke

The original concept of this exhibition, Exuberance, was to explore exuberance through colour and how colour is expressed in contemporary hand-stitched artworks. This exhibition brings together a group of 20 Australian embroiderers/stitchers chosen for their exuberant use of hand stitch. The goal was to work independently from a common springboard for highly individualist artwork.

There were several prompts by the curators Sharon Peoples and Carol Cooke, from which the artists could begin their long stitching projects. These included colour as an expression of exuberance, exuberant growth of plants and exuberance as a psychological state or emotion. Many artists took up readings based on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, one of the first influential books to galvanise global environmental movements. This is evidenced in many works by the exhibiting artists and the way in which they carefully balanced the potentially negative with emotional exuberance.

Why hand stitching? During the Covid Lockdowns there was a world-wide upsurge in hand crafts made at home. Many online courses sprang up with interest in hand made textiles, and in particular hand embroidery. Capturing what was happening in Australia at the time interested the curators, Carol Cooke and Sharon Peoples.

The artists were presented with a number of formal colour exercises, based on the colour wheel. Some artists rejected this notion, yet their reasons were very interesting, and this aspect is explored further in the book, Exuberance; A Stitcher’s Perspective. This book gives a deep understanding of artists’ processes as they worked towards producing final exhibition pieces.

Please join us on:

Thursday 6 July from 6pm - 8pm at the Craft + Design Canberra gallery

Refreshments will be available from our pay bar.

Exhibitions will continue until 26 August 2023.

Image: L to R - Lorena Carrington + Cathy Jack Coupland