EXHIBITION OPENING

Please join us at 6pm, Thursday 15 February 2024 for the opening of three new exhibitions: Wilding Whitlam + Emerging Contemporaries and Seeing & Knowing: New Perspectives in Furniture.

WILDING WHITLAM

Artist | Lea Durie

Whitlam is an exploration of a new place through the deep time materiality of clay. This work started with a curiosity of what I might find when a planned urban place is encountered through unplanned wanderings and messy bodily entanglements. I approach the new, clean and ordered suburb of Whitlam, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, through its human architecture and the non-human world of 350 million year old clay, dug from within the suburb.

The repetitive and intensive process of working with wild clay forces me to slow down and take notice. An exchange between place, labour and material develops its own rhythm. A sensory engagement with the weight, colour, texture, smell and sound of the wild clay shows a vibrancy of matter.

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EMERGING CONTEMPORARIES

Emerging Contemporaries is Craft + Design Canberra’s National Award Exhibition for early career artists. Emerging Contemporaries features the works of emerging designers and makers from local institutions including Sturt School for Wood, Canberra Potters Society, Canberra Institute of Technology, and the ANU School of Art + Design.

This exhibition plays a pivotal role in supporting and transitioning artists into professional practice and placing Australian artists in view of national cultural collecting institutions, industry, and audiences.

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SEEING AND KNOWING: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN FURNITURE

Bryn Davies | Brandon Harrison | Jess Humpston | Daniel Little | Georgia Szymanski

Furniture is more than a mere backdrop to our lives; it is an active participant in our daily rituals – a companion at meals, a stage for play, a canvas for touch. It is a multifaceted object bearing the richness of material lineage, considered design and craft. This exhibition challenges the passive perception of furniture shaped by a culture of mass consumption, aiming to rekindle our connection with the essence of materials and craftspersonship.

This collection brings together skilled craftspeople from across Australia, grounded in traditional woodworking. By recontextualising traditional techniques, they explore shifts in established typologies within a historically grounded craft.

Seeing and Knowing invites you to celebrate the handmade, encouraging engagement with the intentional and the human within our everyday objects. As you navigate this exhibition, consider each piece not merely as a commodity but as the culmination of a considered design and making process. Our goal is to present furniture not as a mere product, but as a manifestation of place, tradition, and the tangible expression of human creativity.

May this exhibition be a celebration of the craft that often goes unnoticed, urging us to reevaluate our relationship with the everyday objects that are the companions to our lives.

What is the proper way of seeing? In brief, it is to see things as they are. However, very few people possess this purity of sight. That is, such people are not seeing things as they are, but are influenced by preconceptions. 'Knowing' has been added to 'seeing'.