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Expanding the table: Vicki Grima’s impact on the Australian ceramics community

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Expanding the table: Vicki Grima’s impact on the Australian ceramics community

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Expanding the table: Vicki Grima’s impact on the Australian ceramics community

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Amelia Black writes about the way the director of the Australian Ceramics Association created a sense of community in times of adversity.

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Federal Court of Australia, William Street, Melbourne VIC

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Damien Wright presents six tables as material platforms for how we can do politics.

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The University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC

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The Hanging Studio Table: For the many and the few

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The Hanging Studio Table: For the many and the few

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Adam Markowitz

Adam Markowitz responds to a brief for a table that can bring three, six or 12 people.

(A message to the reader.)

It was a challenging brief. The design initially was for a typical boardroom-style table. My early designs showed a round table style design. But as the brief developed and we worked through it, it really took on a life of its own. I was challenged to address the specific peculiarities of the space and the various functions of the table. It introduced a number of complexities that really changed the table and changed the course of how I was looking at it as a design.

One of the really interesting discussions we had was that, okay this is a meeting room table and it's for 12 people but it's not going to be used by 12 people all of the time. It needs to be able to accommodate 12 people at some times and three people and six people and it needs to be effective in all those modes.. So the design became less linear, less symmetrical and encouraged a range of different ways to occupy the space.

The hanging studio is a very striking piece of architecture. It's very complicated. There is already a lot of timber in the space, a lot of facets and architectural complexity, so my response is very much about engaging with that design and how my design could sit in that space and complement it.

In our consumer society, people have very little connection to the objects they buy. There's no sense of relationship or ownership. It's something that's bought and then disposed of. By using material that has been salvaged and has a direct connection to the site, to the land and is part of an ongoing story, people are able to engage with that and connect with that object and form a relationship with it beyond the transactional. Whenever you see an object that has been well crafted, that has been made out of timber that you know the history of, and perhaps know the maker of, it brings a joy that is derived from value beyond the object itself but through that network of relationships and stories.

I really hope that the table challenges people to consider how they engage with the objects they own, and understand that quality is worth having - it is something that takes time and costs money, but it's something that imbues your life with meaning and value beyond just having "stuff".

Comment from Tom Kvan

The table in the Hansen Yuncken room is an asymmetric ovoid with many meanings and associations. The shape arose in part from our desire to have a table where there is no obvious 'head' from which one person can dominate the meeting, thereby promoting more inclusive discussions. We also needed to have a table at which video conference calls could be made, so one edge had to be longer and straighter, against which a screen might be placed.

The shape was partly determined by the planks into which the wood had been sawn when no specific use was considered. The tree had grown on the site of the new building and, when it was taken down, students had voiced concerns about the removal of trees on campus, so we assured them the timber would be used in the new building.

Another association for the tree is that Lauritz Hansen, who cofounded Hansen Yuncken in 1918, came to Melbourne from Denmark. Dean of the faculty at the time, I too am Danish and Adam Markowitz had learned his craft in Denmark.

The shape of the table very often provokes a question and this opens the conversation for the explanation and associated stories. There are, of course, some who find the irregularity uncomfortable and disconcerting (as it is intended to be).

The Glyn Davis building is open to visitors and the Hansen Yunckenroom has a glass door through which the table can be readily viewed.

Tom Kvan is an honorary professor of Architecture, Building and Planning

All photos by Ben Clement.

About Adam Markowitz

Adam Markowitz is a fine furniture & lighting designer/maker as well as a practising architect based in Melbourne, Australia. Having trained in Australia, Holland, Denmark and the USA, his practice looks to explore the blurred lines between designing and making and the reciprocal feedback loop when those two feed into each other. Founded in 2015, his eponymous interdisciplinary studio offers Architectural Services, Design Consultancy, small-batch production and bespoke one-off commission work. Since 2016 Markowitz has taught the ExLab experimental Furniture Design Studio as part of the Master of Architecture programme at The University of Melbourne and as a visiting teacher at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine, USA. Visit www.markowitzdesign.com and follow @ markowitzdesign

Assegai: A spear of light across the Indian Ocean

architecture | G36 | Melbourne | table | wood

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The Hanging Studio Table: For the many and the few

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The Hanging Studio Table: For the many and the few

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Victorian Woodworkers Association, Tyrone Street, North Melbourne VIC

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Victorian Woodworkers Association: Joinery in real time

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Victorian Woodworkers Association: Joinery in real time

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Victorian Woodworkers Association: Joinery in real time

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Stephen Ziguras charts the history of a state-based woodworking association that is currently enjoying an increased interest in “bricks-and-mortar” activities.

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Fremantle Arts Centre, Finnerty Street, Fremantle WA

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How to stay grounded in a big mining state

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How to stay grounded in a big mining state

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How to stay grounded in a big mining state

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We talk with venerable arts consultant June Moorhouse about the lessons she’s learned working with small arts organisations.

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South Of The River Potters' Club Inc., Canning Highway, Alfred Cove WA

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South of the River Potters Club: After 50 years, a home of its own

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South of the River Potters Club: After 50 years, a home of its own

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Barrie-Anne Morgan

(A message to the reader.)

As Barrie-Anne Morgan argues, local government support was critical to the longevity of this legendary potters' club.

Our club, the South of the River Potters' Club, is about to turn 50.

The newly built Karlup Ceramic Studio, situated in Alfred Cove, WA is home to the 120 members of the club, with a long waiting list once again and many hundreds of students learning the craft every term.

The studio is just two years old and includes all of the necessary practical elements plus a full library and meeting room. Located on the banks of the Swan River, it was funded by our local government and designed as a purpose-built ceramics facility in collaboration with the potters who now occupy it.

But it was not always like this.

In 1974, the club operated happily from a small house in East Fremantle. Unfortunately, due to road planning changes the club had to leave this home and eventually relocated to Atwell House Arts precinct, just ten minutes away. Atwell House was a volunteer-run community arts hub where many small art groups met.

Numbers dwindled over the years as the facilities did not meet community expectations, particularly for the unique needs of pottery making. The club erected small sheds for kilns and a rudimentary workshop to help the club survive.

The club journey made us all realise two important facts which we believe affect all community art groups survival. Firstly, and fundamentally, an appropriate creative space is the physical element that needs to be a constant to attract and improve membership. Secondly, the leadership and support of volunteers need to be consistently strong to ensure the longevity of the club.

For the club to regain the strength of its early days a decision was made five years ago. Fit-for-purpose facilities were needed. The club committee advocated for 18 months to all three levels of government regarding the value of community arts and the value of our club. Eventually, our potential benefits to the community were recognised and understood.

Ten years ago, most of our new members joined the club because they needed access to kiln firing or a studio workshop. Times have changed. New members now explain, that even though they may have their own studio, they want to be around other Potters and feel the pull to collaborate creatively at some level, rather than solo.

The South of the River Potters' Club provides members independent access to the Karlup Ceramics Studio by using their own security code at any time. Despite this option, many members are part of the WhatsApp club group that arranges workshop meet-ups when others are around. The Friendship Group for members meet regularly once a week and are always busy with a mix of work and social activity in the Studio.

Many of our members take on a volunteer support role within the club. Though this can be a commitment that scares some, the value of sharing the load is not only vital to the survival of community art clubs but also is a positive source of club spirit.

So many members have talents and experience that can be of enormous value to the club. Quite often members are retired from careers where their experience and knowledge lie dormant. A membership to a club like ours can also provide an opportunity to feel valued again in a less corporate and more creative and relaxed setting.

While our community learning program is diverse and interesting, the club takes great pride in offering curated clay art therapy experiences. Sometimes this is via a term program run by a sculptor tutor with counselling experience or a mentor program offering at risk teenagers the chance to explore clay with a potter tutor with a degree in Psychology now studying Art Therapy. We believe that art communities such as ours have a significant role to play in reducing social isolation and supporting good mental health.

Recently the club has developed a program for members' workshops which has been consistently sold out. This reiterates our belief that craftspeople often prefer to come together to create, learn and share their creative experiences. One of the most popular activities each year is Pit and Raku firing which links the potter back to the primitive firing techniques of this ancient craft. The thrill of the flames and unexpected results is always a crowd-pleaser for those watching on from the broader community.

Our club's journey demonstrates that for community arts groups to survive and thrive, they need a fit-for-purpose space to operate. Our club therefore continue to actively advocate to the government for funding to support infrastructure projects for community arts facilities. We share our frustration loudly and often, that an infrastructure fund exists to service community sports projects but not community arts facilities.

A good Club problem is membership demand. We regularly review the challenge of how we fairly share the volunteer load and limit volunteer fatigue. Acting as a strong supporter to the club, our local government, the City of Melville, provide event and marketing support as required

Our hopes for our club in the future focus on continuing the enthusiasm for volunteers to want to be part of the team needed for the club to continue operating happily and effectively. Our experience is that behind every successful creative space that supports a group of creative craftspeople, there exists a vital team of volunteers and supporters.

The South of the River Potters' Club recognises that the current membership would not be enjoying all the benefits of the Club today if it were not for all the hard-working committee members and volunteers' contributions over the past 50 years. We are grateful and look forward to celebrating the club's 50-year milestone in 2025 with events and collaborations throughout the year.

SORPC is an incorporated association, operating as a not-for-profit group. We lease (peppercorn) our Karlup Ceramic Studio from the City of Melville. We manage the facility independently, though have a strong, positive relationship with the Community Arts Sector at the Council. We operate with an executive committee of 6 and a general committee of around 12. Each committee member has a documented job description. The make-up of the committee varies during the year, as members step up to create and bolster sub-committees for specific events and circumstances as they arise. We employ a kiln technician and Tutors, otherwise, everyone else are volunteers. Most tutors are also members. The committee members are elected at the annual AGM. We have a constitution, club rules and a members' code of conduct.

Youth Mentorship at South of the River Potters Club

Hello, my name is Candice. I'm currently studying for my Master's in Art Therapy and partaking in a youth mentorship program called LYF (Leading Youth Forward). LYF is a program that aims to enhance the lives of at-risk young people in Perth during their formative teenage years, by offering vulnerable young people a long-term one-on-one mentorship and large group activities program.

The single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult. This stable relationship acts as a buffer against developmental disruptions and enhances adaptive capacities.

South of the River Potters Club has allowed me the space to teach pottery to my teen and her peers who otherwise would not have this opportunity to learn. The process of art-making is not only fun but facilitates the learning of life skills such as self-sufficiency, community-mindedness, and self-expression.

About Barrie-Anne Morgan

I live in East Fremantle about 5 minutes from our Karlup Ceramic Studio in Alfred Cove. My background is in furniture and interior design. I am currently doing hand-building classes at the Studio and part of the team organising next year's events for the 50th anniversary of the Club. My biggest ongoing challenge is continuing to advocate for government funding to provide for community art infrastructure projects! Visit sorpottersclub.com/classes

ceramics | G36 | Western Australia

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South of the River Potters Club: After 50 years, a home of its own

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As Barrie-Anne Morgan argues, local government support was critical to the longevity of this legendary potters' club.

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Wattle Park, Riversdale Road, Burwood VIC

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Basketmakers of Victoria: Projects with fibre

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Basketmakers of Victoria: Projects with fibre

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Jan Chamberlain

Jan Chamberlain reflects on an organisation that loves working together.

(A message to the reader.)

A week-long basketry gathering called Reeds & Sticks '86 in Melbourne at the Sheraton Hotel, led to Jean Stone taking contact details from the Victorians. She then organised the venue for the first meeting of Basketmakers of Victoria Inc (BOV) on 16 February 1986 at the Meat Market Craft Centre in North Melbourne.

In 1999 an interesting and productive period for BOV came to a very abrupt end when the doors to the now-named Metro Craft market were suddenly locked and all tenants were denied entry. BOV was eventually given access to the building until receivers were called.

Wattle Park is the closest local park to Wendy Golden, a BOV Life Member. Wendy obtained permission to harvest basketry materials there and check plant identification on many occasions from Parks Victoria. Back in 1995 when the group wanted to run a 3-day summer workshop she approached Parks to see if the historic stables next to the Curator's Cottage could be used. It was a successful workshop in a delightful setting. On behalf of BOV, Wendy put in a submission to lease the cottage and the group continued to use the stables for workshops. By January 2000 we not only held the annual 3-day members' musters in the park, we also used the stables for general meetings. With some conditions, the key to the cottage was formally handed to the group of 115 members on 24 February 2000.

Membership has now increased to 168 members including 89 metro Melbourne members, 69 regional Victorians, 9 Interstate and one international member who visits Australia every year. Most people join when they come across BOV demonstrating at various events around Victoria, wish to do a workshop or they have a personal connection to a member.

From early on, multi-day gatherings with interstate members were organised with the first at Bordertown, South Australia in September 1987. National Gatherings still occur every two years (pandemics allowing) with the event moving around states and being planned by people/organisations in that state.

Our program of activities revolves around the availability of tutors and offers a variety of basketry techniques and responds to suggestions and proposals from members. When possible, interstate and international tutors are engaged. Informal sharing of skills occurs and more formal workshops such as traditional melon basket making or contemporary takes on established techniques. In April this year, we held a joint activity with Papermakers of Victoria.

After-meeting activities still occur every two months following the member meetings. The topics vary greatly and have included learning an embroidery stitch to cover a large bead, making a St Brigid's Cross with a variety of materials and learning about different fibres and their use.

BOV offers other opportunities to mingle with members outside of meetings. These include twice-weekly meetings at the Cottage, volunteering to demonstrate at festivals or selling baskets on behalf of members at markets. Most recently BOV has been represented by members at the Lost Trades Fair in Bendigo, Sovereign Hill Heritage Harvest Weekend in Ballarat, the Australian Sheep and Wool Show in Bendigo and the Melbourne Craft & Quilt Fair. Occasional live-in retreats have occurred.

Some memorable projects involving BOV members are: making "bomb baskets" in 2003 for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra; weaving monkey baskets for the Melbourne Zoo; participating in Patrick Dougherty's Stick Work in Federation Square and working on Reclaim the Void. BOV members contributed over 91 rag rugs for this project which is 'having a conversation about caring for country, and honouring its custodians, and inviting everyone to be part of that through modest, small-scale acts, that collectively create something special.'

The Biannual Member Exhibitions encourage members to show their creations. The next exhibition is during our 40th anniversary year in 2026. Herring Island in the Yarra River was the home for exhibitions for a few years from 2011. It involved ferrying all the baskets, other innovative artworks and activities for children via the punt and organising an extensive roster. This meant having members on site for weekend afternoons in Melbourne's changeable summer weather.

Encouraging people to join the Committee is a challenge, but we have many members who contribute informally: baking birthday cakes and other treats, gardening, keeping the Cottage stocked with housekeeping and basketry supplies, curating our gallery, organising our library, treasure room and many other tasks.

Membership of Basketmakers of Victoria offers

our quarterly magazine Basket Views

access to basketry materials at member prices

reduced fees and priority bookings for workshops

organised gathering days for less accessible plant materials

opportunities to sell and exhibit work at our gallery, markets and exhibitions

ongoing skills development

use of BOV's comprehensive library of over 400 books, periodicals, DVDs, magazines and basket moulds

the fellowship and friendship of a unique group of craftspeople in Australia

In a 2019 newsletter, a member wrote of her experience as a new member of BOV. She felt she was warmly welcomed, shown a technique when she admired someone's earrings, generously offered materials and shown how to prepare them, encouraged to finish a never-ending basket, offered great suggestions for covering up mistakes and given valuable advice when trying to learn techniques via books and DVDs.

Around Victoria, BOV members organise regular meetings at public venues or a member's home. Groups operate in Geelong, Swifts Creek, Anglesea, Leongatha, Beechworth/Chiltern, Rochester and near Bacchus Marsh. Many of these groups organise their own exhibitions.

Skill and knowledge building is a focus for the group. As experienced basketmakers age and are no longer able to attend group meetings or share skills we need to ensure that we preserve basketmaking skills now and into the future. These skills are becoming increasingly rare and require a concerted effort to keep them alive.
Jan Chamberlain is the President of Basketmakers of Victoria
Baskets for spider monkeys ✿ Wendy Golden

basketry | fibre | G36 | Victoria

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Basketmakers of Victoria: Projects with fibre

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Jan Chamberlain reflects on an organisation that loves working together.

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Ciocârlia: A thread that binds generations

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Ciocârlia: A thread that binds generations

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Ciocârlia: A thread that binds generations

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Diana Roșca writes about a community in Moldova that come together to keep alive their ancient embroidery tradition

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The Embroiderers Guild, Victoria, Wattletree Road, Malvern VIC

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The Embroiderers Guild, Victoria: A haven for stitchers

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The Embroiderers Guild, Victoria: A haven for stitchers

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The Embroiderers Guild, Victoria: A haven for stitchers

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Gail Thexton recounts the history of a long-standing and friendly stitching guild.

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Natalia Moravski takes us behind the scenes in a Ukrainian dance company, where a team of volunteers make complex costumes that sometimes envelop the whole stage.

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Fabric for a Feast: The story of Textiles Sydney

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Fabric for a Feast: The story of Textiles Sydney

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Fabric for a Feast: The story of Textiles Sydney

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Jane Théau writes about a tablecloth embroidery project that grew into a new organisation, Textiles Sydney.

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Simon Gilby ✿ Figuring out the individual

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Simon Gilby ✿ Figuring out the individual

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Simon Gilby ✿ Figuring out the individual

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Richard King discovers a sculptor whose work deconstructs the individual and so opens us up to the world.

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Anna Davern recounts the inspiring history of a craft-collecting collective

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Alpana: A Hindu craft that flourishes in a Muslim village

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Alpana: A Hindu craft that flourishes in a Muslim village

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Alpana: A Hindu craft that flourishes in a Muslim village

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Mohammad Shahnewaz Khan describes the tradition of house decoration practiced by Hindus that is appreciated by the majority Muslim population.

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underFOOT: A collective for honouring the land on which they stand

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underFOOT: A collective for honouring the land on which they stand

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underFOOT: A collective for honouring the land on which they stand

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Nien Schwarz traces the journey of a craft collective that becomes entangled in the non-human.

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Makers and Menders: Many hands make good

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Makers and Menders: Many hands make good

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Makers and Menders: Many hands make good

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Crafting, creativity and community are at the heart of the Makers and Menders Program at the Brunswick Neighbourhood House (BNH) in Melbourne.

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Creative, collaborative communities: Forms of artist and artisan organisation in historic India

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Creative, collaborative communities: Forms of artist and artisan organisation in historic India

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Rachna Shetty

Rachna Shetty from the MAP Academy presents an overview of craft collectives through the history of India that have shaped and been shaped by its material, religious and social cultures

Sanchi, c. first century BCE - c. first century CE

Travelling back two thousand years to the heart of the Indian subcontinent, one arrives at a landscape in motion. It is sometime between the first century BCE and the first century CE: at the crest of a hill in Sanchi, central India, there is activity around the enormous dome of the Great Stupa. Commissioned in the third century BCE by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka and believed to enshrine a relic of the Buddha in its core, it is now being expanded. Masons, sculptors and other artisans are hard at work, building a peripheral balustrade and a pathway for pilgrims to ritually circle the sacred monument. Along the path, four looming gateways are being erected to mark north, south, east and west. These ceremonial stone gateways, or toranas, each topped with three cross beams or architraves, will become iconic in Indian religious and visual culture for millennia - not least for their lushly carved surfaces. Their columns and architraves are being worked into elaborate sculpture panels by expert hands, depicting stories from the life of the Buddha, and scenes from his previous lives as narrated in the Jataka fables; as well as Buddhist icons, animals and deities of nature and fertility, like voluptuous, auspicious salabhanjika figures.

For the most part, as is the norm for this period, these craftspersons will remain anonymous. On one column of the south torana, however - just above a scene depicting the worship of the Buddha's hair relic - some carvers leave a message: ' Vedisa Kehidantakarehirapakam mankata ' - 'Decoration by the ivory workers of Vidisha'. Coming from nearby Vidisha, not only have they extended their skills to some of the sculpture adorning this torana, they have also contributed to the project as donors. They are both artists and patrons. Today, this rare inscription by a craft guild gives us a glimpse into the rich, complex, often elusive world of collective art, artisanship and patronage in ancient India.

Mughal India, c. late sixteenth century

About 1500 years later, a young man doodles on the walls of the Mughal workshop he is employed at. This is Daswanth, the son of a palanquin-bearer; while he is engrossed, he catches the attention of the emperor Akbar himself. The story will be recounted in the imperial chronicle of his reign, the Ain-i-Akbari by his grand vizier, the writer and historian Abul Fazl: how the impressed king invites Daswanth to be part of the imperial kitabkhana - the 'house of books', an integral Mughal institution that serves as a library as well as an atelier in which books and manuscripts are made and restored. Here Daswanth apprentices under the Persian artist Khawaja Abd al-Samad, and goes on to become one of the master artists of the Mughal court under Akbar, becoming renowned for his individual style and work. He contributes to major projects like the illustrated Tutinama ('Tales of the Parrot') and Razmnama ('Book of War'), an illustrated translation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata into Persian. Yet, like other master artists of the Mughal court, he works in fluid and close collaboration with the many other artists and artisans in the kitabkhana, who each contribute their individual expertise and creativity to a seamless, cohesive endeavour.

Nearly two millennia apart, the urban craft guild and the Mughal kitabkhana are instances of artist organisations in the Indian subcontinent, which have taken different forms in different contexts through the region's social, cultural and political history.

Dating as far back as a few centuries before the common era, artists' and craftspersons' collectives in the region have left an indelible imprint on the cultural and historical landscape of the subcontinent, whether as formal guilds, or kinship, caste or community networks, or as centralised production systems underpinned by direct patronage. Besides creating momentous temples and images that have withstood centuries, as well as textiles, jewellery and armour that are today housed in collections around the world, they served as patrons themselves, negotiated with local and overseas markets, and looked after the interests and wellbeing of their members. Perhaps most significantly, such guilds, networks and collectives were vital in fostering and transmitting knowledge - of ideas, techniques, materials, and their crafts' associated rituals and philosophies - across generations and geographies, allowing it to be manifested in the crafts and living traditions of today.

Craft guilds in ancient India

The historical origins of guilds, both merchant and artisan, are associated with the rise of urbanism in India, which most scholars believe began around the 6th century BCE and unfolded in varying stages across India over the next few centuries. A strong agricultural base had allowed for the evolution of specialisation in crafts, and this was supplemented by an increase in trade as well as monetary systems like coinage. A variety of urban settlements emerged and flourished, from the nagara (fortress or town) and nigama (market or market town) to the mahanagara (a large city settlement) and the rajdhani (capital city). Craftspersons from the villages migrated to these urban areas for better opportunities as well as the abundance of high quality raw materials. Guilds are thought to have emerged with this, as artisans organised themselves to benefit from new commercial networks. Over the following centuries, as trade routes connected different parts of the Indian subcontinent and beyond, the significance of guilds also grew.

Buddhist and Jain texts from the early centuries of the common era, such as the Angavijja, Lalitavistara, Milindapanha and Mahavastu, and works of Sangam literature, composed in old Tamil and broadly dated between the third century BCE and third century CE, reference several types of craft workers, from weavers, ivory workers, goldsmiths and masons to garland makers, chariot makers and perfume makers. The Jatakas, Buddhist fables from between the 4th century BCE and 2nd century CE about the previous lives of the Buddha, mention communities specialising in various crafts and practices, each occupying a different village or quarter of the city. The ancient settlement of Kapilavastu (in present-day Nepal) is believed to have had guilds of goldsmiths, ivory carvers, stone carvers, oil pressers and winemakers, among others. Records of the nuances and differences of such organisations appear in ancient literary works.

Beyond guilds: Collectives and social organisation in the medieval and late medieval period

In India, the nature of artist organisations was more layered and complex compared to a medieval European guild, which had its foundations in shared systems of training and professional practices and goals. Guilds similar in function and structure to their European counterparts did exist in ancient India - a few surviving even until the nineteenth century - characterised by apprenticeship and training, established standards of technical quality, collective bargaining, and engagement with the market. However, in India such functions have not necessarily been confined to formalised guild structures alone - in the medieval and late medieval periods, they were also performed by familial, kinship and community networks or patronage-driven collective groups.

The historians Romila Thapar and KK Thaplyal state that by the early centuries of the first millennium CE, the structures of shrenis or guilds had formalised into jatis or occupational sub-castes. Derived from the Sanskrit ' jata' meaning 'born', jati denotes a narrow categorisation or subcaste based on birth, which determines individuals' social standing and societal relationships in fluid, complex ways. The jati grouping often coincided with occupational divisions - which were increasingly established as hereditary under the Brahmanical varna or class system - and maintained cohesiveness through endogamous marriage ties and a strong geographical rootedness. To effect a change in their social identity, a jati would have to collectively move to a different place as well as a different occupation. Professional skills, practices and knowledge were transmitted within such family and jati units. For artisans of diverse kinds, such hereditary occupations and kinship groups formed a system of stability and support.

Enmeshed within these systems of organisation, says Thapar, were the objects of production themselves - that is, what an artisan group created also mattered in determining its identity, status and influence in society. She lists some of the attributes that had a bearing on the artisan's, and by extension, the community's, standing in the wider social and economic context: the function of the object created - whether it was practical or aesthetic or ritual; how it was consumed - whether personally, or via sale in the marketplace; and sometimes, the status of the patron who commissioned it. She notes how in ancient India a chariot-maker or a carpenter working for the affluent enjoyed greater social prominence than an ironsmith who made tools and armour, to be used by other workers or soldiers. Carla Sinopoli, in her study of the craft industry of the Vijayanagara empire (fourteenth-sixteenth century CE), examines how potters, who primarily made household goods and were part of a rural economy, had a lower social and economic standing than weavers, who manufactured textiles that were important not only for temple rituals and elite consumption but also in the context of trade.

Place, too, was important. Most historic artisan organisations have been predominantly based in urban settings, and artisans here remained distinguished from their rural counterparts for the reasons mentioned above. Even within urban settings, where varied and influential patronage was available, the specific nature of the product and patronage differentiated the status of artisan groups. For instance, a metalsmith creating ritual icons for a temple or employed by a court-patronised workshop enjoyed a higher social standing than another metalsmith in the same city commissioned by a less influential patron.

Shaping society: Guilds in culture and patronage

Guilds were composed of members who practised the same trade or profession. Historically, membership of a guild was not necessarily hereditary, in that some members did not follow a hereditary occupation, and membership did not always map rigidly along caste lines. They were hierarchical organisations headed by individuals; ancient Buddhist literature uses the Pali term jetthaka for the head of a guild, and the Sanskrit antevesika has been used to refer to apprentices who received training in the guilds. Guild heads, as leaders of sizable organisations that had their own insignias and flags, held considerable power and prestige - some texts mention them being a part of a ruler's entourage.

The guild as an institutional framework held significance beyond simply the aggregation and providing of skilled labour to a project - scholars have discerned the role of craft guilds both in the lives of their members and in the context of the broader trading sphere. In addition to training artisans in a craft, guilds ensured reliability and accountability by setting standards of quality as well as prices for their services and products. Members who did not meet the standards or did not comply were often fined; these served as an additional source of income for the guild. As quasi-judicial systems for their members, guilds sometimes extended their powers to arbitration in issues concerning members' familial lives.

As socially and economically prominent bodies, craft guilds were also enmeshed in the system of social and religious donations. They used a part of their profits to contribute towards the maintenance of watersheds, halls, tanks and gardens, and towards helping the poor. Vidisha's ivory carvers are an example of this form of patronage, contributing to a part of the sculptural programme at the Sanchi stupa as both artists and donors. As both, they were only one among several hundreds of individuals and groups who enabled the building and expansion of the Sanchi complex as it stands today. The Buddhist rock-cut cave monasteries that dot the hills of the Western Ghats similarly reveal the patronage of monks and nuns, royal families, as well as professional artisans, not only through inscriptions but also as suggested by their location along major trade routes of the period.

Another example of religious patronage by craft guilds is evidenced in fifth- and sixth-century CE inscriptions found around the ancient city of Dashapur (present-day Mandsaur or Mandasor) in west-central India. Some of these describe the migration of a guild of silk weavers from Lata (in present-day Gujarat) to Dashapur, then a significant Hindu religious centre, and their patronage to the construction of a temple dedicated to the Sun deity Surya. They also funded its repairs and maintenance a few decades after its consecration.

In addition to functioning as patrons themselves, artisan guilds even served a bank-like function. They received endowments as deposits from individuals or entities, and provided interest on these, used on the donor's behalf for patronage. Scholars cite instances where patrons provided clothing, meals and medicines to monks and nuns of monasteries using the interest accrued from their investments with guilds of weavers, bamboo workers and oil millers. In such cases, terms would be laid down, stating that only the interest on the principal sum could be used for the charitable deed of the endowment.

Clues in the stone: The makers' signatures

The caves of Ellora in present-day Maharashtra are home to Hindu, Buddhist and Jain monuments carved into the rock, an endeavour known to have begun around the sixth century CE, and one that would have involved elaborate planning and division of labour. From a stylistic analysis across sculpted dvarapala (door guardian) figures in some of the early caves, the scholars Deepak Kannal and Kanika Gupta have identified the work of a single guild, suggesting the specialisation of guilds even to particular genres of images. They also mention the probability of a central authority guiding the work across groups of such specialists in a large project.

From this period onwards, India saw a flourishing of religious architectural patronage. While traditions of rock-cut architecture from the ancient era continued to flourish, hundreds of new free-standing stone temples were constructed across the Indian landscape. Patronised by wealthy and powerful donors including royal families, officials and merchants, these were projects that brought together diverse professional groups. Each group was engaged to carry out a specific role of expertise in the artistic and architectural processes - from designing plans and sculptural layouts to cutting and dressing the stone, carving and woodwork, shaping the central icon, and painting murals. Guiding the efforts of multitudes of artisans were figures such as the sutradhara (architect), the head stone mason and the chief sculptor.

There is evidence to suggest that organised guilds, made up of individual artists as well as family units with several generations working together, would have been a part of such large-scale projects. In his analysis of a palm-leaf manuscript that describes the construction of the thirteenth-century Sun Temple, Konark (in present-day Odisha), the historian George Michell states that artisans and labourers would have been organised into guild-like structures, which would have regulated the hours and wages of their members, and the costs of completed work.

Individuals or guilds of highly skilled architects and sculptors find relatively few mentions in texts from ancient India that list many other craftspersons - owing perhaps to their itinerancy and lack of formal organisation, according to the historian RN Misra. The medieval and late-medieval period, however, yields inscriptions that credit such specialists.

Some examples of such inscriptions are found in present-day Karnataka. At the eighth-century CE Virupaksha Temple, one of the largest in the Pattadakal temple complex where kings of the Western Chalukya dynasty were once crowned, is a carved inscription naming Sri Gunda as the architect of the structure. Alongside the various epithets praising him, the inscription also mentions the term ' Sarvasiddhi acharya'. The term appears again at the Papanatha Temple in the same complex, on an inscription crediting the architect Chattare Revadi Ovajja. While perhaps used as an epithet of praise - translating variably as 'preceptor', 'venerable one' or 'architect priest' - some scholars believe the term may represent a guild of architects to which both Sri Gunda and Ovajja belonged. At a quarry site near Pattadakal, which may have provided the stone for the temples, one inscription names two members of a sanghata or guild of quarrymen, while others show symbols such as a conch-shell or a trishul (trident), which scholars suggest may have been identification marks of craftspersons or guilds.

Epigraphical signatures become much more common in Hoysala temples commissioned in Karnataka from the 12th to the 14th century, with master sculptors inscribing the stone with not only their names or guild names but a series of self-proclaimed titles and claims of supremacy over other sculptors. Among these, the phrase ' Sarasvati gana dasa ' ('Servants of Sarasvati') appears across a number of temples, leading scholars to suggest that the sculptors may have belonged to a guild of that name or were associated with a temple dedicated to Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of learning and the arts.

From the temple to the world: Artisan settlement, identity and trade

The temple was not only a place of worship or a symbol of patronage. It functioned variously as a social space, an economic entity, and as the crux of the local economy - as the development of temple towns in southern India between the 9th and 16th centuries shows. The detailed inscriptions at the Brihadishvara Temple, Thanjavur, completed in the eleventh century under the patronage of the Chola ruler Rajaraja I, provide an example of how large temple complexes required the services of professionals ranging from sculptors, smiths, woodworkers, garland makers, oil suppliers, dancers and musicians, priests and watchmen.

These large temple complexes were physically, economically and culturally at the heart of a temple town. The streets surrounding these complexes came to be occupied by and identified with the various artisan groups who settled there, specialising in providing services to the temple as well as to the court, the upper classes and the market in general. The temple directly employed master artisans for various specialised tasks, such as carrying out engravings to record temple activities; artisans were also engaged in other crafts for the temple, court and trade, often in workshop systems with apprentices. Wood carvers worked on temple chariots, metal workers crafted processional idols or ritual objects like lamps or armour, master goldsmiths supplied jewellery for use in the temple or made objects for courtly consumption, and sculptors made statues of deities, hero stones or portraits of royal donors. Some of these occupational groups forged a community identity for themselves, identifying themselves as belonging to the clan of Vishwakarma, after the Hindu deity of craftsmanship, and elevated their social status through economic success. These groups were goldsmiths, brass-smiths, carpenters, masons and blacksmiths, and they were known as Kammalar in Tamil Nadu, Panchanamuvaru in the Andhra region, and Panchala in the Karnataka region.

In the tenth century and later, the region corresponding to present-day Tamil Nadu and the broader southern India region was also closely linked with the maritime trade that connected peninsular India to the Red Sea region in the western Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia to the east. With cargo ranging from foodgrains and cloth to elephants and horses, and from gemstones to wood and perfumes, this trade was facilitated by influential merchant guilds. Among them were the Hindu merchant group Manigramam in Tamil Nadu; Anjuvannan, a group of Arab merchants in the Malabar region; and Ayyavole, also known as Disai-Ayirattu-Ainnurruvar ('The Five Hundred of the Thousand Directions'), a merchant group from Aihole in Karnataka, who also became facilitators of religious patronage in Tamil Nadu, handling endowments of land and gifts, and constructing temple structures.

Weaver communities, who were historically also settled on the artisan streets surrounding temples, were one major artisan group linked to trade, and were therefore able to exercise solidarity for their benefit. In the Vijayanagara kingdom (fourteenth-sixteenth centuries CE) - a period scholars suggest was the high point for the weaving industry of southern India - textiles were a trade commodity critical to revenue and the upkeep of the kingdom's military. In addition, the court and nobility were voracious consumers of cloth. Weavers themselves were also organised into guild-like structures and engaged with merchant guilds that facilitated the trade. The value of the commodity they produced allowed them a position for collective bargaining. Weavers in the Vijayanagara empire protested successfully against tax rises, sometimes using the tactic of migrating in large numbers to other regions to make their case. The Kammalar are known to have had a custom whereby all craftspersons of the community would shut shop if a member was offended or wronged. The economic position of these communities also provided them with social mobility and status, such as participation in temple events, caste insignias and the right to blow conch shells, a prominent ceremonial marker.

One example of the community association with the Vishwakarma artisan group is found today in the pilgrimage town of Swamimalai in Tamil Nadu, where some bronze casters, who claim descent from medieval Vishwakarma artisans, continue to make bronze idols using the lost-wax method for ritual purposes and for sale in the commercial handicrafts market.

In-house expertise: The Mughal imperial workshop

Where master artisans in southern India could simultaneously engage with court, temple and market, another form of artist organisation, the karkhana - literally, 'factory' - prevalent largely in northern India, crafted products exclusively for the use of the court or patron. The karkhana in this context was a place of craft production as well as a storage house for objects, patronised by a royal court or by a member of the nobility - a format that scholars suggest emerged in the Islamicate states of northern India with the migrations of artists, artisans and elites from Central and West Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Mughal period, particularly from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, was the apogee of this form of patronage, which was also adopted in the smaller provincial courts. In addition to the kitabkhana or book atelier referenced earlier, the Mughal court's karkhanas or workshops also turned out furnishings and tents for the peripatetic court, alongside jewellery, opulent utilitarian objects, perfumes and weapons. At Amber, in present-day Rajasthan, in the 18th century, the karkhanas dealing with textiles alone included the rangkhana for dyeing, the chapkhana for printing and the siwankhana for embroidery. Because they served the court directly, the karkhanas were also organised in a bureaucratic structure, headed by an administrator under whom artisans worked. The court's resources and the technical quality it demanded meant that these workshops attracted master artisans who specialised in certain areas of craft production, with craftspersons from other parts of the country also sometimes called on to work for the court. In addition to crafting objects, master artisans also helped train apprentices.

The Mughal imperial kitabkhana provides an example of how a royal atelier would have functioned. As an institution where manuscripts were not only stored but also produced and restored on royal commission, the workshop brought together artists and artisans specialising in domains such as paper preparation, binding, calligraphy, margin illumination, giltwork and miniature painting. Among painters too there were specialisations, such as flora and fauna, or portraits. When manuscripts were commissioned, each specialisation was called upon - with junior artisans working under the supervision of masters - to produce a work that achieved excellence and visual consistency. Even as the size of the workshop changed under different emperors with their varying artistic motivations, domain specialisation remained a feature of imperial workshops until their decline. Such karkhanas, both imperial as well as others, remained important craft-production organisations well into the eighteenth century, until the breakdown of Mughal rule and the emergence of British colonial rule pushed these structures towards their decline.

Collective legacies

The idea of a contemporary artist collective today encompasses self-driven management, an infrastructural and creative support network, and the lack of an explicit hierarchy, far-removed from the historical artist organisations that we have seen so far. Yet the spirit of collaboration and creativity, a sense of community and kinship based on common social experiences, work and familial ties, and support in the form of training and knowledge processes bridge artist and artisan organisations of the past and present.

About Rachna Shetty

Rachna Shetty is a Research Associate at the MAP Academy. She holds a bachelor's in Mass Media from the University of Mumbai and a post-graduate diploma in Museology and Conservation from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. Her research interests include folk, performing arts, sports and popular culture. She is based in Mumbai. Email: rachna.shetty@map-india.org.

About the MAP Academy

The MAP Academy is an open-access educational platform committed to building equitable resources for the study of South Asian art histories. It encourages knowledge-building and engagement with the region's visual arts through its freely accessible Online courses, Encyclopedia of Art and Stories.

Bibliography

Agarwal, Simran. "Collaboration, Invention and Artistic Development: The Kitabkhanas of Mughal South Asia". MAP Academy Blog. Accessed July 23, 2024. https://mapacademy.io/collaboration-invention-and-artistic-development-the-kitabkhanas-of-mughal-south-asia/

Archaeological Survey of India. "Sanchi through Inscriptions." January 31, 2019. Accessed June 25, 2024. https://asibhopal.nic.in/pdf/recent_activity/200_years_of_discovery_of_sanchi_31_jan_2019/sanchi_through_inscriptions_dr_s_s_gupta.pdf

Balaswaminathan, Sowparnika. "Icons and Identities: The Work and Lives of Bronzecasters in Swamimalai." Marg 67, no. 3 (March-June 2016): 10-23.

Beach, Milo Cleveland. Mughal and Rajput painting. The New Cambridge History of India, I:3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Britannica, The. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "guild." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 2, 2024. Accessed June 20, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/guild-trade-association.

Dehejia, Vidya. "Introduction: Sanchi and the Art of Buddhism." Unseen Presence: The Buddha and Sanchi. Edited by Vidya Dehejia, xiv-xxxi. Bombay: Marg Publications, 1996.

Dehejia, Vidya. The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855-1280. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Gupta, Kanika. "Countering Cerebral Invasions: Sculptors Against Dependencies." In Embodied Dependencies and Freedoms: Artistic Communities and Patronage in South Asia. Edited by Julia A. B. Hegewald, 347-64. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2023.

Houghteling, Sylvia. The Art of the Cloth in Mughal India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Kaligotla, Subhashini. Shiva's Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

MAP Academy Encyclopedia of Art. "Mughal Miniature Painting". Accessed July 23, 2024. https://mapacademy.io/article/mughal-miniature-painting/

Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to its Meanings and Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Misra, R. N. Ancient Artists and Art Activity. Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975.

Mohsini, Mira. "Crafts, Artisans and the Nation State in India." In A Companion to the Anthropology of India. Edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès, 186-201. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

Ramaswamy, Vijaya. "Sectional President's Address: CRAFTS AND ARTISANS IN SOUTH INDIAN HISTORY." Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 64 (2003): 300-336. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44145473.

Ramaswamy, Vijaya. "Vishwakarma Craftsmen in Early Medieval Peninsular India." Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, no. 4 (2004): 548-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25165073.

Roy, Tirthankar. "The Guild in Modern South Asia." International Review of Social History 53 (2008): 95-120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26405469.

Settar, S. "The Hoysala Artists (c. 1100-1336)." In Indian Art: Forms, Concerns and Development in Historical Perspective. Edited by B. N. Goswamy and Kavita Singh, 181-205. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2000.

Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th century. Noida: Pearson, 2016.

Sinopoli, Carla M. "The Organization of Craft Production at Vijayanagara, South India." American Anthropologist 90, no. 3 (1988): 580-97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/678225 .

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Thapar, Romila. A History of India: Volume 1. London: Penguin Books, 1966. Ebook.

Thaplyal, Kiran Kumar. "Guilds in Ancient India (Antiquity and Various Stages in the Development of Guilds up to AD 300)." In Life Thoughts and Culture in India. Edited by G. C. Pande, 995-1006. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 2001.

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G36 | India | MAP Academy

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Creative, collaborative communities: Forms of artist and artisan organisation in historic India

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Rachna Shetty from the MAP Academy presents an overview of craft collectives through the history of India that have shaped and been shaped by its material, religious and social cultures

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Ceramics Southern Africa: Down to earth connections

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Ceramics Southern Africa: Down to earth connections

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Ceramics Southern Africa: Down to earth connections

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Rosh Sewpersad finds that membership is thriving in an African ceramics organisation, thanks to exhibition opportunities.

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Workshop 6 Richmond Road, Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand

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Common Element: Workshop6 celebrates 30 wild years

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Common Element: Workshop6 celebrates 30 wild years

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Mia Straka

Mia Straka recounts the heady journey of a resilient Auckland jewellery collective.

More than 500 copper rings span the dark brick and concrete courtyard. Suspended in a relaxed curve from eye to waist height they invite intimate inspection and tactile interaction. The changeable coastal climate of Tāmaki Makaurau transforms salmon pink copper to rich earth brown, grey and black. Green oxides the colour of new fern fronds appear, and fingerprints from the many ring makers and visitors to the gallery develop like photographs over the course of the year-long installation.

Each individual ring bears the maker's marks, soft dents of a ball peen hammer, linear tracks, letter stamped initials and personal word plays, cutout patterns and silver solder joints made by the hands of many. Created during special ring-making workshops held at our local Grey Lynn studio, Common Element embodies hundreds of hours of collective making and the sharing of skills at Workshop6. The humble copper ring gains power and presence through multiplicity.

An induction to jewellery making often commences with the crafting of a simple copper ring: a fundamental exercise in metalwork and studio practice. Supported elegantly on a simple display by Michael McCabe and exhibited down the road from the studio at leading design, craft and architecture gallery, Objectspace, Common Element was commissioned as the successful proposal to their 2024 plinth project callout.

History

The project is a fitting way to mark three decades of Workshop6, Aotearoa's most enduring jewellery collective. Throughout this time, the studio has been a vital hub for metalworking and jewellery craft. Many of Aotearoa's leading contemporary jewellers have ties to Workshop6; training, teaching and fostering an extensive community through making. The current partnership includes Anna Wallis, Cheryl Sills, Mia Straka and Lucinda Barrett.

Established in 1993 by jewellers Anna Wallis, Lisa Walker, Helen O'Connor, and Areta Wilkinson in an old laundry building amongst the colourful villas of Grey Lynn, Workshop6 was a place to share tools and costs, and create a communal jewellery studio. Within a year Workshop6 moved a suburb over to Kingsland, to a basement warehouse studio. A small grant enabled the purchase of hand tools for teaching our craft to the public.

This kicked off the still enduring business model for Workshop6 of teaching jewellery classes to pay the rent, facilitating a collective studio where makers could work on their own practice in a shared space. Workshop6 became a kind of clubhouse for contemporary jewellers. The walls and crevices accrued posters and exhibition flyers, random snippets, jokes and interesting objects.

Classes gained an organic following as a community of makers was born. Some students went on to tertiary study and careers in contemporary jewellery, others continued to return as they gained skills, friendships and a place to make in a supported environment.

Events and milestones

Initially the collective had regular exhibitions in national venues. This gave way to a more individual focus on career paths. From 1995 to 2005 Jane Dodd, Octavia Cook and Jasmine Watson became partners as Lisa Walker, Helen O'Connor and Areta Wilkinson moved away from Auckland. Notable milestones were celebrated with exhibitions and celebrations.

Pretty was a multimedia one-night-only event in Auckland nightclub Herzog in the mid-nineties. An animated video of Workshop6'ers experimental jewellery worn on the body was projected onto a wall of the nightclub. During the night people wearing the jewellery mingled amongst the party guests. The event was documented with a wire-bound booklet including critical discourse, jeweller's responses to an informal questionnaire, a self-portrait in their favourite place and images of the work. Jane Dodd was memorably photographed adorned in bubbles in her bath at home.

Tin Years marked the 10-year anniversary exhibition at Fingers Gallery with a tin "party" made in miniature, featuring resident jewellers and guests, a cake-laden table set formally with plates and cutlery, streamers, even a champagne puddle; available to purchase singularly or as a set "for the Guggenheim".

In 2014, Workshop6 came of age, celebrating our 21st year with a move to the iconic Theatre Royal building in Kingsland, built in 1915. The high-ceilinged warehouse lent itself to a big party, complemented by an exhibition at Fingers of past and present Workshop6 jewellers. Work was displayed along a colour-coded timeline across the back wall of Fingers gallery to denote when each jeweller was in residence at Workshop6.

Adaptation

Workshop6 has always been a fluid organisation, adaptable to the changing lives and needs of those involved. As a self-sufficient partnership from our inception in 1994, financial challenges have been weathered with a conservative economic approach and many voluntary hours of administrative tasks behind the scenes.

Decisions are made collectively through conversations around the table. Partnership in Workshop6 has always been made by mutual agreement and with careful consideration that we work well together, like and respect each other, are able to communicate clearly, and have common goals for the workshop environment.

Over the past five years, we have begun to be more business-oriented, increasing our teaching schedule in response to demand and providing a part-time job for each of us, complementary to our self-employed artistic practices as jewellers and makers.

We've weathered storms by working as a team and regularly checking in on our mutual goals and values. Just before the pandemic, our Kingsland studio space changed ownership and underwent major renovations, plus an unforeseen roof replacement. The quality of our workspace and activities was compromised, leading to the search and subsequent move to our current premises. Covid-19 hit our shores as we'd finished the fit-out and were ready to re-open, leading to cancelled classes, refunds and reschedules.

The new space is a step up in location, efficiency, comfort and costs. We have managed to navigate these hurdles but times are tight and our buffer has been consumed.

As tertiary-level education in the craft and design sector has been systematically eradicated in Aotearoa over the past decade, Workshop6 is one of the first and almost the last remaining jewellery teaching facilities left in Auckland. We are determined to survive and thrive and are eternally grateful for the strength and support of our community.

Attraction

Each of us has been attracted to Workshop6 as a place to work with like-minded practitioners. We can generate the environment we need to thrive creatively within the collective, as well as to share our skills with others through teaching. This builds community, which gives us all joy and purpose, as well as creating a part-time income to supplement our self-employed income, a necessity in today's constrictive economic climate.

Plans

To reach a wider audience, we are working with talented designer and friend Tana Mitchell at Studio Akin to build a new website. We aim to create a user-friendly digital interface more representative of our current location and offerings.

We're also in the process of setting up a regular exhibition schedule in the busy street front window of our studio to exhibit and retail our work, alongside curated student works and guest artists. Situated in a great location within the busy, affluent, city fringe neighbourhood of Grey Lynn, we already have a strong established following over our thirty-plus years of existence as a studio.

Facilitating easier access to information about our offerings and a functional booking system online will help to ensure we continue to flourish in these more challenging times.

Aspirations

We want Workshop6 to be a hub for contemporary jewellers and our community, increasing our offerings to include regular masterclasses, exhibitions and artist residencies.

We hope people continue to increasingly find value and joy in the craft and art of handmade goods, with respect for materials, workwomanship and sustainability.

We work hard to ensure our students love coming to Workshop6, growing in skills and developing creatively alongside building community. It helps to have the freedom to respond to student needs rather than working within a more rigid accredited teaching programme.

We hope creativity will be nurtured within educational frameworks as a way to develop new ways of thinking and being.

We aspire to be a small part of the development of new and adaptable systems to exist, supportive of both individual freedom of mind, body and spirit and communal well-being.

About Mia Straka

I am a Pākeha New Zealander of Bohemian, Dutch and Irish descent living in Tāmaki Makaurau, close to the flat-topped volcanic peak of Puketāpapa - Mount Roskill, Auckland. Since my early 20's I have been a self-employed contemporary jeweller, supplementing my income by teaching jewellery classes at Collective Workshop6, a jewellery studio I joined in 2008. I'm drawn to making linear 3D forms, building handworked sculptural adornment that has occasionally grown to installation scale. Through my work, I question our prevailing value systems, often incorporating discarded or overlooked materials. Notable projects include The Handshake Project- Handshake6, Handshake7; The Valere Talisman Project (est. 2017) and The Talisman Project (est. 2014). Straka has undertaken art residencies in Berlin, Germany 2018 and Oaxaca, Mexico 2014. Currently, I'm focused on making adornment as an activator, reworking the form of the knuckleduster as a statement of personal power. I'll be exhibiting at Radiant Pavilion in Melbourne this September with the Handshake6 group at Brunswick Street Gallery. Visit mia-straka.squarespace.com and follow @ miastraka

Aotearoa | G36 | jewellery

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Common Element: Workshop6 celebrates 30 wild years

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Mia Straka recounts the heady journey of a resilient Auckland jewellery collective.

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Jane Bowden’s jewellery gallery and workshop in an Adelaide shopping arcade has nurtured generations of talent.

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Carmel Haugh recounts the story of Queensland’s craft and design organisation as it renews its membership strategy to afford opportunities.

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Meat Market, Blackwood Street, North Melbourne VIC

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The craft confederacy: Differences in common

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The craft confederacy: Differences in common

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Kevin Murray

Kevin Murray identifies the federation of differences as a reason for the longevity of craft organisations.

"The purpose of the Congress was to bring together craftsmen from the world over-both the village artisan and the urbanised designer-craftsman-for a creative, technical, economic and social exchange. The Congress proved that when confronted with each other as artists people could meet in a friendly spirit and with deep understanding no matter what their race or politics. This is the first road toward bringing peace in the world."

Aileen O. Webb, foreword to The First World Congress of Craftsmen (1964)

The Diamond Anniversary, 60 years of the World Crafts Council, is a chance to reflect on the longevity of the many craft associations that have continued despite the radical transfor mations in the recent era. While it is not the oldest craft association-that honour goes to the Worshipful Company of Loriners, founded in 1261-it has been especially generative in seeding many organisations under its umbrella across the world.

What explains the longevity of craft associations? There are many reasons. Psychologically, it can be argued that the patience demanded of working with natural materials fosters a positive culture of dialogue and understanding. Moreover, because craft skills are passed on by hand, knowledge is not readily appropriated by other bodies.

The specific feature I focus on here is the federated nature of the crafts. Western craft is structured as a pentad. Ceramics, jewellery, glass, textiles and wood make up the five major craft fields. While each has a different history and body of technique, they share a common value in the skilful manipulation of materials.

Federations have a special strength. To function well, there has to be respectful dialogue between the various members. As Norman Davies argued in The Isles: A History, the nature of Britain as a union of different peoples is essential to its identity. Arguably, this could also be seen in the relative stability of Australia as a nation made up of different states and territories. Federations bring different interests to a shared table

For the Table issue of Garland, I offer a subjective history of this federation as it evolved from the second half of the twentieth century until today.

1964 - The Crafts Association of Australia

Like medieval guilds, the five craft media are represented by specialised organisations, such as GAS (Glass Art Society) and the International Academy of Ceramics. Regionally, there are also generalist craft organisations that combine all five media. Most of these share a common root in the World Crafts Council, originally established in 1964 by Aileen Osborn Webb, Margaret Patch and Kalamadevi Chattopadhyay.

Thus the Craft Association of Australia was born. It all began when the Australian potter Mollie Douglas was invited to attend the inaugural New York event. This prompted the need for a national body that she could represent.

The initial function of the new association was to raise funds to send Australians to World Crafts Council events. From this modest beginning, a more formal council structure grew representing national, state and regional areas. The activities expanded to include exhibitions, publications, festivals, workshops and conferences.

It's important to counter a stereotype we might have about "council" as an outmoded model. The term has lately been dropped from organisation titles, such as how Australia Council became Creative Australia. "Council" suggests a body of representatives that deliberate on issues relevant to the field. The alternative formula "Sector-Region" is more industrial in the sense that it interlinks with other areas of society, particularly the economy. While sector designation grants new powers, the organisation can lose its unique history as a chain of people over time who have oversight of the field. T he council model is still useful as a body with a unique history that can develop strategies for the betterment of a field.

1970 - Crafts Council of Victoria

The Crafts Council of Victoria found itself navigating the winds of change in the early 1990s. In the 1970s, the council was the envy of other states due to its generous state support. However, the tide changed in 1987 with the amalgamation of the Australia Council Crafts Board into the Visual Arts and the eventual decision to wind up the Market Market Craft Centre, where Craft Victoria was located.

Craft Victoria doubled down on "craft". The Executive Director of the time, Jeffrey Taylor, was determined to keep the "time-honoured word" as a long-term investment in the organisation's "point of difference". In 1991, the board confirmed the new trading name, "Craft Victoria". The next year, Craft Victoria moved from the Meat Market Craft Centre to bohemian Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. The new Program Manager, Robert Buckingham, oversaw an ambitious program. Susan Cohn curated the inaugural exhibition, The Market, Kitsch and Cultural Production which was opened by the Minister of Arts. The Cicely and Colin Rigg Craft Award began in 1994 with a series of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria that profiled the different craft media.

The gallery helped launch many careers, including the first exhibition of jeweller Mari Funaki, as well as names that are now established such as Prue Venables, Kevin White, Neville Assad-Salha, Jane Sawyer, David Ray, Marian Hosking, Simone Leamon, and Simon Lloyd, The new Artistic Director, Suzie Attiwill, upgraded the magazine under the guidance of designer Michael Trugdeon and new President Susan Cohn.

I joined Craft Victoria as Artistic Director in 2000 when we presented exhibitions that attempted to connect our current location with our history elsewhere. From Eltham to Memphis drew on Robyn Phelan's knowledge of the Meat Market's State Craft Collection to present a dialogue in ceramics between "brown pots" and more sculptural postmodern creations. The exhibition Instrumental worked with local luthiers to expand craft by including instrument makers as a craft component of the Bach-themed Melbourne Festival. Rainer Beilharz came in every day to gradually craft a violin from a single block of wood.

Meanwhile, locating the organisation in the CBD had been a holy grail. In 2001, Craft Victoria moved to larger premises at the start of the gallery strip in Flinders Lane. There were now three exhibition spaces and a window on the street to show work. Being at the top end of town had many advantages, including proximity to the Myer Foundation, just as Rupert Myer was developing the Visual Arts Craft Strategy for the Australia Council, which proved a lifeline for Australian craft organisations.

Around this time, a critical decision was made to change the constitution so that the board was no longer elected by members. This was in keeping with a general evolution in the arts sector away from membership control. In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about this change. On the one hand, it offered the kind of stability that funding bodies demanded. On the other hand, it distanced the organisation from membership.

The benefits were mixed. Like most arts organisations, Craft Victoria welcomed corporates onto the board, especially lawyers. They generously offered their skill, experience and time. But there was often tension between the corporate and not-for-profit worlds. Younger lawyers seemed keen to demonstrate their corporate mettle and misunderstood the voluntary culture of a small arts organisation.

The dominance of managerialism is a common issue across most organisations today. The problem lies not with the corporates: they are simply doing what they are trained to do. Practitioners need to step up and take a seat at the table where they can confidently speak for their field. The corporate focus on risk management and opportunity costs needs to be countered by bold creative visions.

Boards are by nature hierarchical. The singular power of the President encourages factions that seek to win power. Thankfully, the board is not the sole organisational forum. Power was more evenly distributed at the committee level.

The real democracy of Craft Victoria happened during the Exhibition Committee meetings. These were held in the library and witnessed by the shelves filled with books, journals and magazines from past generations. At the table, fueled with pizza and wine, representatives of the craft pentad gathered to assess the applications for the upcoming exhibition spots. Opinions from around the table were invited and a level of enthusiasm was noted.

After the first impressions were aired, we typically turned to the specialist. "Was the work original?" "What was the level of skill involved?" The ceramicist might talk about the quality and uniqueness of the glaze. Or a jeweller might comment on the soldering. This specialist judgement would then be taken into account along with the myriad other factors in making the final selection. Ideally, the meeting would end with everyone's opinion respected, specialist knowledge privileged and each medium given a fair hearing.

On leaving the good ship Craft Victoria, I felt some immediate relief from board politics. But I did miss the camaraderie of the exhibition committee. There was something about finding commonality in difference which was heartening. That was one of the motives for joining Roseanne Bartley in setting up the Bluestone collectors' group. It was essentially an exhibition committee freed of the institutional issues.

2011 - World Crafts Council Australia

After Craft Victoria, I pursued a project to help build partnerships between designers and artisans in Australia and India. Seeking UNESCO backing, I was advised by the current President, the Chilean Celina Rodrigues, to attend the 2008 World Crafts Council General Assembly in Hangzhou. Walking into the hall, I saw a sea of people from all countries of the world. A Chinese official guided me to an empty seat in front of which was the Australian flag. Eyes turned in my direction and a Greek neighbour began the chorus, "Australia is back!". It seemed there hadn't been an Australian representative since the twentieth century.

I hadn't expected this, but I saw immediately the importance of this worldly forum. Like Mollie Douglas, I felt the need to find an organisation to represent. Unfortunately, at that time there was little appetite in Australia for world craft engagement. In 2011, the Australia Council de-funded Craft Australia, arguing that there were more efficient ways of funding the sector. Initially, the funding was directed to a National Craft Inquiry, managed by the National Association of Visual Arts (NAVA). The expectation was that the resulting report would recommend alternative ways of supporting the field. Unfortunately, without an organisation left to advocate for national funding, the report was not followed up and the funding was lost.

So with the help of master silversmith, Marian Hosking, we set up (or rather re-established) World Crafts Council - Australia as our national entity. Canada had gone through a similar process in creating the Crafts Federation of Canada after the defunding of its national body. Since this WCC connection has been re-established, many Australians have participated in the various festivals, meetings, awards and prizes.

The federated structure of crafts in WCC is not between the five media, it is among the five world regions: Europe, North America, South America, Africa and Asia Pacific. As indicated in Aileen Webb's original depiction of the divide between "the village artisan and the urbanised designer-craftsman", a key challenge is to bridge the divide between East and West: the traditional workshop model of the Asian and African continents versus the studio model that is dominant in Europe, North America and Oceania. Though craft may seem a marginal pursuit in global politics, it does offer an important forum for mutual respect between countries that otherwise are divided on geopolitical lines.

A major achievement in recent years has been the World Craft Cities program, initiated by Ms Usha Krishna during her Presidency. This provides a platform for local governments to champion their crafts on the world stage.

Australia itself is part of the largest region: the Asia Pacific. Currently, the region is facing a generational challenge. In previous decades, the World Crafts Council - Asia Pacific has been guided by powerful women, following in the footsteps of Kamaladevi. Unfortunately, major figures like Dr Ghada Hijawwi Qaddumi, Ruby Guzhnavi and Raja Fuziah have recently passed. It seems sad but inevitable that the sense of "family" that they fostered will eventually give way to a more sustainable formal management.

This is a chance to address long-term constraints. Because of the rotation of the WCC presidency every four years, the new Secretariat must reinvent the wheel each time with new bank accounts and websites. Ideally, this should be consolidated so that it's easier for the new Presidency to focus on the challenges ahead. As well as advocating for crafts globally, it can then play an important role in shared issues, such as building resilience to cope with climate change, particularly in areas where artisans are most vulnerable.

2024 - The Knowledge House for Craft

Like with the exhibition committee, I sought a collegiate gathering to complement the more formal WCC. With colleagues in various countries, we created an international association of craft scholars called the Knowledge House for Craft. It began in 2020 with a number of craft thinkers and makers from the wider world who wanted to open up the field of craft to reflect their varied heritage. The Kuwaiti designer Laila Al-Hamad, for instance, wanted to include olfactory crafts such as incense that lay outside the Western pentad. Others, such as the Indian scholar Aarti Kawlra, viewed craft through a post-colonial lens.

While WCC connects regions through its formal rules, including presidential elections, KHC adopts a customary framework inspired by the "talanoa" of Moana Oceania, a conversation involving differences of opinion that are treated respectfully. To provide a means of building on these gatherings, it uses a form of "knowledge weaving" facilitated by new information technologies to build a bespoke "knowledge graph", from which projects like the Value of Craft Report are built.

KHC is not for everyone. Though an increasing number of makers have been university-educated and enjoy writing about craft, most "artisans" in the wider world are focused on material production. For them, WCC continues to offer a more tangible form of representation.

Back to the table

In the year before the WCC was born, a Melbourne collective was established which continues today. Arena Magazine is home to a unique school of thinking about late capitalism. It offers a critique of "abstraction" as a formalising process that ungrounds individuals from their local communal base. This is evident in a wide range of recent social transformations, such as the replacement of local stores with retail chains and the commodification of informal social relations by platforms such as Facebook and Airbnb. (See Guy Rundle's overview and Richard King's essay in this issue).

The history of the crafts in recent times provides an important antidote to this loss of belonging. Its varied organisations offer a place to invest our energies, knowing that the benefits will be shared now and in the future.

While many of the organisations themselves have followed the trend of corporatisation, the emergence of video conferencing platforms such as Zoom has led to a kind of "vertical table" around which we can meet. As the article about Vicki Grima attests, the COVID lockdown provided an opportunity for members to meet each other. At WoCCA, we developed a Bench O'Clock on Friday afternoons with a similar intent, which has now become national Craft Cooees.

The challenge is to nurture structures that sustain these virtual gatherings. Though it began exclusively online, the Knowledge House for Craft eventually adopted the same legal framework for community associations that is used across Australia, involving a constitution and board. The long-term investment is a knowledge base on which is built projects like the Value of Craft Report.

There's still nothing like meeting in person. A recent "roundtable" KHC hosted at a conference in Surabaya evoked the embodied meaning generated when sitting around the common table. While an organisation like Craft Victoria experienced many transformations, the one consistent element was the physical table originally made by local designer-maker David Emery, around which the boards and committees have met over the decades.

Boards come and go. It's a privilege to be able to contribute, but our place at that table is always temporary. To maintain the confederacy, it's important to have a variety of tables where we can gather and find our differences in common.

As Hannah Arendt wrote, "The table is a place where one is oneself, where one discovers what it means to be human, where the illusion of isolation and separateness is brought to an end."

About Kevin Murray

Kevin Murray was Artistic and Executive Director of Craft Victoria, 2000-2007. He is now editor of Garland magazine, Secretary of the World Crafts Council - Australia, Vice-President of World Crafts Council - International and board member of the Knowledge House for Craft. He lives in Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner north, where he published stories about locally made products. Visit kdsm.pub.

G36 | Kevin Murray | World Crafts Council

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Kevin Murray identifies the federation of differences as a reason for the longevity of craft organisations.

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JMGA WA: A leading edge of Australian jewellery

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JMGA WA: A leading edge of Australian jewellery

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JMGA WA: A leading edge of Australian jewellery

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Swedish Crafts Centre - Konsthantverkscentrum

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Center for Craft: The importance of space for collective action and belonging

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Nathalie Mornu covers the wide range of programs AJF provides to ensure it responds to the needs of its members.

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Kyoto University, Yoshidahonmachi, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, Japan

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Forest of Craft ✿ A map of nature’s treasures

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Forest of Craft ✿ A map of nature’s treasures

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Forest of Craft ✿ A map of nature’s treasures

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Malabar Coast, Vallarpadam, Kochi, Ernakulam, Kerala

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Hortus Malabaricus: How the garden of Malabar travelled the world

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Hortus Malabaricus: How the garden of Malabar travelled the world

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https://garlandmag.com/article/hortus-malabaricus-malabar/

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Rachna Shetty, The MAP Academy

Rachna Shetty from MAP Academy presents a seventeenth-century Dutch botanical treatise about the Malabar coast that has been recently revived in India itself.

Every land and field extending into the plains abounded so much with plants and trees of every kind, (as I have said of the above forests), and radiated such fertility... Indeed even the pools, and one may wonder about this, the marshes, nay the very borders of the rivers which carried salt water displayed several plants with which they were almost completely covered. There was no place, not even the smallest, which did not display some plants.

The most barren rocks abounded nevertheless with the splendour of a rich vegetation of trees and herbs.

Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein, in his 'Preface' to volume 3 of Hortus Malabaricus

Facing the Arabian Sea along India's southwestern coast lies a narrow strip of land over 800 kilometres long. Its inland edge is bounded by the Western Ghats, a continuous chain of mountains older than the Himalayas that runs parallel to the coast. These mountains block the southwesterly winds coming over the Arabian Sea, bringing monsoon to its windward slopes and the long, narrow coast at its feet. This region, with its densely forested peaks, gurgling streams, cool valleys and fertile plains, is called Malabar - "land of the mountains"- believed to derive from a combination of Dravidian and Arabic words. The Malabar region stretches from the Konkan region to Kanyakumari at the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent, and traverses five Indian states, most notably present-day Kerala. Its soil ranges from coastal alluvium to laterite and black cotton, and it hosts an astounding diversity of flora and fauna in its moist deciduous forests and rainforests, including several endangered plants and animals.

In the seventeenth century, the trees and plants of this sliver of the Indian peninsula became the subject of an enormous Dutch-commissioned Latin compendium called the Hortus Malabaricus, the "Garden of Malabar", published in Holland. Each plant was meticulously hand-drawn and every detail catalogued. This is the story of how such a comprehensive treatise on these plants and their medicinal properties came to be published nearly 400 years ago - 8000 kilometres away from the land itself - and the particular set of local and global, economic and scientific circumstances that made it happen.

The land of riches: Trade, knowledge, power and healing

The monsoon winds that washed Malabar had, for thousands of years, also borne sailors from different parts of Asia to its coast. Traders, in particular, were attracted by the land's rich produce, among which were timber, spices and food crops, as well as fine, naturally dyed cotton textiles. They thronged to the various ports that dot the coastline, establishing the region as an important point in the global trading network.

In one of the most significant voyages of the "Age of Discovery" (between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries), the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama became the first European to sail to India. His arrival near the Malabar port of Calicut (present-day Kozhikode, Kerala) in 1498 had an unprecedented impact on the economics, politics and culture of not only the Malabar region but also the rest of the Indian subcontinent, and far beyond. From the sixteenth century onwards, Portuguese traders and other European merchant companies arrived on the shores of India, drawn not only by the lure of commerce but also by the desire to possess and control land in areas critical to trade.

Beyond the economic riches it brought the region, the land of the Malabar coast also served its people as a healer. Its plains and forests nurtured plants that indigenous communities had used for medicinal purposes for generations. This accumulated medico-botanical learning had been passed down among traditional healers and codified into texts and other systems of knowledge, which in themselves became communal cultural heirlooms. The use of plants and plant-derived medicines in healing practices was not uncommon in ancient civilisations, whether in ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt. In the Indian subcontinent, the use of herbs for treating ailments is mentioned in the ancient texts of the Vedas and later in dedicated treatises on medicine like the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita.

In fifteenth-century Europe, even as overseas travel and trade networks flourished, a growing interest in botany, particularly the study of exotic tropical plants, was sweeping through the continent. From the late sixteenth century onwards, universities in Europe began establishing botanic gardens housing plants from different regions of the world, and exotic flora gained popularity as collectors' items. While European nations vied for political power and control over profitable ports in newly discovered lands, they also competed for knowledge and the control it promised. Strategic knowledge of the natural world could be tapped for commercial and scientific purposes. So the intimate understanding of foreign lands and their peoples became in itself a marker of power. In this context, indigenous expertise around natural resources began to acquire new layers of significance for explorers and the states funding their voyages.

Dutch Malabar: A garden discovered

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company ( Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) had gained control of key islands and regions of maritime trade, particularly the spice trade, from the Portuguese. In 1663, they came to control parts of the Malabar region, particularly a significant territory in present-day Kerala, centred at Cochin. and in 1669 the second Dutch Governor of Malabar had been appointed - a man named Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein. By this time the networks of the VOC, spanning Southeast Asia, South Asia and South Africa, were already gathering knowledge about the natural environments of these regions, with merchants, officers, sailors and physicians all contributing information and specimens of flora.

In particular, the VOC government in Batavia (Jakarta in present-day Indonesia) had begun encouraging research into local medicinal sources in their Asian colonies and trading posts. The aim was to make these territories less dependent on medicinal supplies from the Netherlands, which were costly to transport and lost their efficacy over the course of the long voyages. They were exploring the potential for trade in medicinal plants from Malabar, which was predominantly associated with pepper. For van Rheede, this was also an opportunity to make a case for Cochin as the capital of the Dutch empire in Asia over Colombo.

It was against this backdrop that, in the 1670s, he assembled a diverse group of about twenty people to traverse the length of the Malabar coast to learn about its medicinal flora. The group, comprising administrators, physicians, artists and helpers, both Dutch and Indian, gathered and documented the leaves, fruits, flowers and seeds of nearly 740 plants in painstaking detail. Over three decades, their efforts, with the contributions of many others, led to the creation of the lavishly illustrated Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, published in twelve volumes between 1678 and 1693 in Amsterdam - a landmark work of tropical botany and taxonomy, and an object of sociocultural and anthropological significance even today.

Books and botany: In pursuit of plants

The Hortus Malabaricus relied on existing frameworks of local knowledge, drawing on generational indigenous wisdom of the land and the plants of the Malabar region. It was a significant work not only for the information it compiled, but also for its intricate visual documentation of the astounding range of medicinal plants and trees that thrive on India's southwestern coast. While it is perhaps the earliest publication of such breadth and detail on the flora of this part of the world, it was not the first European work to engage with South Asian ethnobotany.

A century before the first volume of the Hortus Malabaricus was published, the Portuguese physician Garcia D'Orta published his treatise Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia, or 'Colloquies on the Simples [medicinal herbs] and Drugs of India' in 1563. D'Orta had lived and worked in India for three decades, serving as a physician for the viceroys of Portuguese India at Goa and later in the Nizam Shahi kingdom of Ahmednagar. He had compiled his information from field research and local sources, as well as Arab physicians he encountered in the multicultural milieu of the sixteenth-century Deccan.

While D'Orta's treatise was not illustrated, subsequent works that relied heavily on Colóquios - the Spanish Tratado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (1578) by Cristobal D'Acosta, and the Latin Aromatum et simplicium aliquot medicamentorum apud Indios nascentium historia (1567) by Carolus Clusius - carried a few woodcut illustrations of Indian plants. Another work, Jan Huygen van Linschotens' Itinerario (1596) also carried botanical information on plant life in Goa. An unfinished English text now known as the Gurney Herbal, likely compiled by a surgeon of the British East India Company in the mid-seventeenth century, included information on plants of the Coromandel Coast and northern Deccan regions. Another important work was the Viridarium Orientale, an illustrated work on South Asian plants compiled by a Christian priest, Father Matthew of St Joseph, who would also go on to contribute to the early version of the Hortus Malabaricus.

A Dutch governor, an Indian physician, and their motley crew: The making of the Hortus Malabaricus

Van Rheede himself was a naturalist, and he held a deep respect for the natural world, both scientifically and aesthetically. He appreciated the lush Malabar forests, with their diversity of plant life, and quickly realised that the soil of the region almost never lay fallow. His key guiding principle for the Hortus Malabaricus project was the quality of documentation - inspired by the thrust on empirical study that Europe was seeing at the time, he aimed to record accurate and detailed information from first-hand sources.

He began by assembling a group of officials, physicians and botanists. Vira Kerala Verma, the VOC-installed ruler of Cochin, provided van Rheede with helpers to collect specimens for the project. A crucial figure in the project was Itty Acchuden, a vaidya or Ayurvedic physician from the marginalised Ezhava caste, who is believed to have selected the plants for the project. Hailing from the Collatt family of vaidyas, from Cherthala near Cochin, Acchuden was not only deeply knowledgeable about botany but had also inherited medico-botanical documents and works from his forebears. He was assisted by Ezhava helpers, who were familiar with the region's biodiversity, could climb trees, and knew how to identify the various parts of the local plants. These plant specimens were brought to van Rheede and the artists, who drew from them from life, achieving accuracy from direct observation.

After the specimens were discussed and studied, the group compiled information about the plants, ranging from their nomenclature, habitat, odour, colour, taste, descriptions of their parts, and their fruiting and flowering seasons, to their importance in various industries and their use (or absence) in local medicinal practices. Three Brahmin physicians, Ranga Bhat, Vinayaka Pandit and Appu Bhat, who belonged to a dominant-caste community of priests originally from Goa and later settled in Cochin, also vetted the traditional medicinal uses of these plants using a fourteenth-century Sanskrit treatise called Manganingattnam or Maha Nighandu. The Malayalam names of the plants were recorded in the Kolezhuthu and Arabic scripts; the Konkani names in the Devanagari script; and the Latin names in the Roman script.

A number of Dutch collaborators worked with van Rheede. Two VOC officials, Johannes Casearius and Christiaan Herman van Donep helped translate information from the local languages to Portuguese, Dutch and Latin. Of the artists involved in drawing the specimens, only two names are known from the records - Antoni Jakobsz Goetkint and Marcelis Splintjer, both military draughtsmen of the VOC. In Holland, Bastiaan Stoopendael and Gonsalez Appelman and others created copperplate engravings based on the original drawings. Father Matthew of St Joseph, who had documented some of the region's plants in Viridarium Orientale was originally a part of van Rheede's team, but his drawings were rejected as they were not accurate.

A particularly significant aspect of the project was van Rheede's collaboration with an Ezhava physician, and his decision to use a particularly indigenous system of classification. A rarity in a time marked by a rigorous belief in European scientific systems, this also brought recognition and respect to Ezhava indigenous systems, as the environmental historian Richard Grove points out. This framework was also able to bypass the often inaccurate information of the priestly Brahmin class. The inclusion of local nomenclature further served as windows into the socio-cultural contexts of the regions in which the plants grew. The Hortus Malabaricus described 740 species and carried 794 illustrations and remains the only encyclopaedic compendium that records Ezhava medico-botanical knowledge to such a great extent. Acchuden's own documents - lost at some point - were never recovered.

Made in India, printed in Holland: In service to science

Seventeenth-century works like the Hortus Malabaricus and Georgius Everhardus Rumphius' Herbarium Amboinense (which detailed the plants of the Amboina Island in modern-day Indonesia), filled critical gaps in botanical knowledge relating to Asia. These monumental works, combined with the collections and influence of the botanic gardens of Leiden and Amsterdam, put Holland at the centre of tropical botany in the seventeenth century. Richard Grove frames Hortus Malabaricus as a symbol of the network of Dutch trade and science that connected Asia and Europe.

The Hortus Malabaricus was one of the main sources of information on Asian flora for Carl Linnaeus, and its taxonomic classifications based on Acchuden's ancestral knowledge influenced Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753), which listed and classified over 6,000 species of plants. It also influenced works by noted British botanists, such as William Roxburgh and Joseph Dalton Hooker.

Even as it is studied in institutions around the world, the Hortus Malabaricus has been brought back to life and relevance in Kerala of the present day. Its translation, annotation and research have been a three-decade-long project for Indian botanist KS Manilal, who has in recent years produced English and Malayalam translations of the work, alongside multiple studies into its history and local contributors. Private not-for-profit and governmental institutions have created gardens with many of the species mentioned in the text. With these efforts, the Hortus Malabaricus and Acchuden's role in its creation have also become significant cultural symbols of the sophistication of Ezhava medico-botanical knowledge.

The Hortus Malabaricus weaves multiple strands into its legacy - from indigenous knowledge and its attribution to the networks of science and commerce in an expanding world of trade, political power and colonialism, technology, as well as shifts in perspective around the representation of nature in the visual arts. Above all, it is a story of the land, and of a curiosity to know and recognise the gifts of nature.

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Grove, Richard. " Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature," Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (February 1996): 121-143.

Heniger, J. Hendrik Adriaan Van Reede Tot Drakenstein (1636-1691) And Hortus Malabaricus. Rotterdam: AA Balkema, 1986.

Jain, Akshai. " A Kerala Botanist's Affair With an Unlikely 17th Century Book." The Wire, September 30, 2018. Accessed April 14, 2024.

Menon, Minakshi. " Hortus Indicus Malabaricus: The Eurasian Life of a Seventeenth-Century "European" Botanical Classic." Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, July 12, 2023. Accessed April 12, 2024.

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About Rachna Shetty

Rachna Shetty is a Research Associate at the MAP Academy. She holds a bachelor's in Mass Media from the University of Mumbai and a post-graduate diploma in Museology and Conservation from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. Her research interests include folk, performing arts, sports and popular culture. She is based in Mumbai. Email: rachna.shetty@map-india.org.

About the MAP Academy

The MAP Academy is an open-access educational platform committed to building equitable resources for the study of South Asian art histories. It encourages knowledge-building and engagement with the region's visual arts through its freely accessible Online courses, Encyclopedia of Art and Stories.

G35 | India | MAP Academy | Netherlands

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Hortus Malabaricus: How the garden of Malabar travelled the world

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Rachna Shetty from MAP Academy presents a seventeenth-century Dutch botanical treatise about the Malabar coast that has been recently revived in India itself.

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Japan, Osaka, Kita Ward, Umeda, 1 Chome−1−3 Temple University, Japan Campus, Osaka Center

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Art of meditation: Attitudes to nature in Japanese gardens & Ikebana

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Art of meditation: Attitudes to nature in Japanese gardens & Ikebana

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Art of meditation: Attitudes to nature in Japanese gardens & Ikebana

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Shoso Shimbo identifies the essence of Japanese Ikebana in the interior process of meditation.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/mike-crawford/

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Renée C. Neblett reflects on the idyllic village life she found in Ghana, how it lost its way with commercialisation, and the institute she founded to help recover its vitality.

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Melinda Young

Melinda Young introduces the Trellis via her own journey of terrestrial and marine jewellery.

Engagement with the land as a jeweller is a varied proposition, as most jewellery has an inherent relationship with the land in some way, be it through the use of stones and metals and alloys from the earth. Or at the other end of the preciousness scale, via the seeking and gathering of debris, on the street, or along a shoreline to enact a transformation from trash to treasure. Garland's garden trellis is adorned with many beautiful pieces of writing by and about jewellers whose practice engages with the land. These stories are deeply evocative and reveal the personal connections so many jewellers have with the land on which they make and the lands that inspire them.

In my own practice, engagement with the land comes from the perspective of a settler jeweller who occasionally uses metals, and rarely stones, mostly preferring to work with materials encountered directly whilst walking. In my engagement with the land, I consider its complex, troubled stories, as well as its ability to nourish and nurture. I am part of a community of jewellers who work in this way including Roseanne Bartley, Melissa Cameron, Cara Johnson, Pennie Jagiello, Catherine Large, Nellie Peoples & Zoë Veness, for whom the act of walking, noticing, gathering, documenting is an integral part of making, and also a way of coming to understand and know a place, a kind of wearable space/time mapping.

Throughout my life, I have walked to gather thoughts, images, materials and to make. Over the past few years, I have walked the same tract of coast (almost) daily, not only for a sense of routine and friendly encounters along the way, but also to learn. The land where I walk belongs to the Dharawal and Wodi Wodi people, whose Country it will always be. I feel the weight and significance of this place and a duty to assist with its care. Walking the same land allows an opportunity to observe and reflect on small and large changes to the land-scape. The shifting seasons bring about changes in light-storms, winds, tides, the sun and moon-all leave their mark and gradually I am learning the signs that indicate the Dharawal seasonal changes. Usually autumn swells bring driftwood. Sometimes in winter shoals of pebbles are exposed. Amongst them are weathered and tumbled bricks: relics from the old brickworks that used to be up the hill. Coal is always here. Slowly I am becoming familiar with what appears and when, and slowly over the years, enough materials are gathered to make work.

Recently huge weather events have seen the land and the ocean coalesce. The beach has become the landing place for debris swept downhill by torrential floods of rain, whilst concurrent massive tides have regurgitated vast quantities of seaweed and wood onto the shore. Amongst it all, there is the inescapable scourge of plastics.

As I walk, I gather, collecting plastics to clean the beach and gathering the occasional, irresistible piece of driftwood. The plastics are sorted, most are recycled, but some are washed and kept. The driftwood is dried. Both are used to make jewellery, sometimes together. Through this manner of engagement, I am constantly aware: looking, noticing, touching, smelling and listening. Gathered items become materials, either transformed in situ, or at the bench, combined with other elements into something with the potential for wearability. The materials speak back to the land. They are a document of time and place, revealing stories, and making connections with wearers and viewers.

Since 2015 I have been the workshop facilitator for the Indigenous Jewellery Project, a role in which I have needed to be agile, adaptive, open, sensitive, and responsive to the land in unique locations. There is always a great deal of preliminary preparation. With each workshop, I have become better at asking questions to best understand the requirements, facilities, and potential complexities of each place. Nevertheless, I am always learning, before during and after every workshop about the land, culture, language, seasons, materials, gathering, preparing, making. Each workshop has required intensive and quickfire materials research that is specific to place, learning from the artists and also testing and playing with materials after hours to see how we might innovate a little together. This might be to better understand local materials, such as how seeds behave between picking, stringing, drying and wearing; how to gather and prepare shells. Or how to identify and use a box full of timber offcuts to create jewellery. I have come to know that, bound intrinsically to creating jewellery that engages with the land, deeper knowledges are also required. For example, developing an understanding of how materials behave over time, be they natural or unnatural, and that these understandings and ways of knowing are, in many instances, locally unique.

This knowledge feeds back into my own work and understanding of the land. For me, jewellery that engages with the land is a collaboration, a sort of co-making with its human and non-human occupants (and, ultimately a collaboration with the wearer). By making in this way, everything encountered, even the land itself is viewed through the lens of its jewelleryness.

Wearing jewellery that is from, or speaks of the land, helps to reveal its stories, through noticing and learning the lines and traces of the lands that hold us.

For more about how The Land inspires jewellery practice, revisit these stories from Garland's Jewellery trellis:

Trellis ✿ Jewellery on land

About Melinda Young

Melinda Young lives and works on Dharawal Country. Her research-based practice spans jewellery and intimately scaled textiles reflecting experiences of being in and understanding place, underpinned by complexities of place-based making in contemporary Australia. She is interested in materiality - the traces of human and non-human interactions left behind on the body and the land. Exhibiting extensively in Australia and internationally since 1997, her work is held in public collections and included in numerous publications. Melinda is an Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture UNSW and undertaking a PhD in Human Geography and Creative Arts, at the University of Wollongong. For more, see Melinda Young ✿ Writing and making by the sea

G35 | jewellery | Melinda Young | trellis | with nature

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Melinda Young introduces the Trellis via her own journey of terrestrial and marine jewellery.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/creative-conservation/

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Chrissy Wickes and Sonia Frimmel

Chrissy Wickes and Sonia Frimmel share their journey gathering artists across NZ Aotearoa whose creativity is focused on care and appreciation of land.

(A message to the reader.)

A few years ago Chrissy Wickes was working in one of New Zealand's most remote landscapes. In an old hut, she noticed a beautiful pencil sketch of a takahē drawn on a wall. Underneath were the names of people who had worked to protect this once-thought extinct bird, dating back to the 1970s. It struck Chrissy that people working in conservation had important stories to tell, and one of the most powerful modes of storytelling, was visual. That was the spark that eventually led to the publication of Creative Conservation in 2021, a book that brings together artists and craftspeople whose works were inspired by nature and their own experiences working in conservation endeavours. It took a number of years, a little help from Sonia Frimmel (another artist, and one-time Department of Conservation staff member), and lots of support from friends and colleagues but the end result is a wonderful acknowledgment of the artists' creativity and commitment to conservation. It showcases 35 artists who celebrate our distinctive landscape and flora and fauna through a wide range of mediums including painting, sculpture, ceramics, carving, poetry, and tapestry.

Chrissy explains, "What lifts this from just a book about artists that are passionate about nature, is that it's about artists that have worked, and still do work, in conservation. So, there is an incredible depth of meaning and knowledge behind each artwork."

Here are three of the craftspersons featured in the book:

Ginney Deavoll

From an early age, I knew that I would be an artist. I also knew that I felt at home in the outdoors and that the thought of adventure made me shiver with excitement and anticipation.

At first, I mostly painted landscape from life but soon started to illustrate the stories of where I was living. The design element in these paintings caused my artwork to take on a different look. This style was developing well but took a huge leap forward after an incredible trip with my partner Tyrell: a sea kayak journey up the coast of the Coromandel, out to Great Barrier Island, then up the East Coast of Northland to Houhora. The duration of the journey was five weeks, and by the end I was brimming with inspiration.

My intention was to share the places we'd seen, places that take your breath away and to capture the moments that were funny, scary or beautiful. I wanted to pass on the feeling of elation from seeing a whale cruise by under my kayak and the pleasure of watching every sunrise and sunset and admiring the Milky Way each night. Most of all I wanted to share how incredible our little country is.

I had found my Turangawaewae and also what I wanted to do with my painting. I had discovered how to combine my passion for painting with my journeys in the outdoors and make them my world. Since then I've been on many journeys into the wild and extreme places of New Zealand and the need to share those experiences through my artwork is stronger than ever.

Gavin Smith

I have worked for the Department of Conservation for three years as an iwi engagement community ranger. This involves building and maintaining relationships between the department and our treaty partners. I believe if we can support tangata whenua to practice traditional kaitiaki practices over their ancestral lands the future of conservation in Aotearoa New Zealand will be an exciting adventure.

I am driven to conserve the indigenous and ancestral culture of Aotearoa and this has allowed me to make sense of my love of native manu (birds) and rakau (trees). My personal journey of connection began as a child in my mother's native garden where I learnt to identify common native trees and birds and practice the pronunciation of their names. The interest that was ignited in my mother's garden has guided my life's work.

Carving is a traditional art form of my ancestors and it shapes how I engage in the world. Since beginning my job with the department, manu have begun to influence my personal carving style. In 2018 I held a solo exhibition that utilised manu to interpret my journey of reconnection.

The purpose of this exhibition was to raise conversations about conservation creating common ground between the department and Tauranga Moana whanau who both have interests in conserving manu.

Chrissy Wickes

I love the process of painting, particularly when painting the land. It lets me explore and study the physical layout of the land in a more creative way than if I was just enjoying the view. At the moment the landscapes I am exploring are those around Wanaka where I live. I am also enjoying painting off canvas ... large murals in public spaces and on retro water and snow skis.

It is this connection with the land, and my deep love for it that brought me to conservation. This then led me to work in some of New Zealand's most isolated and pristine places, from the far north on Raoul Island to the wild south on Adams Island. I became slightly obsessed with islands, hopping from one island to the next for over ten years. They are places of wonder. Having thousands of seabirds falling out of the sky at dusk to find their burrows; the cacophony of sounds in the bush at night on these warm seabird islands; the southern islands with their wind, mist and huge albatross. Each island has left an everlasting impression on me. It is the New Zealand beyond the mainland that I hope will be returned to the mainland.

In my art, I try to express with gratitude and awe of this place.
You can purchase Creative Conservation here.
About Chrissy Wickes and Sonia Frimmel

Chrissy Wickes has worked in conservation for more than 30 years and her work has seen her travel extensively around New Zealand, including many outlying, isolated parts of the country. She is also an artist and her oil paintings capture the magnificence of the New Zealand landscape. She has worked with other artists who are also interested in conservation in curating group exhibitions and shares their passion for furthering conservation efforts through their artwork. Visit chrissywickesart.wordpress.com/

Sonia Frimmel is a Waikato-based artist and author of guidebooks to her region's walking and cycle tracks. She produces creative display panels with conservation themes - incorporating art to tell these stories that are important to her. She is inspired by her 30 years working alongside people committed to conservation and the time she has spent tramping in some of New Zealand's most beautiful places. Visit https://www.whatsthestory.co.nz/

carving | G35 | New Zealand | painting | printmaking

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Chrissy Wickes and Sonia Frimmel share their journey gathering artists across NZ Aotearoa whose creativity is focused on care and appreciation of land.

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The world at our feet: Shoemakers of Dehradun

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The world at our feet: Shoemakers of Dehradun

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https://garlandmag.com/article/the-shoemakers-of-dehradun/

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LOkesh Ghai

LOkesh Ghai honours the shoemakers of his neighbour and argues for the continuing value.

It is a lesser-known fact that the history of shoemakers and their advent in the Dehradun Valley is linked to the defence. There are three locations in Dehradun where the defence has been based: Clement town, Ghari Cantt and IMA the Indian Military Training Institute, next to my house. In the early mornings, I wake up to the sound of the band, the young men in training marching past in their shoes.

I interviewed over thirty shoemakers in Dehradun and Mussoorie. Most told me that their ancestors migrated from Central India in 1857. Their history was not written. They heard from their ancestors of being bullied by the upper caste which left them no choice but to flee as a community via Punjab.

I spent a few hours at each of the shoemaker's studio shops in various neighbourhoods of Dehradun. One such street has two makers, Hemant and Jagdish Prasad. The two brothers were part of Clement-town's ecosystem. The younger had established his studio-shop two decades ago followed by his older brother a decade later. The younger on the main road just before turning to the Buddha temple and the older in the parallel back lane.

Both brothers had learned the craft from their father who made shoes for the defence. The defence sector brings a sizable consumer base. It was their specific footwear needs that led the shoemakers to settle in this location. In an interview that lasted three hours, veteran shoemaker Deepchand Gangoli said that part of the soldiers in training first-morning jobs was checking the spike of their shoes. If even one nail is out of place, their foot would get injured. Laces had to be tied in a certain manner. Almost half an hour of his (soldiers in training) time each day was dedicated to the upkeep, cleaning and polishing in stages.

He continued,

"When I was just eight years old, we would set off in the morning with a shoe polish box. Now, people don't have time to even lace their shoes. Polishing is a ritual of the old world. My grandfather used to hand make shoes for the British Army and post-independence for the Indian Army".

Deepchand ji presented me with a photo dated 1936 of his late grandfathers with shoes handmade by him for the British soldiers. He recalls vivid memories, "post-independence years when I was a kid, I was surprised to find elderly English Ladies (visiting India) touching the feet of a senior shoemaker from our community. I later gathered that he was like an extended family member".

In those days the shoemakers would visit their client's family home. Like a family doctor, there was a family shoemaker. The foot measurements were taken at the family house. In the next visit, a trial was given, and adjustments were made before another visit for delivery. The shoemakers would get a good tip for the making. Sometimes Italian shoe design was brought by the Britishers as a reference. The Indian artist could make an even better version with adjustments. Those times were prosperous for the shoemakers.

In a recent article, I read that "distance" and "quantity" is what makes luxury. Shoes were not merely a luxury. In the mountains, having strong shoes was almost a metaphor for how long you could go ahead in life.

Almost all shoemakers I spoke to during my course of field research spoke of two names: the late Bhagwan Das and Lu Hong Kong. All shoemakers in Dispenser Road, Dehradun mentioned Bhagwan's name as the person whom they learned from. Now two of his sons carry the legacy. Manoj ji a retired Indian army officer told me that in his youth he had to save a sizable part of his salary, some 450 rupees for a pair of handmade shoes. They were such good shoes. "Earlier the drapers were sent to England to learn tailoring, I got my clothes stitched from a descendant of one such family. Unfortunately, they are no more, and I have stopped acquiring new clothes. Nothing fits the same as what the tailors and shoemakers made back then". Now people buy ready-made branded shoes and clothes that last a short time and then they just throw them away.

What about Lu Hong Kong? Why does everyone remember him? I was told that he was a master. The retired officer had told me that he could not afford what Lu Hong Kong made. His craftsmanship was different from others. And being of his kind in Dehradun, he attracted attention. Another local added that his stitching was distinct and thus the shoe looked different. I spoke to shopkeepers opposite Ashtley Hall where his studio shop was once located. The family left a few years ago, perhaps to Mumbai from Dehradun.

Chinese migrants to India decades ago were known as dentists or shoemakers in several towns. They are two very different professions with common distinct skills: both involve "stitching". As a kid, I went to a Chinese dentist. She was very good with implants and I recall the needle and threads at the clinic.

According to a senior local, Lu Hong Kong was one of the early migrants whose family most likely had fled to India when mainland China started encroaching on Formosa (present-day Taiwan), just like their Indian counterparts, who had fled from central India to find a secure life in making shoes.

For years the community of shoemakers handmade bespoke boots, sandals, chappals and shoes for the army, school children and common citizens. Their identity is fast reducing to menial menders. Post GST (Goods and Services Tax) and COVID, the majority of shoemakers have lost most of their business. Out of some four hundred families in the community, many are unemployed, with one of the best shoemakers by the footpath now mending umbrellas and chappals to make ends meet.

While the next generation is assertive about not entering this trade, could there be a better future for the existing ones? The state of Uttarakhand heavily relies on tourism for earning. Could the heritage shoemakers have a role? While the shoemakers in Landour in Mussoorie are somewhat popular amongst tourists, this could be one of the paths forward for those in Dehradun. It is time that the capital city of Dehradun included small-scale craftspeople in their smart city agenda. As citizens or tourists, we take pride in and support what is locally made. So next time you are in Dehradun or Mussoorie, acquire a handmade Roman chappal, a classic Oxford or a Summer sandal.
Find out more about the shoemakers of Dehradun Valley at an exhibition from 19 July 2024 at Café Laata, Dehradun and public engagement events scheduled for mid-July 2024. You are welcome to reach out to the author with your own shoemaker's narrative or to contribute to the shoemaker's map of Dehradun, Mussoorie and Vikas Nagar being currently built by the author along with his friends. This article is an outcome of an ongoing research grant awarded to the author by IFA . You can follow the project at @shoesheritage.
LOkesh Ghai ✿ A craft song-catcher

G35 | India | LOkesh Ghai | shoes

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The world at our feet: Shoemakers of Dehradun

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LOkesh Ghai honours the shoemakers of his neighbour and argues for the continuing value.

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Hyrcanian forests, Shirgah, Mazandaran Province, Iran

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https://garlandmag.com/article/phoenix/

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Bahareh Zaman

Bahareh Zaman is gifted the branch of a yew tree as the perfect jewel to honour an Iranian forest.

When I was working on the Damavand collection based on Moslem's travels, I wondered what the final design of the collection would look like.

The Damavand collection includes seven necklaces. These necklaces are made from the photos that Moslem Irannezhad took during his trips to Damavand. Moslem is my cycle tourist friend who loves Mount Damavand.

For me, the glory and beauty of Damavand is overwhelming. Every time I see this mountain, I feel that I am a piece of nature, and Damavand is like a pure and intimate friendship that being by its side makes me walk in life with more self-confidence and enthusiasm.

Walking through the Hyrkani Natural Museum feels quite special to me.

The Hyrcanian forests are a zone of lush lowland and montane forests covering about 55,000 square kilometres near the shores of the Caspian Sea in Iran and Azerbaijan. The forest is named after the ancient region of Hyrcania. The World Wide Fund for Nature refers to the ecoregion as the Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests. Since 5 July 2019, the Hyrcanian Forests have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In September 2023, the heritage site expanded to incorporate portions of the forest located in Azerbaijan. This forest is 25 to 50 million years old (Paleogene period) and is considered one of the most valuable forests in the world and is known as a natural museum.

Whenever I get the chance to see Damavand in this forest, my soul feels refreshed. I sit here watching the precious heritage of my homeland for a few hours, and then putting my backpack on I head toward the Caspian Sea again. I wish I could come up with a beautiful story for glorious Damavand.

After a while, something green and incredible catches my attention. It is a two-thousand-year-old yew tree.

Now I have the story of finding a two-thousand-year-old yew tree, as well as a man who cherishes the mountains and Damavand. During his trip to the Hyrcanian forests, Moslem accidentally found a two-thousand-year-old yew tree and brought me a piece of its branch that had fallen to the ground. The yew tree is one of the endangered species of the Hyrkani forest.

The body of the tree was wet with the same cloud that stretched from the Caspian Sea to the foot of Alborz, and it breathed the same breeze that travelled around Damavand. Watching the tree, I noticed some pieces of its rotten branches scattered around it. Thinking of Bahareh, I took them.

A sixty-year-old branch that was rotting on the ground is now in my hands.

In the last decade, the illegal occupation of the Hyrcanian fabric, the construction of Roman-style villas, rapid construction and development, unsustainable tourism development, the illegal entry of off-road riding tours, the excessive grazing of several animals, soil and fire destroy the Hyrcanian forests. Its plant and animal diversity has become. Iran's Environmental Protection Organization and the United Nations Development Program have started a five-year joint program to preserve the biodiversity of these forests.

Hoping for a better fate, I brought the branches.

As if, the legendary Phoenix was destined to rise from the white foothills of Damavand and the red heart of yew.So that Damavand will live eternally in its heart.

The Phoenix necklace, which was the last work of the Damavand collection, currently belongs to Moslem Irannezhad. The cut shape of the branch is similar to the map of Iran, which is also similar to Moslem's surname. Phoenix was a magical story from nature and for nature.

Bahareh Zaman ✿ Shouldering the world

About Bahareh Zaman

I was born in Tehran. I am 33 years old and I travel to different cities with my backpack. I socialize with people and artists from each region and listen to their stories. In my journey, people and their stories or any scenery I see can inspire me to make a wooden work. Follow @ baharehzamangallery

G35 | Iran | jewellery | tree

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Bahareh Zaman is gifted the branch of a yew tree as the perfect jewel to honour an Iranian forest.

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The Purun Project: Fashion offers hope for peatland communities

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The Purun Project: Fashion offers hope for peatland communities

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https://garlandmag.com/article/the-purun-project/

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The Purun Project: Fashion offers hope for peatland communities

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Myra Suraryo profiles the Purun Goods collection designed by Merdi Sihombing with the communities of South Sumatra & South Kalimantan.

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Bamboo looms and floating fibers: How Nepali weavers manage their environment

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Bamboo looms and floating fibers: How Nepali weavers manage their environment

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https://garlandmag.com/article/bamboo-nepal_sardar/

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Viola Bordon

Viola Bordon writes about the Sardar community in Nepal which is applying bamboo weaving skills to solve the problem of an invasive species.

In Koshi Tappu, Nepal, the rhythm of life is intertwined with nature. When rain falls, meetings are assumed to be rescheduled, a pleasant discovery for my American sensibilities. Open courtyards blur the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces reflecting the ideological lack of distinction between nature and humanity.

Here, resides the Sardar community who survive through traditions of farming and weaving. For the primarily female practitioners, weaving is not only a supplemental income but also a unifying force. The weaving collective fosters communal bonds, and creates opportunities for creativity and empowerment.

The Sardars practice their craft on common bamboo floor looms, weaving mats to cover their earthen floors and vessels for ceremonies like weddings. Most of what they make stays in the community, although some objects are sold as far as Kathmandu. Through their craftsmanship, they forge a deep connection with the land, utilizing locally sourced cattail with intergenerational skills.

Koshi Tappu is an ecological hotspot, and its wetlands are a habitat for all kinds of creatures. Recently, ecological shifts brought about by the invasive water hyacinth have been threatening it. The floating plant invaded the wildlife reserve, overgrowing and displacing the native cattail. It blocks sunlight and shifts microbiomes, which in turn kill fish and aquatic birds.

Hyacinth has grown along with cattail since its introduction to South Asia during the British Empire. It is an unintended consequence of colonialism in a country that was never colonized. The Sardars have adapted, incorporating water hyacinth into their craft production. Its soft fibers and stem length make it a great material alternative.

As with any adaptation, there are trade-offs. While the use of water hyacinth is a new evolution of traditional craft, it also signals a departure from centuries-old practices. The balance between innovation and tradition is delicate and points to a complex interplay between culture and nature.

The Koshi Tappu weavers face additional challenges in the form of conservation and its bureaucratic hurdles. The establishment of the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve in the 1970s on traditional foraging grounds shifted the Sardar community to the Buffer Zone around the reserve. With the further elevation of the site to an internationally protected wetland (Ramsar site) in the 1980s, the Sardar's access was increasingly restricted. With ecological protections in place, the community's access to their ancestral lands is now at the discretion of the Community Forrest.

As a governing entity established to foster community access while promoting preservation, Nepal's Community Forests is a case study in community-led restoration. The problem is that it adds multiple layers of permissions for an impoverished group to access what has been theirs historically. This fact is compounded when the lack of education, and the illiteracy of this community are taken into account. The recent innovations in weaving are being looked at positively and are prompting discussions within the Wildlife Reserve about community-led harvesting initiatives

I am a material researcher and excited by what the Sardars are doing. Their deep-rooted connection with nature means that the pivot to using what the environment presented was natural. Invasive species used as weaving materials not only present ecological benefits but also challenge the notion of overconsumption in manufacturing cycles.

Using water hyacinth is eco-friendly in its harvesting, processing, manufacturing, and breakdown: something very few contemporary products can claim. This material is a direction toward a sustainable existence, and it is not alone. Across Nepal, innovative material solutions are emerging. Organizations like the Nepal Knotcraft Center are working with indigenous women's collectives to explore alternative materials and techniques. From pine to nettles, corn to cardamom, artisans are finding new ways to weave from discarded ecological excess.

As they navigate the intricate web of contemporary realities and age-old traditions, the weavers of Koshi Tappu are an example of resilience and innovation. Their craft is a tangible embodiment of a harmonious coexistence of nature with intangible human culture. In many ways, it endures despite the efforts of preservation.

I am inspired by these women.

About Viola Bordon

Viola Bordon is a Philadelphia-based artist and educator who works with sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and fibers. Bordon's work with fibers relies on pre-industrial craft histories of weaving and quilting, while her work with landscape suggests questions about sourcing, over-consumption, and human impact on the environment. These interests have led her to her current endeavor, a Fulbright investigating art and craft's adaptation to the environment through ecological shifts and disasters. She has an MFA in Studio Art and a certification in Emerging Design and Research from the University of Pennsylvania. Viola Bordon is a material researcher with a keen interest in lo-TEK and preindustrial crafts. She is conducting a 10-month Fulbright research grant to Nepal. She has an MFA in studio art with a certification in Emerging Design and Research from the University of Pennsylvania.
All the photographs were taken by Viola Bordon.

bamboo | G35 | hyacinth | Nepal

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Bamboo looms and floating fibers: How Nepali weavers manage their environment

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Viola Bordon writes about the Sardar community in Nepal which is applying bamboo weaving skills to solve the problem of an invasive species.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/chitral-shu/

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Adil Iqbal

Adil Iqbal finds a remote valley in Pakistan where women gather on a winter evening to keep their culture alive through weaving.

In the remote valleys of Chitral, nestled in the rugged mountains of north-west Pakistan, the craft of making Chitrali shu-a handwoven woollen fabric-is a story of both heritage and resilience. The intricate process of creating shu is not just a craft; it's a deep-seated cultural identity, a livelihood, and a form of resistance against the encroaching tides of modernity.

I am a Scottish Pakistani artist currently in the process of developing an enterprise that safeguards and rejuvenates the art of Chitrali shu. I am engaged in a two-year EMKP project aimed at documenting the endangered practices of making Chitrali shu. I explore how the handwoven shu is not just a fabric but a vital cultural emblem that has sustained families and communities through centuries.

Cultural historian Dr. Inayatullah Faizi highlights the economic significance of shu within his community, where it was not only a utilitarian product but also a form of artistic expression. The delicate fingers of artisans crafted the " Zhil" quilt and " Paitawa", a wrapping for the legs. As the sun rose on this ancient craft, the landscape evolved, introducing the "Raghz" shirt, "Shoka" overcoat, and the iconic " Pakol" Chitrali cap. Each piece, sculpted from the shu fabric, encapsulates the essence of the land. In olden times, every Chitrali home was a tapestry of self-sufficiency. The "Takht," large white blankets gifted to brides, symbolised new beginnings. The eighteenth-century "Chogha," a woollen coat embroidered with silk threads, was a ceremonial beacon. By the twentieth century, it modernised, showcasing the harmony of ancient craft and contemporary artistry.

"The phrase, "Har Chamuto tan hunar" which means every finger of her hand has its own skill, highlights the respect for craftsmanship. It wasn't just about creating garments; it was about weaving stories, preserving culture, and ensuring survival" Dr. Inayatullah Faizi

The process of making shu is communal and intricate, beginning with the rearing of sheep, which were considered a vital asset to a family's livelihood. Each household managed a few sheep, which were often tended by women and young daughters, symbolising their crucial role in the pastoral economy. Shearing was predominantly a male task, performed by skilled individuals known as the community's shearers. Women, on the other hand, were custodians of the wool post-shearing, engaging in cleaning, teasing, and carding the wool. These stages were critical in preparing the wool for spinning, a skill that required finesse and was also predominantly managed by women. The dyeing process, another critical stage, utilised natural dyes derived from walnut husks, a resource abundantly available in the region. The spun yarn would then be used to create the warp and weft for the shu looms.

Shireen Khan, a venerable weaver with over thirty years of experience, sits among the wooden frames of his loom, his hands expertly manoeuvring the warp and weft. Shireen learned this craft from his uncle, a master weaver himself who was part of a lineage that treated weaving, not just as a profession, but also as a cultural inheritance. This craft, passed down through generations, became a part of Shireen's identity and his way of connecting to his heritage. His village, Royee, in Garam Chashma has long been a cradle for this traditional craft, where the making of shu is more than just creating fabric; every knot has a purpose and a soul, echoing the teachings of his forefathers.

Souz boyan ae shu berang zindagio shutrar,

thasurko ghon gherduman falako makuwa awa.

A woollen fabric is being woven of the thread of colourless life. I am forced to revolve like a "Thasuruk" inside " Maku" of the mortal world. Beghash, a poet from Chitral. ("Thasuruk" is a bobbin, a 8-10 long hollow piece of wood, which holds rolls of single-ply thread in the boat shuttle for weaving. "Maku" is an oval, boat-shaped wooden shuttle for weaving).

"These looms were made by the prophets"

Shireen recalls his early days as a weaver, his hands inexperienced and often leading to a fabric so thick it resembled a blanket rather than the finely woven shu intended. It was a learning curve where each thread taught him the balance between force and finesse. "When you force the weaving, it becomes thick; when done normally, it becomes thin," Shireen explains, illustrating the delicate art of tension in weaving. Despite the advances in technology, the essence of making shu remains tethered to traditional methods. "These looms were made by the prophets," Shireen says, emphasising the sacredness of his tools. There is a blessing in the manual labour involved in shu making-a blessing that is absent in more commercial or mechanised forms of production. This belief underscores an ethos prevalent in many artisan communities, where the value of handmade goods extends beyond their material utility to embody deeper cultural and spiritual significance.

Kushtan, Shireen Khan's wife, explains that crafting perfect white shu begins with meticulously teasing wool to ensure no other coloured fibres are mixed in it. It remains pure white, akin to fresh milk. This involves forming and spinning the wool into yarn, a skill-intensive process that includes creating a double-sided warp on a spinning wheel. The yarn is then woven into fabric on a loom, with the final product submerged in warm water to enhance its quality.

Additionally, shu production is integral to social rituals, such as the winter evening wool-teasing gatherings known as geeve, where 9-10 girls share stories and maintain traditions. These sessions not only foster community engagement but also spur competition, enhancing the quality of shu. The involvement of skilled women and adherence to traditional superstitions underscore the cultural significance of precise shu-making techniques.

Despite their passion, these artisans face significant challenges. The global market demands innovation and efficiency, often at the cost of traditional methods. The younger generation's disinterest in labour-intensive crafts poses a threat to the survival of shu making. Yet, these makers remain hopeful. "By teaching our new generation, we keep our culture alive," Shireen Khan asserts, who is eager to pass on his knowledge.

The connection between land, ecology, and climate change is profoundly integral to the production of chitrali shu. This craft relies on the health of local ecosystems, as the quality of the wool is directly affected by the environmental conditions in which the sheep graze. Changes in climate, such as irregular rainfall patterns and rising temperatures, can lead to degraded pasturelands, thus impacting the quality and availability of the raw materials needed for shu.

Pakistan is ranked as the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change according to the Global Climate Risk Index. It experiences rising temperatures and frequent floods, endangering the livelihoods dependent on pastoral farming. This situation emphasises the need for sustainable practices in land management among these communities, which not only help preserve their traditional craft but also contribute to broader environmental conservation efforts. By maintaining a harmonious relationship with the land, the artisans ensure the continuation of their craft and the well-being of their environment, creating a sustainable model that resonates with global ecological goals.

As Chitral navigates the crossroads of tradition and modernity, the story of shu is a poignant reminder of the region's heritage. This isn't just about making fabric; it's about weaving the past with the present and carrying forward a legacy that defines the community's identity and sustains its economic foundations. The resilience of these artisans symbolises a bridge between generations, a beacon of hope that traditional crafts will not merely endure but flourish.

Through their stories, the looms of Chitral continue to weave, quieter now, yet as vibrant as ever, crafting not just fabric but the very fabric of life in the highlands of Pakistan. The threads of tradition, spun from the past, stretch into the future, promising continuity and renewal in the face of changing times.

About Adil Iqbal

Adil Iqbal is a Scottish-Pakistani cultural practitioner with over 15 years of experience working alongside craft communities in Chitral. He has produced numerous films and led several interdisciplinary creative projects. He leads Twilling Tweeds, an initiative dedicated to preserving cultural heritage and leveraging craft and design for well-being. Currently, he is spearheading a two-year project aimed at documenting the endangered practices of making Chitrali shu, a handwoven woollen cloth. This project is funded by EMKP and hosted by the National Museum of Scotland. Visit www.adiliqbal.co and follow @ twilling_tweeds

G35 | Pakistan | textiles | weaving

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Adil Iqbal finds a remote valley in Pakistan where women gather on a winter evening to keep their culture alive through weaving.

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Alpaca shawls: A love woven from life on land

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Alpaca shawls: A love woven from life on land

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https://garlandmag.com/article/alpaca-shawls/

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Alpaca shawls: A love woven from life on land

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Douglas Brodie asks Louiseann King about falling in love with alpacas and the processes involved in weaving shawls from their wool.

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Makassar City, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

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Bamboo bridges: Firman Djamil's Seni Lingkungan

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Bamboo bridges: Firman Djamil's Seni Lingkungan

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https://garlandmag.com/article/firman-djamil/

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Caitlin Hughes

Caitlin Hughes reflects on regenerative bamboo sculptures by a Makassar-based artist that bridge far-flung worlds.

It was early on a Saturday morning, November 2023, when I met with artist Firman Djamil at his former studio, Somba Opu Studio and Gallery, on the grounds of benteng (Fort) Somba Opu in the outer suburbs of the city of Makassar, South Sulawesi. There are many layers to this place. In the sixteenth century, it was the centre of commerce and royalty for the Gowa Sultanate. It was the strongest of the Gowa forts until Somba Opu became the epicentre of the Makassar War in 1669; when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) seized control of, and subsequently destroyed, the fortress.

For the next 330-odd years, Somba Opu was abandoned. The bricks of the fort wall were dismantled and repurposed to build Dutch colonial houses; the original site was rediscovered in the 1980s. In the 1990s, a "Miniature Sulawesi" park was built here by the South Sulawesi provincial government. It is an outdoor showcase of South Sulawesi's many ethnic, traditional houses around a dirt and asphalt track, including stately and stilted Bugis houses, Makassar houses, Luwu and Selayar homes, and Tana Toraja's famed boat-shaped tongkonan.

These variations in architectural style at Miniature Sulawesi reveal the many-layered cultural and tribal influences in the South Sulawesi region. It is a multiplicity that shapes everyday life: a diversity and a homeliness. In the colonial era, Makassar had a famed, and now somewhat faded, status as an international port city. Today, visions for tempo doeloe (the olden days) are a subject of nostalgia and pride in the community. Over time, Miniature Sulawesi has also fallen into varying states of disrepair. Unfortunately, this includes Pak Firman's studio at the fringes of the park, where he made art for 23 years until 2013, and contributed regularly to the art ecosystem of Somba Opu.

As Firman and I sat outside on the studio's front verandah that morning, campfire-cooking smoke wafted from a nearby house, interspersed with the sounds of chainsaws and calls to prayer. The smells and sights around Somba Opu reminded me of the bushland in coastal North-East Tasmania, where my grandmother once lived in her weatherboard shack: a transporting-shuttling-teleporting from one island to another and back again.

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I am not the only one who has experienced this shifting and displacing quality on a visit to studio Somba Opu. Poet Afrizal Malna had, in 2006, observed that entering the house was "like entering the epic Bugis-Makassar stories"; reflecting that:

There is a small schizophrenic shock when feet begin to ascend the steps [to Firman's studio] ... I know I am not entering the discourse of contemporary Indonesian art. But something different, something suggestive, something for which there is not yet a place [in contemporary art discussion] ... for those cast aside by Indonesian modernisation.

Makassar is a long way from the urbanised or gentrified hotspots for Indonesian contemporary art, largely found on the island of Java; in the cities of Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta. Born in the regency of Bone, South Sulawesi, in 1964, and today living in Makassar, Firman has carved out his own artistic pathway that sometimes rebels against, and often transcends, the conventional aesthetics and art-market-friendly attributes expected for contemporary Indonesian art. But Firman's art is indeed contemporary. It is a pulse detected in his paintings and performances, and especially in his primary artistic medium: environmental art. He draws deep from his Bugis heritage as inspiration for such works. Yet this is not to create a push-pull tension between "tradition" on the one hand and "contemporaneity" on the other. Rather, these influences and experiences come together as a cohesive, whole togetherness.

Having produced most of his large environmental commissions outside of Indonesia, Firman's immersive, sculptural artworks become metaphorical bridges or portals of translation. It is seni lingkungan, "environmental art", in Bahasa Indonesia, but more than that. It is Firman's own re- genre-ing of the concept; not fixed or tied to European or American meanings, but freed to explore a multilayered alternative. In that middle-space emerges new encounters with art, environments, and the world.

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Firman began his career by training as an art teacher at IKIP Ujung Pandang. Ujung Pandang or "Pandanus Point" was Makassar city's previous name for a time between 1967 and 1999. For ten years, from 1990 to 2000, he travelled back and forth between Somba Opu and Pondingao, an isolated village on the border of Tana Toraja and Mamasa regencies, and the border between West and South Sulawesi, where he taught art at a local school. Active since the 1980s, Firman is regarded as a prominent figure in the contemporary art and performance community in Makassar, making public installations, public performances, and happening artworks. A series of intra-national exhibitions and experimental art convergences in Indonesia in 1999 and the early 2000s would prompt a shift in his art practice towards environmental art. What followed was a turn to the international.

In 2000, Firman was invited to attend the 2nd Yokohama International Open Air Art Exhibition in Yokohama, Japan. There he presented Root Ritual (2000); an artwork made of bamboo, grass, and the roots of grass, rice and other plants. Combing and twining these roots together in a snaking, spiral formation, Firman then staked cuttings of yellow bamboo into the centre. Above that he rested a bird's nest.

Bamboo is an important part of Bugis mythology, especially yellow bamboo. In Bugis storytelling, To-Manurung refers to the mythology of the first person on earth who descended from the sky, whichis given form through many aspects of Bugis cosmology. By coincidence, in Japan, there is also the mythology of The Story of the Bamboo Cutter, a ninth-century Japanese fairytale detailing the life of Kaguya-hime; a princess from the Moon who was found as a baby inside a glowing stalk of bamboo.

"In my work ... there is a meeting of paradoxes. From those paradoxes, I want to create something that ensures survival."

Root Ritual references these living bamboo spirits in the use of yellow bamboo, sourced from a nearby bamboo plantation that was being prepared for urban development. In this context, the artwork had another interpretation; drawn from the Bugis epic poem and cycle, La Galigo, the Bugis creation story inscribed in Bugis-Makassar Lontara' scripture, central to the Bugis world(s) and its cosmologies. This second meaning is what Firman described as a "paradox": bamboo is cut down to make perahu (boats), destroying the natural habitat for birds. "It's about scientific knowledge ... but [also] the consequences of that science," Firman commented: "In my work ... there is a meeting of paradoxes. From those paradoxes, I want to create something that ensures survival". The large whitish spiral track spun on the dark soil around the bird's nest; with, as Firman described, "the hope that these roots become a spirit for sustainable survival".

At the Yokohama exhibition's Symposium, Firman met Indonesian-Australian artist, Dadang Christanto. Firman was an invited panellist for the exhibition's symposium, and Dadang acted as his translator. Environmental art, as its own sculptural, spatial, and formal medium for art practice, is sometimes a sidelined genre in mainstream histories of Indonesian contemporary art, and in certain aspects of university art education. However, in the early 2000s, a core group of artists were branching out into this territory, including Firman and Dadang. The booming platforms of 2000s-era East Asian nature art exhibitions enabled new opportunities and new forms of art making. This type of "Indonesian" environmental art (if indeed it could be described by such national terms) was tethered to a largely international setting. In this context, seni lingkungan is therefore neither import nor export. Rather, it is best understood as a specific artistic translation of personal encounters and experiences in a trans-place, transnational movement.

Emblematic of this idea, Firman's artistic journey since Yokohama in 2000 has followed a largely international trajectory: including multiple visits to South Korea and Japan; the staging of a participatory performance artwork in Australia (in Byron Bay, 2005); and repeated exhibitions in Turkiye and Taiwan. In the 2010s, his flight path continued further afield: to the Netherlands, Romania, Canada and Hungary. Each new location shapes and expands the critical horizons for his environmental art practice. In turn, the resulting artworks create a dialogue with space, and with spirit.

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From early explorations, what has emerged through Firman's art practice is a sustained interest in the medium of bamboo. The sculptures made with bamboo have a certain strength in their size and scale: a sturdiness but also an intricacy. It is a play with form and a play with message, exploring materiality and meaning. The story of To-Manurung is woven into many of these artworks. But at their essence, Firman's artworks are about the experience of sharing and making environments-in-common, of finding things in common in disparate, far-flung places. Bamboo is an important place-based and cultural object in many locations around the world, especially across the Asia-Pacific region. It is a translocational medium and a thing-in-common through which to weave new experiences together.

At the Geumgang Nature Biennale in South Korea, 2006, Firman presented Bamboo Tunnel (2006). At seven metres long, and with a front circular opening of approximately 1.3 metres in diameter, the 'tunnel' was fashioned as a giant bubu; a fish trap form found in various Indonesian (including Maluku and Papua), Malay, Singaporean, Filipino and Bruneian cultures, used for catching fish in the river.

Compared to traditional bubu, which are much smaller in their build, Bamboo Tunnel is deliberately oversized. Not only this, but the artwork has been placed in an inland area. In this position, in the forests of South Korea, the context and experience shift. Here, far from the waters of Southeast Asian island fishing, the structure becomes a spiralling vortex sculpture. It is a passageway, too narrow for human visitors, but a filter for sunlight, greenery, and clean forest air. It is a breathing space, a seeing space, through which to reflect and refract a view of the surrounding landscape.

Firman commented that the artwork represented the imbalances of everyday, contemporary life and the environment. On the one hand, there are the fast-paced realities of modern material, and consumerist lifestyles. And on the other, there is the degrading of the natural world and the loss of ancient knowledge. But this opens out to a secondary view: as a reminder of the need to find balance and, in turn, a visualisation of balance itself. The spokes and supporting bamboo structure plunge in deep towards a distant end and, from the other direction, the ribbed, circular weavings ripple outwards, forwards, in an undulating motion. There is a formal symmetry here; a slowness. A response to the surroundings that breathes in, followed by a long, deep exhale.

Two years later, Firman participated at Guandu International Nature Art Festival in Taiwan, making Zero Chimney (2008). Zero Chimney is a cylindrical, vertical smokestack around eight metres high. It is a sculpture that starts thicker and becomes thinner, creating the shape of a long bottle or bell that rises tall above the surrounding, grassy landscape. The central frame of the sculpture was made with long, vertical stakes of bamboo arranged in a circular formation. Bamboo is wrapped and woven to create a series of repeated circular bands around the sculpture; floating higher and taller. The circular base of the chimney was lined with grass, on which corn seeds were planted.

Zero Chimney was intended as a critique of alternative energy production, specifically of ethanol. Ethanol as agrifuel is made from fermented maize and corn. Firman had observed that the ethanol manufacturing process for energy resulted in a loss of agricultural land and significant environmental damage. Fermentation processes, too, use up vast amounts of clean water. In place of this destruction, Firman chose to make a sculpture that generated a cleaner and more useful alternative: corn as food, as plant and sustenance, which is, in turn, regenerative.

In both Zero Chimney and Bamboo Tunnel, we can observe various environmental, translational and mythological paradoxes brought to life through bamboo sculpture. In their different ways, they are objects and sculptures that serve a function; primarily intended as sculptures that restore and better the landscape. Tunnels and spirals provide a different view of place and spirit, and corn plants clean the air. These sculptures move and grow with purpose, infused with social and environmental meaning. After the craft and work of sculpting the artwork, there comes a time when nature will take over; controlling the end form. The premise for Zero Chimney would be repeated in later works, including in the Netherlands ( Fuel Flue, 2009), and Canada ( O2 Chimney, 2011).

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In Taiwan in 2011, Firman continued making his growing, moving, living bamboo sculptures at the Cheng Long Wetlands, where he presented Cheng Long Spiral (2011). A bamboo structure starts at the side of the wetland's banks and plunges down to the water's surface. In this descending movement, the path of the bamboo swings and swirls around to the right. Grass and shrubs native to the wetlands are planted in the middle of the installation along with tomatoes, sea purslane, and canavalia rosea; nourished by volcanic ash from Indonesia. Over time, these plants climbed, pushed and grew further across the length of the spiral; becoming a resting place for birds, fish, and other local animals.

Cheng Long Spiral shares obvious visual similarities with a more famous artwork: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), located in Corinne, Utah, in the United States. The comparison with Spiral Jetty is clear, but at times, it is an overpowering and overstated one. Although Firman notes the surface-level similarities between his work and Smithson's in his artist's statement, Cheng Long Spiral diverges through a different context and meaning. It charts a course with reference to Bugis mythology and the To-Manurung again. Here, the To-Manurung man is invoked in the use of split bamboo, while the To-Manurung woman emerges from ocean foam, in this case, represented by the spiral movement and pathway. This form follows the counter-clockwise rotation of Bugis cosmology; where the To-Manurung man and woman meet and rule the world for human beings.

The spiral therefore has a spiritual significance in this artwork. Yet it also has an aesthetic form and a practical one. Like Firman's series of smokestack sculptures, the Cheng Long Spiral is also a regenerative sculpture that intends to feed the surrounding environment. Hanging off the bamboo structure are a series of fish nests, to bring sustenance to the wetlands ecosystem. Above it, seeds and grass are planted in the centre, spiralling and growing outwards. This is an artwork, then, that has sought to respond to the varied needs of Cheng Long's wetland environments. The land surrounding Cheng Long is subsiding, slowly being submerged by seawater and the effects of a changing climate. In this situation, bamboo is a strong material to withstand salt water. Firman uses this floating, strong bamboo structure as a place of rest and respite for the local wildlife, birds and marine life; decorated with grass, flowers, and tomato plants.

In this context, Cheng Long Spiral is not a direct appropriation of Spiral Jetty, as it may appear at first. It functions instead as a physical pathway both of spirit and for the local ecosystem. It integrates the spiritual as part of this embodied ecological sculpture, and in doing so, extends the reach of a Bugis environmental cosmos.

In 2018, Firman again participated in the Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project. For this exhibition, curated by Jane Ingram Allen, the theme was the number nine, to mark nine years of the Cheng Long Wetlands art project. Firman presented 9 Waves; a series of nine bamboo, wave structures that rise up tall like the sails of Bugis pinisi and padewakkang ship vessels. The bamboo crests pierce the air and keep rolling on, rippling.

On 9 Waves, Firman commented that "waves for Bugis people symbolise strength, perseverance, and challenges in navigating the ocean, as well as navigating life in various lands to share materials, traditions, experiences and spirits". The Bugis have always been famed sailors and seafarers, travelling as far afield as Madagascar or Thailand, and, indeed, to Yolngu Country in Australia's Top End. The histories of trepang trade between Makassar and the nearby Indonesian islands, China, and the Yolngu people are well known in Australian history. But in contemporary (and especially Australian) contexts, its history is still principally interpreted as a two-place exchange between Indonesia and pre-colonial (then colonial) Australia. By contrast, the seafaring foundations to Bugis' identity and experience necessitate a further, longer, multiplied view of place; beyond singular sites, and certainly beyond frameworks of the national. Firman's artwork here and across his oeuvre returns to an understanding and experience of place that is, instead, founded in multiplicity: just like the cultural makeup and historical layers to South Sulawesi life itself." It is a view where each place is a node or star in a larger constellation.

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Bamboo carries culture and spiritual meaning in South Sulawesi, as in Indonesia, as in the broader Asia-Pacific region where most of Firman's environmental artworks have circulated. It is a translational device and an experience in common. Through the flexibility and architectural nature of his bamboo sculptures, place becomes a passage through which to encounter environmental art and environmental issues in a different light, a philosophy intended as a regenerative experience. These are sculptures designed to leave no impact on the natural environment. Instead, they aim to better it. Here, then, the mediums and sculptures made by Firman may be considered a bridge or wave between one place and another; between one culture and another. Moving and travelling with the multilayered perspective of South Sulawesi plurality, Firman's artworks and environmental concerns are not anchored to one place, but instead ripple and flow to an expansive everywhere.

About Caitlin Hughes

Caitlin Hughes is a Melbourne-based researcher, writer, and PhD Candidate in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne, where her dissertation examines "post-global" internationalisms in Indonesian art after 1998. This research encompasses Eastern Indonesian art as part of an interdisciplinary focus, especially from Makassar. She is interested more widely in contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region; including ideas of interactivity, play, public art, urban/environmental aesthetics, and art historiography. Caitlin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art Theory, Asian Art History) and a Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship (Honours, First Class) from the Australian National University, Canberra, where she graduated in 2020.

bamboo | G35 | Indonesia | South Sulawesi

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Bamboo bridges: Firman Djamil's Seni Lingkungan

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Caitlin Hughes reflects on regenerative bamboo sculptures by a Macassan artist that bridge far-flung worlds.

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The piaçava revival: Afro-indigenous crafts save a local tree species

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The piaçava revival: Afro-indigenous crafts save a local tree species

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The piaçava revival: Afro-indigenous crafts save a local tree species

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Egnaldo Rocha da Silva finds that crafts play an important role in reviving the piaçave tree for descendants of Brazilian communities of escaped slaves.

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Amathole District Municipality, South Africa

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Between the quarry and paradise: Grafting rubbish onto nature

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Between the quarry and paradise: Grafting rubbish onto nature

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https://garlandmag.com/article/lauren-downton/

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Lauren Downton

Lauren Downton shares her journey from the dazzling nature of South Africa to the withered landscape of South Australia, from which has emerged hybrid porcelain forms.

I grew up on the dusty plains of a cattle farm in rural South Africa, surrounded by wide open landscapes with dramatic storm clouds and grasslands dotted with thorny acacia trees. Situated at the foot of the sprawling Winterberg mountains. It was an idyllic place for an inquisitive child to grow up, surrounded by nature. Encounters with wildlife were part of our everyday life. Hornbills, with yellow, banana-like beaks and dappled black and white plumage, were frequent visitors to our garden. Their arrival was always a spectacle, accompanied by the rhythmic chatter of hoopoe birds, crowned in spotted feathers and displaying brilliant shades of chestnut with intense black and white streaks.

A bit over an hour's drive away was Hogsback, named for its three hog-like mountain peaks that form part of the Amathole Mountain Range. Hogsback is situated within a larger escarpment rising 1800 metres above sea level. It is a ruggedly beautiful region with mountainous grasslands and wildflowers meeting dense forests of yellowwood and Cape chestnut trees. The Hogsback forest is filled with leafy gullies, sheer waterfalls and winding streams that trickle through the woods. During family hiking trips to the Hogsback forest, I was mesmerised by such giant trees, with fuzzy lichen-covered trunks towering above us, leading my eyes far up to the canopies above, aglow in delicate sunlight. Walking through the forest floor was a sensory delight. Earthy scents of damp soil, moss and pine intermingled among dewy ferns. And the surprise of puffball mushrooms with bursting clouds of spores would make my sister and I shriek with horror and glee.

I live in Australia now. My family immigrated here when I was eleven years old, and we eventually settled in Adelaide. To this day, I still remember the moment when our plane first touched down at the airport. It was a scorching day in January; 40 degrees Celsius with hot winds and brown dust blowing across the runway, while the tarmac visibly baked under the searing sun. My first impression of Australia's harsh, dry weather and seemingly withered gum trees was a far cry from the lush forests I had grown up with, but I have since grown to love this country's distinct landscapes and beauty.

Nowadays, I call Highbury home. It's a suburb nestled in the Adelaide foothills where urban life and nature intertwine. Perched on the side of a hill, our house is surrounded by native woodlands teeming with eucalyptus and acacia. There is a flurry of activity in our garden with kookaburras fighting over who gets the best gum branch, and lorikeets flickering hues of the rainbow while they feed on nectar from surrounding trees. Our house looks out across a valley with Black Hill and the greater Mount Lofty Ranges in the distance, the Torrens River winding its way below. This surrounding woodland is a haven for echidnas, koalas and kangaroos, which my husband and I often spot while walking our dogs through the nearby trails.

It is immensely satisfying to pour the velvety smooth liquid into the cavity of the mould, removing it later as a perfectly formed shape.

It doesn't come as a surprise that I am drawn to themes of the natural world in my art practice. Working mostly in porcelain, I make casts of animal and botanical elements that I later assemble into hybrid combinations. My main studio process is slip casting, which involves pouring liquid clay into a plaster mould and removing the cast from the mould once the clay has dried into a firm state. It is immensely satisfying to pour the velvety smooth liquid into the cavity of the mould, removing it later as a perfectly formed shape. I enjoy the process of slip casting because it can capture incredible detail and the most intricate textures from the original object. Slip casting allows me to reproduce these fine details, expressing and re-experiencing the awe of nature in each final piece I create. Once I have built up a vast collection of slip-cast pieces, I then begin the process of manipulating them. I do this by bending, distorting, cutting and carefully combining them together by hand, meticulously sculpting and splicing parts into a seamless hybrid form.

In the past, I would collect natural items that I found particularly interesting, such as a beautifully shaped branch or textured seedpod. But I have recently begun to expand my collection to include human-made objects. This happened somewhat intuitively and unexpectedly when I stumbled upon a disused quarry close to our home whilst out hiking. The quarry site is a strange and dystopian place, eerily isolated and comprised of extensive concrete ruins and leftover bits of bulky mechanical equipment. Now an expansive wasteland, it has become a dumping ground where all kinds of rubbish and debris are littered among its graffitied remnants in surrounding hills and natural environment.

I was drawn to the curious objects abandoned in this strange place. Envisioning what they might look like in porcelain form, I sensed they would be exquisitely intricate and fascinating. I became interested in the idea of things thrown away, broken or cast off. Rubbish usually attracts a repulsive reaction. It is dirty and non-functional. As a society, we don't want to see, smell or touch it. I was taken by the idea that by reproducing these discarded objects in porcelain I could instill new life and meaning into them.

I immediately started collecting and slip casting these thrown-away objects. Using the natural fusibility of clay, I began to graft them with organic forms. Grafting became a method that enabled me to propagate such diverse forms and bring them together, fusing them into unexpected hybrid combinations that began to blur the natural and artificial.

This experience transformed my art practice and resulted in my latest body of work titled Otherworld. Otherworld consists of a series of ceramic sculptures, grafted together using various casts of animal organs, branches, leaves, antlers, plastics, waste and human debris. The series comprises a growing amassment of diverse parts-animal, vegetal, and human-made-melding and intertwining into hybrid forms. Crumpled bottles and bulbous hearts transfuse into bits of rubbish, with branching tendrils and appendages. Interfusetranstwine, one of the sculptures in the series, features a delicately balanced heart, with grafted twigs and a plastic tube sprouting outwards from the wrinkled and bulging form. The title is a play on a fusion of words, creating a tangled portmanteau between "transfuse" and "intertwine". Other portmanteaus feature throughout the series, with titles such as Skeletendril, Ghostory, Flutterleaf and Vascustem. The material qualities of porcelain, bonelike and ghostly in its final ceramic state, render these object-beings in an eerily dreamlike disposition. Each piece seems at once recognisable and yet ambiguous, alluring yet discomforting.

These artistic explorations bring me back to my childhood roots, causing me to question how we understand and interrelate with nature in contemporary society. The ghostly porcelain sculptures from Otherworld invite viewers to reconsider perceptions of beauty and value in a world where industry and nature are becoming increasingly enmeshed.
Otherworld was recently featured in the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition, and presented with two awards at the opening event; The Fetzer Award for Excellence, valued at $7500, and the City Rural Insurance Development Award, valued at $5000.
Further reading

Bennett, J 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.

Powell, D 2004, 'Chimera Contemporary: The Enduring Art of the Composite Beast', Leonardo, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 332-340.

Toma, M 2010, What Even Is Slipcasting?, East Fork

About Lauren Downton

Lauren Downton is an emerging artist who works in contemporary ceramics and installation, based on Kaurna land, South Australia. She combines animal, botanical, and human-made forms into ghostly hybrid assemblages that examine humanity's relationship with the natural world. Downton was selected to exhibit in the 2022 Hatched: National Graduate Show at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Journal of Australian Ceramics and Art Edit Magazine, and she has received awards from the University of South Australia including The Australian Ceramics Association Award (2023), UniSA Art Honours Graduate Prize (2023), Vacation Research Scholarship (2022), and Harry P Gill Memorial Medal Award for outstanding work in ceramics (2021) among others. She has recently completed a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) at the University of South Australia. Visit www.laurendownton.com and follow @ laurendowntonartist.

Adelaide | Australia | ceramics | G35 | South Africa | South Australia | with nature

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Between the quarry and paradise: Grafting rubbish onto nature

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Lauren Downton shares her journey from the dazzling nature of South Africa to the withered landscape of South Australia, from which has emerged hybrid porcelain forms.

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Maxwell Fertik

Maxwell Fertik works with a globally invasive species to tell a story of local industrial devastation.

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(A message to the reader.)

1) There is no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem.

In America, invasive plants are often considered a hated presence. Gardeners shun them and plant nativists call for an all-out war on them. Make no mistake, they are pesky, persistent and without a doubt a problem. Nonetheless, I challenge you to adopt an alternate perspective. Consider the invasive plant as a post-industrial resource and symbol of abundance within the ruins of American industry. Also a visceral stand-in for colonialism, xenophobia and post-industrial abundance.

Long before the first industrial revolution, humans defied indigenous wisdom and developed an Earth that disregards the way nature moves, an Earth that treats humans as an exception to natural laws and performs for humans the act of submission. Throughout the past two years, I have seen the world through the eyes of Japanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) (虎杖), and deciphered the spread of this non-native species of the Northeast, as a direct product of rapid development and an obvious outcome of human disregard.

2) Every inch of the planet is impacted by industrial development and its chemical legacy has mutated the soil and water.

Specifically, I took an interest in the impact of Gorham Silver Manufacturing on Mashapaug Pond in Providence, Rhode Island as a proxy for the environmental impact of craft industries everywhere in the West. But it doesn't have to be knotweed and it doesn't have to be Gorham, these just happened to be my hyperlocal examples. As a response, my friends and I went out into one of the most abandoned relics of twentieth-century industry, an old train tunnel, and spent the day harvesting the knotweed as an endless resource. This was our first Knotweed Field Day.

We did this to promote a value system of abundant over extractive resources and to visualize a post-industrial reality. The vision was to work with my peers and community to thoughtfully and carefully remove this pesky perennial without succumbing to the violent language of invasive biology. In the process, we learned to work with this plant instead of against it and reframe its existence as a displaced species, never meant to grow in the toxic soils of the post-industrial Northeast. Nonetheless, the plant is here and thriving with no plans of leaving any time soon. So armistice, it is.

3) Native to Nagano Prefecture in Japan, knotweed is accustomed to volcanic soils and an ecosystem to keep it in check, namely Miscanthus, a vigorous giant herb, bamboo and Aphalara itadori, a psyllid (bug) that feeds on the stem.

Knotweed was brought to the West as an ornamental for British gardens by Philippe von Siebold in the mid-1800s. It gained popularity for its bamboo-like quality reminiscent of Japanese gardens. England was obsessed with anything "exotic" in this period. But you can probably guess the rest of the story from here. The plant is brought to the United States, either intentionally or not, after it escaped cultivation in Europe. In the 1950s, it was first spotted in New England, 20 years after the plant got the nickname "Hancock's Curse" for its ability to reduce property value by £100 (about $10,000 today).

4) Meanwhile, Providence, like many other New England cities in the early 1900s, is a booming industrial dynamo.

In 1890, the city housed five of the largest factories in the world and even boasted of having the first industrial mill in America (Slater Mill). However, due to various factors including a devastating hurricane in 1938, most of these industrial giants abandoned ship, leaving their behemoth buildings behind, either to crumble or remain standing as monuments to the past. Today, many of these sites remain standing while others have been demolished. Nonetheless, the soil reflects the immense contamination that lives on long beyond their exit. Gorham Silver was one such example of the group that many local artists and organizers have done lots of work around. But I also chose Gorham because the old site was covered in patches of knotweed. In many ways, this was a collaboration between the contaminated soil, the opportunistic plant and myself. And thus began the playbook++.
Aside) This ++ symbol that appears throughout is a representation of addition and abundance.
5) A playbook++, lays out possible strategies or "plays'' for making do with what exists around us amid collapse.

Japanese knotweed continues to grow in the most degraded landscapes. It is the central case study and key example of how abundance can be harnessed without exploitation or the assumption of infinite growth. The second to final step of this endeavor was to make knotweed objects at three different scales: a set of silverware, a small table and a raft.

The silverware, made from cast knotweed powder and electroformed with a thin layer of silver, is a direct response to Gorham Silver who dumped toxic solvents and polishing agents into Mashapaug Pond. Silver is not only a symbol of immense wealth but equally, environmental degradation and disrupted ecosystems. The table was a collaborative effort with Sam Aguirre, embodying similar values but proving the strength of knotweed pulp as modelling material.

And lastly, using the bundles of dead knotweed stalks harvested from the pond, the old train tunnel, and other post-industrial sites, I created a raft. The raft can act as a floating remediation island for native wetland species as a way of harnessing this abundant resource and pulling toxins out of the water. It can also act as a life raft in the age of rising sea-levels.

6) Lastly, addressing the xenophobic language around invasive species mentioned earlier, the amorphous element of this project was outreach.

One of my more insightful trips around New England was my trip up to the Maine Invasive Species Network (MISN) conference where they held a workshop on invasive language. I made sure to borrow this tactic and create a worksheet to help my peers reframe the violent and militaristic language used around non-native plants. I was also graciously brought into the BAC (Below and Above Collective) consisting of four artists/designers and one botanist. Together we create floating wetlands made of knotweed pontoons and native plants. We also continued the (one-year) tradition of knotweed field days and received a resounding response this spring as over 20 people joined us to harvest knotweed, fearlessly clipping and bundling for a common cause.

Today, I look at the spot my partner pointed out two years ago and despite the bi-annual bulldozing, a forest of green sprouts hastily appears right on schedule. If nothing else, this project showed me how to work with the abundant material around me and how to share that wisdom with those around me. Regardless of where I exist in the world, I know there will be some form of post-industrial growth to experiment with and carefully deconstruct with my hands. As I mentioned at the end, this resilient plant and this post-industrial city taught me so many stories beyond their thriving nodes. The disrupted landscape is a hostile place, brimming with sharp ruins and feral plants. But within that mess, amid the decay and destruction, exists the seed of radical futures of resilience and belonging.

About Maxwell Fertik

Maxwell Fertik is an artist, designer and educator currently based in Providence, Rhode Island. In his spare time outside of teaching, he makes furniture, he is 1/6th of an artist collective called "Below and Above Collective" and works on top-secret invasive species recon with his partner Erika for their Somerson Sustainability and Innovation Fellowship.

G35 | recycling | USA | wood

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Maxwell Fertik works with a globally invasive species to tell a story of local industrial devastation.

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The Uuseum of the white desert: A showcase of Kutchi crafts

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The Uuseum of the white desert: A showcase of Kutchi crafts

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The Uuseum of the white desert: A showcase of Kutchi crafts

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Aashka Jadeja reveals the contents of the House of Amoda at Rann Utsav - Tent City, Dhordo village.

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Parched: An artist research residency about drought in regional Victoria

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Parched: An artist research residency about drought in regional Victoria

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Parched: An artist research residency about drought in regional Victoria

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Jacqueline Millner reveals what artist residencies can tell us about the lived culture of drought

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Cerdeira: An artist village of stone and wood

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Cerdeira: An artist village of stone and wood

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Cerdeira: An artist village of stone and wood

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Tatiana Simões introduces Karine Locatelli, whose work flourished in this idyllic Portuguese village.

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Mount Hotham Summit, Great Alpine Road, Hotham Heights VIC

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Mount Hotham Summit, Great Alpine Road, Hotham Heights VIC

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Mount Hotham Summit, Great Alpine Road, Hotham Heights VIC

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Holly Grace

Holly Grace wonders through the Australian bush that inspires her enchanting glass works.

As I walk along a well-worn track carved by heavy machinery with 4WD tread marks, I know where it leads and how far and long my journey will be. I am safe and secure in a place that is foreign to me but one that I am hoping to get to know.

As the journey continues I see that my track has many small interceptions, lightly marked animal trails formed by swamp wallabies, wombats and eastern grey kangaroos. Nature's pathways lead into a vast open landscape, both empty and full. Empty of life's everyday distractions but full of space to breathe and the sublime wonders of our unique light-filled landscape.

With trepidation and joy, I step off the track and into the unknown, with a lighter step I ascend a trail crafted by nature on a journey of discovery both ancient and new.

My artwork begins in nature, a traverse into the remote regions of the Australian outback. This time I am alone within the landscape is an invaluable experience, sometimes challenging but immensely inspirational as I learn more about the natural world and about myself.

My experiences are documented initially with the camera but further explored with glass as my canvas, becoming both a lens and a personal record of our unique environment.

This is an intimate record created from a recent four-week Craft ACT 2023 artist residency at the National Portrait Gallery and Gudgenby ready-cut Cottage in the Namadgi National Park. It is combined with recent explorations of the fire regeneration at Northern Kosciuszko National Park and remote sections of the Victorian Highlands affected by the 2020 black summer of fires.

Through research of the past and the present, I seek to create a cultural narrative that weaves together humanity and nature, history and natural history. It is both a portrait of a place and a self-portrait, a journey of discovery and walking light in an increasingly fragile environment

All my artworks begin with a walk in nature and I will often describe this as the best part of my job. Most of these walks take place in the Australian Alps both in Victoria and NSW and more recently in the Namadgi National Park where I was fortunate to participate in a two-week residency at Gudgenby Ready Cut Cottage, June 2023. During this time in the landscape, I will document initially with the camera collecting a catalogue of future digital images that I will later transfer onto blown glass forms using a photosensitive sandblast resist, technology I have adapted to large-scale 3D glass forms. My background is in the traditional craft of glass blowing a medium I have worked with for 25 years. As a glassmaker, my main field of expertise is predominantly with coldworking and adapting other traditional glass methods such as the firing of gold lustres, glass paints, mirroring, and grinding and polishing of glass surfaces to achieve the certain desired effects and finishes that have become unique to all of my artworks.

Vessels - landscapes

These blown glass vessels had their genesis in my time in Scandinavia, where at the beginning of my career I travelled frequently as part of my education as a glassmaker and as an artist. These trips have been instrumental in my understanding of glass as a material. They instilled an appreciation for Scandinavian design and helped formulate my aesthetic as an artist. It was in both Denmark and Sweden that I began to look and observe the landscape and I was drawn to the many seasonal changes in colours of the landscape.

In 2023, I spent time rediscovering the mountains in both Victoria and New South Wales. I walked through fire-damaged areas in North Kosciuszko National Park, particularly around Mount Selwyn, Mount Tantangara, Sawyers Hill, along the four-mile track and around the Round Mountain trail. The landscape is still recovering from the 2019/2020 black summer of fires and its strange walking along trails that in the past were shaded by tree foliage and are now fully exposed. Nature is struggling to regrow and the damage is a stark reminder of the ferocity of those fires. Even though there is still much damage, many trees have vivid green regrowth and there was an amazing amount of wildflowers due to the open and exposed new terrain.

Nightfall - Gudgenby Valley I - III & Night fliers - Bogong Moths

These are based on my recent residency in the Namadgi National where I was fortunate to experience the many transformations of light throughout the day. These three vessels reference the fall of night and the recent return of the bogong moth to Gudgenby Valley. The bogong moth is a temperate species of night-flying moth, and will biannually perform long-distance seasonal migrations towards and from the Australian Alps. Unfortunately, due to climate change, deforestation, and pesticides caused their numbers to severely drop from hundreds of thousands to the hundreds. This past summer, they made a recent comeback to Gudgenby Valley in the Namadgi National Park, a rare reversal and something to rejoice. These vessels have a companion wall installation of three small wall-mounted bogong moths titled "Night fliers - bogong moths".

Bushfire sunset - Mount Selwyn - Round Mountain Trail, Mount Tantangara

In early 2023 I spent time around the northern sections of the Kosciuszko National Park, particularly around Mount Selwyn, Mount Tantangara and in the Jagungal Wilderness down along Round Mountain trail. Due to COVID, this was my first visit to these locations since the 2020 black summer of fires. I was astounded and greatly saddened to see how much damage still remained. These fires were so hot that the normal regrowth hasn't happened and it makes me wonder if it will ever be as it was and what further changes in the environment will result from this intense fire event. I remembered living in bayside Melbourne and the series of ominous sunsets we had at the time when large sections of Victoria and NSW was on fire.

Dusk - Dargo High Plains

After lockdowns and fire damage to roads, I finally got to revisit places in the mountains that I hadn't been able to visit for some time. One of my favourite roads to traverse is Dargo High Plains Road, it was here that I discovered sections of the Victorian Alps that had been damaged by the fires of 2020. Though the damage is severe there is also much regeneration of the landscape and it was beautiful in the soft blue light of dusk.

Pretty Valley

Pretty Valley is located not far from Falls Creek and a starting point for many of my walks in the Victorian Alps. These two vessels both feature small scarlet robins, I will often see in the same area. I always know it's going to be a good walk when I see one of these in my travels.

I wandered lonely as a cloud I - III, Sawyers Hill & Alpine Hill

Weather in the mountains can change quickly and often in the early morning, particularly in late Autumn and early Spring I will become enclosed in low cloud cover. These artworks are about those experiences and the sense of loneliness or solitude I feel at those moments. The title "I wandered lonely as a cloud" is from a William Wordsworth poem and the vessels feature an Australian Raven, who on one particular walk on South Rams Head followed me for most of my descent down the mountain. This same walk is featured in another artwork, "A raven's lament".

A raven's lament

"A raven's lament" Is based on the loneliness and solitude I feel when walking under the low cloud cover that can quickly descend into the mountains. Shrouded in clouds the old snow gums will stand as silent witness to my traverse the only sound I can hear is the raven's call, a lament to the passing of summer and the beginning of winter. The objects in this artwork are all based on remnants found in Spargo's hut, the inkwell and raven's feather represent history both mine and the huts are etched onto the surface of the interior billycan, in a font created from my father's handwriting, who has inspired much of my love and respect for the landscape.

Remnants Series

Sometimes when walking I will come across small mountain huts, one of my favourites is Spargo's Hut which is located on the opposite mountainside from Mount Hotham ski village. It is one of the very few huts that I have come across that hasn't been destroyed from bushfires and inside still has many remnants of the original owner Bill Spargo. All the objects in the artworks "A raven's lament", "Snow gum walk - Mount Hotham" and "Walking light, a self-portrait" are based on actual objects I discovered inside Spargo's Hut and I have tried to remake them as close as possible in glass to the original objects.

These objects represent part of the cultural history of the Australian Alps and introduce a human element to my landscapes. It is with this series of works I can explore narratives from the past and entwine them with the present and the future.

Snow Gum Walk - Mount Hotham

The walk to Spargo's Hut starts from Mount Hotham and one of my favourite sections is known as the golden point when you cross around the peak and start descending towards Spargo's hut. This artwork is about my last trip to Mount Hotham and walking through the snow gum trees and rediscovering Spargo's hut.

A Lost Song - the Australian Alps

This artwork features a flock of 20 birds, glass recreations of the regent honeyeater, swift parrot, superb parrot, brown tree-creepers, gang gangs, and scarlet robins. Four of these bird species are currently listed as critically endangered and the other two recently been listed as endangered. With both the regent honeyeater and the swift parrot the decline is so rapid that they are losing their songs. Due to the historically low numbers of adult males to learn from the juvenile birds are turning to other bird species as role models and mimicking their calls. In the process mating rituals and songs are being muddied and often lost entirely, resulting in a lack of future breeding and a compounding decline in numbers. It fills me with incredible sadness to know that these unique songs might be lost to us forever. My hope is that this recreation of the birds in flight and their visual melody in glass will help raise some awareness towards their sad fate and the need to support the national parks in their efforts to protect these species of birds and all the other wildlife in the parks.

The Hunter - Wedge-tailed eagle

While I was in the Namadgi I was fortunate to witness different species of birds flocking together to form foraging flocks. Protection against hunters such as wedge-tailed eagles which would often be lurking nearby or soaring high above waiting for an opportune moment to catch an unfortunate forager.

"Walking light, a self-portrait"

This artwork is both a memoir and a self-portrait. It's about my relationship with the landscape and exploring personal connections to a stolen landscape as a non-indigenous Australian. It was inspired by a recent two-week residency at the National Portrait Gallery where I had the opportunity to explore concepts of portraiture combined with an additional two weeks spent at Gudgenby Ready Cut Cottage in the Namadgi National Park, where I had the time to explore the landscape, all its animals and myself as part of this fragile environment.
The residency at Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage in Namadgi National Park is managed by Craft Design Canberra.
About Holly Grace

I am an Australian glass artist whose current art practice is based in Arnold St, Cheltenham, Victoria. I am represented by Sabbia Galleries, Sydney. Visit www.hollygrace.com and follow @ hollygraceartist

Canberra | G35 | glass | Holly Grace

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Walking light: A bush journey suspended in glass

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Holly Grace wonders through the Australian bush that inspires her enchanting glass works.

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Upside-down: The land is the limit to the sky

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Upside-down: The land is the limit to the sky

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Salome Katamadze

Salome Katamadze records her residency at the Domaine de Boisbuchet working with landscape to bridge sky and land.

I had been living in Milan for a year and a half when I applied for the artistic residency at the Domaine de Boisbuchet near Lessac, France. The reason for moving there was the start of my PhD at Politecnico di Milano at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies. Due to my background, passions and activities, which I have been carrying since I left my home country, I somehow managed to gather all the dots of my interests into one massive cloud of curiosities, connecting Landscape Architecture with conflictual borderlands, land-based practices and the Caucasus mountains.

Through my enthusiasm and intuition, I have been searching for ways of looking at the frictional borderline from the perspective of the landscape, its qualitative representation and alternative perception of ongoing conflicts and their spatial implications on the communities inhabiting the frontier line between Georgia and the Russian Federation. Sometimes, it might be deceptive to think, narrate, write and open up discussions in an office room on the University campus, while the topics you are relating to are intertwined relationships between people, land, nature, history and morphology of the places in the remote, infinitely high, and often unreachable mountain territories. When I saw the open call for doing a month-long research project in an isolated, completely contrasting geographical context from what I have been working on, I decided that this might have been the right occasion to experiment with specific methodological approaches to landscape mapping, perception and observation of it, advanced in my studies, however in the theoretical dimension of it.

I sincerely believe in understanding the landscape as a cultural and visual artefact, which can offer unlimited perspectives of dynamic processes that usually co-exist without leaving conspicuous traces. I always search for the alternative narrative of the landscape where the neglected or invisible phenomenons overpower the picturesque perception of it. That was also the starting point for the experience in the region of Charente, where I was heading, to create observation and representation tools for the places of ambiguities where entanglements and contradictory exchanges occur.

Even though I had a precise idea of the working themes, I could not predict the very elements of the landscape I would work with, the contradictions I would find on the long walks in the fields or the peculiarities that could tackle the idea of invisible, ephemeral sides of the place. I was open to the things to happen while hoping to be at the right place at the right time.

The residency premises were around an hour's drive from the nearest city where I managed to arrive. After crossing the southern countryside, I found myself completely isolated, however, in a place with a particular richness and generosity in the variety of inner and outside spaces to offer. It felt like being in a tiny collection of microcosms, where the territory's characteristics, the light, pigments of green, could transform within several minutes, and the unpredictable changeability of the weather, typical to the mountain areas, further enhanced the constant mutation of the surroundings.

It took me several days to get used to the feeling of detachment from certain daily life dynamics while another type of routine started to open up. It became difficult to distinguish which part was remote, the countryside where I was bumping into a group of fawns and hares on the usual afternoon walks or the anthropocentric reality that became a regularity.

The possibility of complete immersion into the landscape incentivises profound observations and understanding of the place. Therefore, I started to explore, walk, listen, and smell. Within the process of absorbing surroundings, I was also trying to grasp the scientific dimensions of the ecosystem. Thus, after long hours spent outside, I would flee into my minuscule room, with an enormous window directly framing Alvaro Size's pavilion and a small detail from the nineteenth-century Japanese house dissembled and assembled next to the miniature forest of bamboo, to draw, write, and search for what I had been looking at during the first part of my inquiry.

Soon, I noticed that wherever I went, there were two constancies: first, the sound of birds, as if the silence was a forever precluded aspect of the landscape, and second, the water. Even if I were distant from the lakes and river, I could hear the water underneath; the delicate scrolling sound, like the infinitesimal cascade, was permanent under my feet. I trampled the land, I stepped on the grass, and all I could hear was the water. This enormous energy, in continuous movement, was the land itself. Neither were the nights silent. When it would go dark, a completely different bird spice orchestra would start.

The darkness was absolute. The nocturnal landscape was as powerful and alive as the daily one, surprisingly still not eradicated by the invasive light pollution majorly typical to the urban areas. Hence, I started wondering where the limit to the sky was. Why do we mainly refer to the soil in our conception of the territory? Why does the understanding of the landscape stop at the horizontal line? The land is at the lower limit of the sky. Within several days of my exploration, I started to concentrate on envisioning and observing the land through the characteristics and phenomena of the sky.

After several dives into research, an invisible, however extremely attendant, entwined system of bird migration and movement routes floated up. From long-distance mobility, originating from the far north and heading to Africa, to the abundance of the sedentary presences, an utterly alternative perspective on the territory was generated. Even though their movements at first glance seem detached from the land, the multi-scalar displacement that regionally and internationally took place was strictly connected to the season, climate, and temperature change, which rendered the birds intrinsic actors and narrators of the local landscape. Through the project "Upside-Down", I started to reflect on the temporary evidence of migrations, flows, and mobile networks deeply characterised by the land. Because of the ability to navigate and the orientation of feathered creatures, the movement is never random but always composed of a performative act, where the landscape becomes the stage.

The skies were drawn by endless trajectories and patterns all year round. Migratory birds traversed along invisible paths through these lands. More sedentary birds intertwined their lives with these seasonal travellers. I looked at them as tiny presences that revealed themselves only to the most attentive and dedicated ones.

For me, the Upside-Down landscape, where the land became the limit to the sky, required different tools and artefacts of exploration. I started to draw maps of the movements, sketch the identified bird species, and create a photographic archive of the birds belonging to the place where I was just a passing stranger. I wanted to work outside, be part of the territory, adapt to its mutations, and follow the transformations while observing these infinite networks threading above my head.

As an architect, I started working on a prototype that I could use as an artefact for landscape exploration, connecting the land with the sky and englobing the ambiguities and complexities of the animal-human exchange relationship. I started to explore a lightweight octagonal steel structure, which would roll from one field to another in search of birds, their lives, their stops, and their passages. A structure that combined stairs for humans and a platform for birds, where the object's geometry facilitated displacement despite its weight, height and scale.

After two intense weeks of pioneer-level welding, where I felt like a medieval fairytale dragon spitting the fire capable of razing everything to the ground, the prototype named Daedalus was made, and the first question that came to my mind was caused by the vagueness towards its users, purposes and destinations. So, who was it for? For humans or non-humans, or both? The ephemerality of the structure permitted the artefact in specific scenarios to disappear and be entirely dominated by the surroundings. Daedalus became architecture in monition, only temporarily resting on the ground, with the same texture as the threads in which birds rest. It became a place to observe and be observed by humans and nonhumans alike.

About Salome Katamadze

Salome Katamadze is a Georgian-born landscape architect and researcher based in Milan, Italy. She has been researching landscape, borders, frictional territories, and their representation throughout a long-term investigation, starting with her MA thesis, followed by a fellowship at Fondazione Benetton, leading to her current PhD project at Politecnico di Milano. Since 2020, she has been a co-founder of an architecture office, NOIA practice, operating both in Italy and Georgia.

architecture | birds | France | G35 | Georgia | residency

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Upside-down: The land is the limit to the sky

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Salome Katamadze records her residency at the Domaine de Boisbuchet working with landscape to bridge sky and land.

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Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, Sydney NSW

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Inga Walton

Inga Walton reviews the exhibition Dreamhome in the context of a local and global housing crisis.

The exhibition Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter (3 December, 2022-27 August, 2023) was one of the inaugural projects to be installed in the North Building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. The project, known as Sydney Modern, is the most significant cultural development since the Sydney Opera House was opened in 1973.

Appointed to the role of Government Architect in 1890, Englishman Walter Liberty Vernon (1846-1914) was responsible for the design of the original Art Gallery with its dignified sandstone façade. Built in four stages from 1897 to 1909, Vernon's original design for the building was not pursued thereafter. Situated on the eastern side of The Domain adjoining the Royal Botanic Gardens, the gallery was plagued by a constant need for more exhibition and storage space: three major expansion projects were completed in 1968, 1988 and 2003. Sydney Modern has almost doubled the Gallery's exhibition space to 17,000 square metres, including utilising the moribund World War II-era Navy oil tanks in the basement.

The "strategic vision" for the project was announced in 2013, but its realisation has been both protracted and somewhat controversial. Following an international architecture competition, the Tokyo-based architectural firm SANAA was awarded the contract in 2015. The architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa founded SANAA in 1995, and were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2010. The original design for Sydney Modern was revised in 2017 to a more compact, stand-alone complex of eight galleries spread over four pavilions. It is also the first public gallery to achieve a six-star Green Star design rating for ecological considerations.

Construction on Sydney Modern began in November 2019 under the supervision of regional firm Architectus, with landscaping by American designer Kathryn Gustafson. The project cost AUD$344 million, $244 of that contributed by the NSW government, and includes what is now more than $109 million in private donations raised by the AGNSW. The opening was intended to coincide with the Gallery's 150th anniversary and the centenary of the Archibald Prize in 2021, but was impacted by bushfires, pandemic lockdowns and torrential rainfall to finally open in December, 2022.

Curated by Justin Paton, head of International Art, and Lisa Catt, curator of Contemporary International Art, Dreamhome can be viewed as a rather self-referencing affirmation. The exhibition featured the work of twenty-nine artists spread over nine spaces. Drawn primarily from the gallery's collection, six new commissions were also presented. In Paton's view, "these artworks are offering dreams of home but the dreams aren't airy or fanciful. Certainly, the real-estate sense of 'dream home' (a palace only money can buy) is not in evidence here". Other than standing in it? The artworks were presented in "a palace" money certainly did buy. As Paton goes on to note, "there is no better place to contemplate the meanings of home than a new and shared home for art." Of the roughly sixty-nine works on display just over 39% could be considered craft-oriented which seemed comparatively low given that textiles, furniture, ceramics, and glass objects are all closely associated with the domestic realm and home décor.
Although small in size, two earthenware structures "Model of a house " (both early 1st century) sat side-by-side and served to anchor the exhibition. More than any other works included, these ritual objects embody the difference between a house as a structure, and the complex social and psychological understanding of what constitutes a home. Produced by an unknown craftsman in Guangdong province during the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), they function as burial objects designed to accompany the deceased on their journey. The Chinese belief in an afterlife that continued the pleasures and activities of this world was a common one. These simple and unobtrusive models reflect the characteristics of the architecture and way of living in the southern region during that period, with gabled roofs, and the wooden construction of the building indicated by incised lines. The safety and contentment of a home, that includes a couple in one work, and the companionship of a domestic pet in the other, are conventional and everyday ideals that transcend time.
The commission "Te Ao Hau" (2022) by Māori artist Michael Parekōwhai ruminates on this concept. The two-storey sculpture, realised with the collaboration of furniture designer and craftsman Chris Nicholson, is based on the archetypal public housing in 1950s New Zealand (Aotearoa), with a weatherboard exterior. The state housing scheme, initiated in the 1930s by New Zealand's first Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage (1872-1940), was part of suite of wider policies leading up to the Social Security Act (1938). Parekōwhai was born in Porirua, north of Wellington, and lived there until he was six, an area that had the greatest concentration of state housing in the country by 1970.

Like Australia, New Zealand is enduring a significant housing crisis with some of the most expensive prices in the world, relative to income. The prevailing economic situation with inflation, escalating interest rates, and stagnant wage growth, coupled with the collapse of building firms and supply problems, has made the goal of home ownership unreachable for many. In his masterful Quarterly Essay (92) of November, 2023, "The Great Divide: Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix It", leading economist Alan Kohler, AM, made the sobering pronouncement that, "the use of housing to regulate the economy is essentially a policy of cruelty." Parekōwhai's work expresses nostalgia for a more socially egalitarian time with more homes available to rent and at accessible price-points that people could 'dream' of buying.

Parekōwhai invites the audience to indulge in some harmless crytoscopophilia (the urge to look in other people's windows), illuminating the interior with five chandeliers that resemble the starburst constellation designs by Hans Harald Rath (1904-68) for New York's Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. Parekōwhai references the Māori meeting house known as the wharenui, which is communal and welcoming, the focal point of the marae (sacred place). Chevron patterns on the rear window shutters resemble the woven tukutuku panels that accompany ancestral carvings displayed inside a wharenui. "Te Ao Hau" ('the world breathes') glimmers like an unoccupied display home, and with the doors firmly shut. It is representative of the current status quo, both inviting and exclusionary, where the 'haves' and the 'have nots' have rarely been further apart.

A proliferation of small houses, high-rise towers, tenements and ramshackle settlements made up the extraordinary and improvised cardboard metropolis "From this place" (2022) by Filipino artists Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan. The precarious canopy that greeted patrons at the entrance to the exhibition drew on the Filipino tradition of arko, coloured decorative arches erected temporarily at the entrances to towns to mark local festivals. At the time of the commission, the artists established a space within the AGNSW, "The Aquilizan Studio: Making it Home", where patrons were encouraged to participate in hand-making these structures to be added to the overall community of cardboard. The installation was constructed from the utilitarian material because it is both democratic and ubiquitous.

A familiar sight in the lives of many people from the Philippines, particularly for the millions of diaspora working overseas, is the balikbayan box. It is a cardboard container to fill with gifts and goods to send, or bring home; in Tagalog, "balik" means "return" and "bayan" means "home country" or "community". The artists were assisted by students from the Gallery's Pathways program and their five adult children who help run the Fruitjuice Factory Studio. The Aquilizans work between Brisbane and the studio collective based in Los Baños in the province of Laguna. They were in the Philippines when the pandemic border closures were enacted in Australia, separating them from their family for almost three years. For the artists, the idea of home and what that constitutes became more dispiriting and acute as the international border closure extended to 21 February, 2022, an unprecedented 704 days.

The Australian population, who had effectively been under "house-arrest" and subject to various state-based public health orders including lockdowns for much of that time, had differing views of their government-mandated 'home detention'. Feelings of vulnerability, frustration, despondency, isolation, and dejection escalated. This was particularly the case for those in greater Melbourne who endured the 'world's longest lockdown' of 263 non-consecutive days at a punitive Stage 4, including travel restrictions (5km from your address) and a nightly curfew with no medical basis. The stability and security represented by the home became a more contested and insular space the longer the lockdowns wore on. For many, being confined to their residence ostensibly for 23 hours daily exacerbated mental health and domestic violence concerns, and led to feelings of Kafkaesque oppression and surveillance.

In a contrast that was both bleak and ironic, the homeless population in Australia had the opportunity to be suitably accommodated in the thousands of vacant hotels and motels across empty cities. Their usual state of displacement was ameliorated during that time and represented a rare moment of respite where they had access to food deliveries, safety and amenities. Like the Aquilizans' installation, their housing was temporary and dependent on circumstance. The itinerant were ejected from their "covid-safe" lodgings when it suited government agencies and returned to the urban encampments that are increasingly common in many "developed" cities. Improvised hovels of cardboard for re-displaced occupants are a reality in countless suburbs as disengaged governments and over-stretched welfare agencies struggle to manage the need for crisis housing outside of pandemic mandates. Recently in Victoria the Melbourne Zero movement has posited the goal of ending homelessness and rough sleeping by 2030, but these are charity, religious, or private initiatives, no longer a policy agenda for government.

Compared to the utilitarian and humble cardboard of the Aquilizans, American artist Samara Golden's installation "Guts" (2022) is one of sleek high-rise layers and deceptive surface gloss. With this project, she appears to catalyse the various meanings and associations of the word in order to assess the social ills of the global 'body politic', including the viscera. Paton writes that Golden, "could be described as an architect of affect- a sculptor who creates real spaces that are also headspaces, psychosocial interiors." Spread over six levels in a mock-apartment, this disconcerting mirror world is multiplied and reflected countless times. The spaces are occupied by figures Golden calls "souls" and "transitional people", who lie there but are not resting, as though they are trapped in a mirrored purgatory. Conceptualised when the world was stalled due to the pandemic, "Guts" hints at the divisions and injustices that period laid bare, the subsequent housing crisis, and the threat of conflict, amplified within a loop of catastrophising and doom scrolling. Like being sealed within a recurring nightmare, this home offers no respite or domestic comforts, just an infinity of disturbance, claustrophobia and unease.

As a child raised in postwar London, Dame Phyllida Barlow (1944-2023) recalled playing in cityscapes shattered by Luftwaffe bombing raids. Upheaval, disaster and dislocation are suggested by the sculpture "Untitled: brokenupturnedhouse" (2013). Not so much a structure as a shattered cube with broken walls and cladding, two protruding black panels that might be floor slabs, and teetering on the misshapen remnants of what could be the roof cavity. This work was inspired by a radio interview Barlow heard where a man described returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (2005) and how he encountered what was left of his home as a wrecked and unrecognisable form.

Barlow's work is unnerving in that it is identifiable enough as "something" that the viewer would ordinarily scan and ignore, but now disrupts easy assessment. A house reduced to fragments of its former status due to a natural event or strategic assault is a threat to order and an affront to our idea of refuge and shelter. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, over one million people were displaced in the Gulf Coast region of America and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received widespread criticism for failing residents. Barlow's work acts as a reminder that not all housing can be easily replaced with a flat-pack or kit home when the site is imbued with deep trauma, exacerbated by bureaucratic incompetence.

American artist Simone Leigh is interested in the social histories of the African diaspora, particularly the perspective and experience of black women. "Sentinel" (2019) conflates the idea of the woman/mother in the home by presenting her as a guardian and symbol of protection- both a woman and a shelter. The figure's Afro hairstyle and neckpiece of spreading raffia link the sculpture to the culture of North Africa and explore the connections between the physical body and the world it inhabits. The corrugated iron structure references the prefabricated Nissen and Quonset huts used in wartime and subsequently repurposed as storehouses and ready-made dwellings. However modest the space, this inscrutable figure presides over it; responsible for resources and protecting whatever it contains. She is both a symbol of safety and an active participant in enforcing it.

The title "Avatar Towers" (2020-22) has a dual meaning since an 'avatar' in Hinduism refers to the worldly and material incarnation of a deity or soul when they descend to Earth (the word means 'descent' in Sanskrit). While it alludes partly to sacred architectural structures, it also suggests a mid-rise apartment block. Sri Lankan artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran was inspired by the bamboo scaffolding of Asian megacities, and the housing complexes around the Western Sydney suburb of Auburn, where he grew up. These 'towers' resemble shelves in a storeroom or scaffolding platforms where multiple hybrid beings wait expectantly to engage with the audience. The fixed smiles and slightly manic bearing of some of this cohort could be read as grimaces, or expressive of anxiety, uncertainty and a desire for connection.

Nithiyendran's works were produced during a period of pronounced social division and trauma in Australia. The pandemic period entrenched lowered public expectations, broken social contracts, state-based divisions, and created enmity about government mandates and police overreach. Communities had to form new alliances during the lockdowns in an attempt to cope with unprecedented circumstances where many vulnerable members of the community fell through the cracks. Tone-deaf government advertising campaigns like "Staying Apart Keeps Us Together" reinforced the inadequacy of these 'social support' measures. Nithiyendran proposed ideas of inclusion and togetherness within a makeshift society, where a sense of home is otherwise uncertain and tenuous.

For Romanian artist Anna-Bella Papp, who is based in Belgium, the point at issue is not a home, but land. Her family now has the right to reclaim 'family land' that smallholder farmers lost when it was collectivised by the Communist Party in 1947. Descendants can follow a lengthy and complex process to prove ownership of these plots and potentially have them returned. Papp's paternal grandparents farmed in the north-western corner of Romania, close to the border with Hungary, in the town of Chişineu-Criş. In the series of incised white ceramic plaques/plots, "Plans for an unused land" (2018), Papp considers what might be possible if you had such an asset to use as you saw fit. She depicts various community-minded options that don't involve building a "dream home", ranging from buildings (artist residency, retirement homes), to the agrarian (asparagus, corn, rhubarb, or strawberry fields, a walnut nursery) in keeping with the family's history, a sculpture park perhaps, a wind farm, or a freeway.

Of all the works in the exhibition "Boyongan (moving house)" (2019), is referred to by curator Paton as, "most explicitly a house of dreams". Indonesian artist Jumaadi combines painting and drawing on an expanse of Balinese cloth. This is made in the village of Kamasan in eastern Bali using a traditional method whereby cotton is prepared with rice paste, sun-dried, and carefully polished. Jumaadi is the son of a fisherman and grew up in a simple stilt house above water. On a steep hillside in the village of Imogiri, south of Yogyakarta, Jumaadi has established a studio compound where he restores antique Javanese homes. These wooden structures, damaged by time and humidity, are up-cycled and made available to the local community as a space for music and performance.

Jumaadi depicts a multi-storey floating dwelling; at once a houseboat, an escape craft, barge, or perhaps an ark or mobile archive. Within the boat is a symbolic narrative that depicts civil unrest and displacement, starting with the soldiers who quashed anti-colonial protests in 1926 in the Dutch East Indies. The figures queuing on the opposite side of the canvas represent around 1,200 Javanese who were subjugated for their dissent and exiled to the remote Boven Digul prison camp in Irian Jaya with their families. When Japanese forces invaded Indonesia in 1942 they overran the colony in less than three months. Some of these exiles were then evacuated to Cowra, NSW in 1942-43, and interned in the Prisoner of War camp with their Dutch overlords. When it was understood that the Javanese forced migrants were already political prisoners, they were released.

Incorporating elements of magic realism, Jumaadi deftly weaves this story of colonialism, culture, and Indonesian independence that reverberates in his own life travelling between Indonesia and Australia. At the bottom of the painting, long lines of workers hold the house aloft on the boat and hold the boat afloat in the ocean. This is reflected in prose Jumaadi has written that reads, in part:

We will carry him on a stretcher, this house, like a soldier shot in the leg. Past the river embankment, rocky path. We will also go through, the road in the village, entering small towns, through the market, until we arrive at the port. Where ships and boats await.And some are eternal.Those who landed and those who departed, those who were free and those who were lost, those who wept and those who prayed far and wide.Then, by boat, we cross to an island over-grown with mangroves. This house will be with us, like a wound, like a pair of legs, like longing, like the smell of the ground on the first rain, like the twilight in Surabaya.

Two works by South African artist Igshaan Adams reflect his childhood in the townships of the Cape Flats, many built in the 1960s, where the city's "coloured" population were moved under the apartheid regime. His three maternal aunts taught him to weave amidst the domestic upheaval when he was taken in by his grandparents due to his father's abusive behaviour. "Threshold" (2019) resembles the prayer mat gifted to him by a friend during a period when Adams was examining his own faith; an intricate and contemplative veil of strands embellished with a pattern of shells and beads.

"11B Larch Weg (i)" (2019) is the address of a property in Bonteheuwel not far from where Adams grew up; the home of a carer for his grandparents. Adams' work focuses on the tapyt, a cheap patterned vinyl that lined the floors of working-class homes in his neighbourhood. Removing these aged "vinyl skins" from houses, Adams was interested in the way that the flooring was worn, and the areas that received the most foot traffic in the house. When the "map" of the property was turned into a woven representation, those areas were highlighted. They form a record of where the resident spent her time in household duties, and as part of the wider community when she sat on her veranda. The household trajectory of one woman is also constrained by social, economic and racial factors within a society governed by segregation. This political and racial imperative imposes distinct conditions and impediments on the concept of 'home'.

The potential contents of the "dream home" seemed of less interest to curators Paton and Catt, perhaps because the potentially "loaded" nature of objects complicated the curatorial narrative. Certainly "Untitled" (2007) by Doris Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia, demonstrates the way that domestic objects can bear witness to more insidious societal problems. A fairly standard wooden wardrobe is filled with concrete to express the terror and paranoia of the families of people killed or "disappeared" in the country's decades-long civil conflicts and drug violence. Where the home and its contents should be a safe and familiar area, here the contents are stifled and blocked; no clothes laid out for coming days, clattering hangers, or small children playing in the space.

Salcedo, who has sought the testimonies of many victims and their families, conveys the fear of retribution, the suppression of normal behaviour, and the discreet desperation experienced by these traumatised individuals. The mundane aspects of life are on hiatus, as the missing person within the domestic sphere is neither publically marked nor mourned. They are beyond the reach of their families who live with the physical reminders of that loss. The person has been imprisoned or murdered by unseen forces, but the evidence of their life remains like a series of shuttered relics from a stealthy atrocity.

The final space in the exhibition was occupied by an exuberant installation by Native American artist Jeffrey Gibson, "The Stars Are Our Ancestors" (2022). He created a "family room" that resembles a house museum or historical recreation, but the period Gibson depicts is somewhat more interstitial; perhaps the recent past, or sometime in the future. Made in collaboration with designer Aimee Jeffries and Sydney craftsmen Oscar Prieckearts and Kazu Quill, "The Stars Are Our Ancestors (Kissing Chair)" (2022) is Gibson's interpretation of the nineteenth-century tête-à-tête chair, but with room for a 'third wheel' in the conversation. Sitting in proximity became highly fraught during the pandemic, acknowledged with the coloured glass panels built into the chairs. These allude to the millions of plastic barriers used to demarcate points of public interaction in stores and communal spaces where people resorted to shouting at each other to be heard through masks and thick panels; one of the more absurd and counter-productive aspects of pandemic ritual.

Gibson refers to wall pieces like "Speaking to the Trees Kissing the Ground" and "The Stars Are Our Ancestors" (both 2022) as "new whimsies", portable objects that can bring a familial energy to a new and uninhabited space such as Sydney Modern. As Paton remarks, "modern art museums hardly have a reputation for fostering colour and decoration. Behind their pristine white spaces lies an assumption that austerity equates to intelligence." Gibson provided the decoration to enliven the starkness of the gallery, inviting viewers into his futuristic parlour. "Seeing the stars as witnesses to the story of the planet and people, the universe becomes our shared space. It all becomes more intimate suddenly", he contends.

Since it opened in 2023, Sydney Modern has been awarded the Sir John Sulman Medal for Public Architecture (2023), and the Apollo Magazine Award for Museum Opening of the Year (2023). Although the Art Gallery of NSW has achieved its "dream home", this ostensibly "celebratory" exhibition had more troubling undertones revealing alienation, disenfranchisement, and trauma. The initial triumphalism that greeted the project has already been overtaken by long-standing budgetary problems for the institution. Maintaining the vast space and the grounds was always going to depend on significant revenue from exhibitions and events, consistent funding support from the NSW government for many decades, and continuing engagement with major sponsors and philanthropists. The final of nine commissions for Sydney Modern, "the fire is not yet lighted" by Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones remains unfinished. Conceived as a "living artwork" and intended for the public Art Garden connecting the Vernon building with Sydney Modern, it was also the most expensive project at a rumoured cost of $15 million. The commission has reportedly been the subject of several disputes about scope between Jones, other contractors, and the gallery's executive team.

By March, 2024 the Art Gallery of NSW had a $4 million funding shortfall and signalled that it was intending to cut jobs across nine gallery departments. The NSW government announced a "top-up" payment to avert a looming $16 million fiscal hole and indicated the gallery would be subject to an audit of its finances. If Sydney Modern represented the pinnacle of a customised space to house art held in trust for the public, perhaps it has also become emblematic of overreach, unrealistic expectations, and a poor business case. Non-ticketed collection exhibitions like Dreamhome, however worthy, don't inspire a surge of patrons to fill depleted coffers. It was not until the Louise Bourgeois exhibition opened in late November 2023 that Sydney Modern hosted a major international show. The artist's bronze sculpture "Untitled (No. 7)" (1993) was included in Dreamhome, and while Bourgeois' work is renowned it is not a "crowd pleaser".

Since May 2022 the Reserve Bank of Australia has imposed thirteen consecutive interest rate rises, fuelling mortgage stress and pummelling household budgets. In his essay, Kohler asserts, "the fact that one of the three least populated countries on Earth contains the world's second-most expensive housing is a national calamity, and a stunning failure of public policy". Dwindling opportunity is also making the path to home ownership far harder for many of those patrons whom the Art Gallery of NSW hopes to attract, resulting in an unfortunate corollary between audience and institution. Having achieved the "dream" of a second campus, the gallery's hierarchy seems unprepared for the obligation of greater fiscal discipline and a schedule of compelling programming needed to maintain it. This complacent attitude could be interpreted as a "too big to fail" default position. However, the failure to anticipate post-pandemic budgetary constraints suggests a lack of accountability at a time of considerable economic hardship throughout the country.

About the artists

Igshaan Adams' site-specific installation Lynloop (Toeing the Line) (2024) (until 15 February 2025) is at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, MA 02210

Jeffrey Gibson represents the United States of America at the 60th Biennale di Venezia with The Space in Which To Place Me (until 24 November 2024) Giardini della Biennale, Sestiere Castello, 30122, Venice: His first solo exhibition at a UK museum, no simple word for time (until 4 August, 2024) is at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norfolk Road, Norwich, UK, NR4-7TJ:

Jumaadi has a survey exhibition ayang-ayang (shadow-shadow) as part of the Tales of Land & Sea project (until 16 June 2024) at Bundanon Art Museum: 170 Riversdale Road, Illaroo, New South Wales, 2540

Simone Leigh's work is in the group show Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend An Inch (until 4 August 2024) at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, 20 North Main Street, Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America, RI 02903:

Curated by Frances Morris, the exhibition Phyllida Barlow.unscripted (until 5 January 2025) is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane, Bruton, UK, BA10-0NL:

Samara Golden will create a new installation (28 September 2024-12 January 2025) at the Nasher Sculpture Centre, 2001 Flora Street, Dallas, Texas, TX75201:

About Inga Walton

Inga Walton is an arts writer and consultant based in Melbourne, Australia who writes widely about fine arts, fashion and textiles, film, and popular culture. Her work has appeared in over thirty Australian and international publications; she has authored numerous catalogue entries and essays and contributed to several books.

exhibition | G35 | home | Inga Walton | Sydney

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Inga Walton reviews the exhibition Dreamhome in the context of a local and global housing crisis.

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The Kalange ✿ Local knowledge created from recycled denim and clay

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The Kalange ✿ Local knowledge created from recycled denim and clay

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Katesi Jacqueline Kalange

Katesi Jacqueline Kalange works with the communities of Nubuke in Ghana to create a home for the story of Badere, the spider who hoarded knowledge.

(A message to the reader.)

The Nubuke Foundation for Clay and Textiles is located in the East Legon, Accra, and Wa, Upper West region, Ghana. It was established in 2006 by Odile Tevie, Kofi Tutu Agyare, and Kofi Setordji. It includes a gallery for exhibiting contemporary African art, children's workshops, a self-directed artist residency, Woori festival of clay and textiles, school for the blind, weaving workshops.

As an example of the activity they foster, we invited a recent artist in residency from Uganda, Katesi Jacqueline Kalange, to share her experience.

✿ How did you come to take up the residency at Nubuke? What did you hope to achieve?

I embarked on this residency thanks to both a recommendation and generous financial backing from 32 Degrees East Ugandan Arts Trust in collaboration with the Nubuke Foundation. My goal was to foster artistic development and push myself beyond my artistic comfort zone by immersing myself in a new geographical context. I sought to cultivate fresh collaborations within the Ghanaian community, immerse myself in their way of life and culture, and explore how this experience would enrich my artistic perspective as well as impact on the community in Wa-Loho.

✿ Can you describe the experience of arriving there? What are your strong memories?

Nubuke Foundation is a haven where art and creativity flourish, blending tradition and culture-an ethos deeply resonant with my own artistic pursuits. Stepping into Nubuke foundation was like realizing a cherished dream. I owe immense gratitude to my parents Mr and Mrs Ntende and family, 32 Degrees East Ugandan Arts Trust and Nubuke Foundation for making this possible.

Among the many poignant moments of my residency, one stands out vividly: my collaboration with the Wa-Loho community surrounding the Nubuke Foundation, Center for Clay and Textiles. It marked my most expansive collaboration to date, and I remain profoundly grateful for the profound exchange of Indigenous knowledge and creativity it fostered.

During this collaboration, I had the privilege of engaging with a diverse array of individuals: the children of the community, who shared with me captivating tales of "Badere" (the spider) passed down through generations; students from the school of the blind and deaf who generously shared their phenomenal art of weaving furniture as well as the local artisans, including women, children, men, and their apprentices, who generously imparted the intricate weaving techniques of "smocks," which served as inspiration for our collective weaving endeavour; Bilal, the welder, along with his apprentices Jelilu and Jute, who contributed their skills and expertise; market women and men from the Central market, who shed light on the challenges surrounding the importation of second-hand clothes from the global North into their country Ghana, influencing our choice of materials; the school children of Loho RC primary schools in the Upper west region of Ghana, and the youth and children who enthusiastically joined me in applying clay and woven fabrics onto the armature.

...the aroma of Kundisawu's delectable meals permeated the air, mingling with the scent of clay as we layered it onto Badere.

I was struck by the remarkable willingness and generosity of the Wa-Loho community to exchange knowledge. Their openness to share their traditions and provide a platform for me to reciprocate the same energy enriched our collaboration. I can still feel the warmth in the words of the local artisans and the community as they introduced me to their weaving and clay techniques, alongside the remarkable school of the blind and deaf, who showcased their unique form of weaving. Witnessing the passion and joy in the children's eyes as they recounted the folklore of Badere, along with the invaluable lessons embedded within, was truly inspiring. Not forgetting the aroma of Kundisawu's delectable meals that permeated the air, mingling with the scent of clay as we layered it onto Badere. In these intricate moments, our collaboration blossomed, weaving together our paths in a tapestry of shared experiences and mutual understanding.

✿ How did the idea of using the Badere story come about? Did you already know it?

During the initial weekend of my residency, I had the opportunity to engage with children from the community who regularly participated in Nubuke Foundation's weekend program. Assuming the role of their facilitator, I led them through storytelling sessions inspired by Ugandan folklore, including tales like "Njabala" and "Nsangi." Encouragingly, I invited them to reciprocate by sharing some of their beloved Ghanaian folklore and their personal interpretations of these stories.

Most of the children eagerly recounted the tale of Badere and its significance. It was then that I realized its meaning: "No man is an island, we all need each other!" held a strong and familiar connection to that of many traditional folklores in Uganda.

This interaction led me to a poignant realization: the rich tradition of oral storytelling in Ghana, akin to that in Uganda, was gradually fading away, particularly within our modern, urbanized environments. Yet, many individuals within these spaces grappled with contemporary challenges, including the profound impacts of global climate change.

Reflecting on these narratives, I was struck by the inherent wisdom embedded within African indigenous traditions. It became evident to me that the solutions to many of our present-day challenges lie within our ancestral knowledge. I often refer to this concept as "Sankofa," a word derived from the Akan tribe of Ghana, which encourages looking back to our roots to move forward as well as inform our current actions and decisions.

✿ Where did you learn the building technique involving clay?

Hailing from Uganda, I am deeply rooted in the Busoga culture, where the use of sustainable materials such as clay, mud, straw, and cow dung, to construct vernacular architecture commonly and natively known as "Enhumba ye'itaka" (mud houses) holds significant cultural and environmental importance. This not only defines us but also reflects our selfless and respectful relationship with other beings within shared ecosystems. However, the rapid pace of urbanization has led to the decline of these eco-friendly building practices, even in rural areas, in favour of more modern and supposedly durable construction materials and methods. Unfortunately, most of these modern approaches contribute significantly to climate change through the emission of high amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Arriving at Nubuke Foundation in Ghana, particularly at the Center of Clay and Textiles, offered me my inaugural opportunity to practically explore clay as both a protective and decorative material added onto the woven denim, second hand jeans. This choice was ignited by the community I collaborated with, particularly through my interactions with the children and Mr. Bart, a staff member at Nubuke Foundation who provided valuable guidance on working effectively with clay.

✿ Where did the textiles come from?

These second-hand textiles were sourced from various channels. Initially, through the foundation, I initiated an open call to schools and communities nearby, encouraging them to gather their old clothes and exchange them for new ones at the foundation every Wednesday and Saturday. Additionally, textiles were procured from traders in the Central market of Wa-Loho. Furthermore, a significant portion of these textiles was purchased from traders in Kumasi market encompassed mostly poorly-conditioned second-hand clothes considered as financial losses, which were to be disposed of in landfills. I also directly purchased good-condition second-hand clothes from these traders, intending to exchange them for old ones within the community. Furthermore, the staff at Nubuke Foundation actively participated in this initiative by contributing some of their old clothes for collective recycling efforts.

✿ Where did the clay come from?

The clay was procured from residents of a neighbouring village called Charia, as suggested by Mr Bart, a staff member at Nubuke Foundation.

✿ What are some memories of building the Badere?

Reflecting on the collaborative process of building Badere at Nubuke foundation, with the community of Wa-Loho, I am profoundly moved by the collective effort that brought this project to fruition, as I've previously expressed. The journey of creating Badere echoed the sentiment of the African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child." This truth resonated deeply throughout every aspect of the project, leaving me speechless at times as I witnessed my metaphorical fourth child, Badere, uniting individuals from diverse backgrounds under one roof.

Together, we shared meals, exchanged stories, and supported each other through both joyous and challenging moments. It was a powerful experience to see people from different walks of life, including myself, come together and communicate in a shared yet distinct language, embodying the essence of unity and community.

While I could endlessly recount the invaluable experiences and lessons learnt from collaborating with the community, I am reminded of the profound Ubuntu philosophy: "I am because we are." This project would not have been possible without the collective contributions and support of everyone involved.

"I am because we are."

I extend my deepest gratitude once again to my parents Mr and Mrs Ntende and family, 32 Degrees East in collaboration with Nubuke Foundation, alongside their partners Prince Claus Fund and Programmeawa, as well as to the community of Wa-Loho. "Barika yaga yaga!" (a heartfelt Dagaaba expression of gratitude)

✿ Have you done anything like that before? What is coming up for you next?

Certainly, I've undertaken similar projects in the past, albeit utilizing different recycled materials. For instance, there's "Nature Invasion: Ndegeya," my inaugural public work conceived during my bachelor's degree at Kyambogo University in Uganda, executed between 2017 and 2018, and subsequently refurbished in 2023. Additionally, there's "Nature Invasion: Omulondo 1," showcased during the Kla Art Festival 2021 organized by 32 Degrees East in Uganda, and "Nature Invasion: Omulondo 2," briefly exhibited at Goethe Zentrum in Kampala.

Looking ahead, I'm eager to advance the research initiated during my residency at Nubuke Foundation, encapsulated by the theme of drawing inspiration from African indigenous wisdom, particularly vernacular building techniques. The aim is to integrate sustainable materials like clay, mud, cow dung, among others into contemporary building practices, thereby mitigating or eliminating the environmental harm associated with some conventional construction methods. This endeavour has already gained momentum, evidenced by my engagements with the Ugandan community regarding my findings. Furthermore, this research continues to evolve as part of my ongoing residency program at GAS Foundation in Lagos.

The story of Badere

There was a spider called Badere, that resided in a vibrant village teeming with life. He endeavoured to amass wisdom from every corner. He carried a pot to gather this wisdom, intending to hoard it for himself by placing it atop a tree, thereby becoming the wisest being. However, he faced a challenge: he couldn't ascend the tree while carrying the pot in his hands. A passing goat offered a simple solution: "Carry the pot on your back" Angered by the idea that he had monopolized wisdom yet he couldn't solve such a simple challenge by himself, Badere threw the pot, shattering it! Wisdom scattered, dispersing back into the village and the world, affirming the truth that no individual possesses all knowledge. This tale underscores the interdependence of beings and the adage that "No man is an island", we all rely on each other for knowledge and growth!
Photos by Inkz_photography
About Katesi Jacqueline Kalange

My name is Katesi Jacqueline Kalange aka the Kalange, a female visual artist from Uganda. I hold a master's degree in Art and Industrial Design from Kyambogo University. My multidisciplinary work, incorporating a tapestry of sculpture, architecture, research, installation and performance art, draws deeply from African indigenous wisdom to address global contemporary challenges like climate change and inadequate waste management. By emphasizing upcycling and recycling inspired by traditional techniques of making, I aim to ignite public discourse on sustainable practices as well as encourage a harmonious co-existence of humans alongside other beings within shared ecosystems. I am currently an artist in residence at GAS Foundation, Nigeria where I am deliberately extending my research into recycling single-use plastics and second-hand clothes inspired by the materials and techniques used in building traditional Nigerian vernacular architecture. Follow @ the_kalange_official

Visit Nubuke Foundation and follow @ nubuke_wa.

G35 | Ghana | insect | residency | spider | story-making | Uganda

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The Kalange ✿ Local knowledge created from recycled denim and clay

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Katesi Jacqueline Kalange works with the children of Nubuke in Ghana to create a home for the story of Badere, the spider who hoarded knowledge.

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FLOAT ✿ Lakeside with an arts residency on water, a feral MBA and a float-keeper

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FLOAT ✿ Lakeside with an arts residency on water, a feral MBA and a float-keeper

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FLOAT ✿ Lakeside with an arts residency on water, a feral MBA and a float-keeper

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Andrea Lane and Gary Yelen share journey of creating an arts compound on Lake Tyer, while Isaac Carne shares his day as a float-keeper.

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Russell "Wossy" Davey ✿ Carving stories, protecting Country

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Russell "Wossy" Davey ✿ Carving stories, protecting Country

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Russell "Wossy" Davey talks about the many uses of the boab nut and how it helps him tell the stories that keep the connection to Country strong.

Russell "Wossy" Davey is a Bardi man and carver of traditional local materials, including boab and shell. He lives in One Arm Point on the Dampier Peninsula, which is north of Broome. Russell is a member of the Ardi'ol clan group, which covers the areas of Ardyaloon Community, from Baninygoon (West) to Lirramarr (North). The logo is his family's traditional "riji" design, carved on a pearl shell. "It was handed down to our family over 100 years ago, and is six generations old".

For Russell, the boab nut has many benefits. "There's fruit inside to eat, you know. There's good seeds inside, black seeds, big-sized seeds. You have to get them early before they start to crack."

The boab is a part of Country. "Sometimes, when I get broken ones, I take the seeds and find a wetland area. I just throw the seats and then they grow naturally."

Besides eating, the nut provides a wonderful canvas for carving designs. "The boab nut has got about three layers. The outside fourth layer is hairy. To get that off, you have to rub it with a rag, then you have the base colour, sometimes a blackish colour, brown or a reddish colour as well."

Russell learnt boab carving from his uncle, Robin Hunter, when he was living in Derby on the appropriately named Boab Street. "He'd draw some of the pictures for me and then follow the lines with the pencil. And I'd carve with a hand pocket knife. We did that for a while. I was practicing, practicing...until I sold my first boab nut for $17 when I was 11 years old."

Robin taught him how to hold the knife while carving and the different techniques he could use for the lines. His designs reflect where he lives. " A lot of my designs would be based on what's around me where I grew up. I might do a story about the Kimberley, like the ocean reefs, corals. Birds are my favourites."

He also tells stories through his carvings, like the fight between Loolool and Marrgaliny. "They live in my mum's area. They had a waterhole where they kept turtles. Loolool, the wise one, had this mate Marrgaliny who would feed him turtles, but they had to be female. Once he gave him the wrong turtle. Instead of giving him a female he gave him a male turtle. A fight broke out between the two. There was fighting and fighting. Others got involved too. Eventually, all the men went into the water to clean themselves up and wash their wounds, then they became sharks and stingrays. Loolool became the grey nurse shark, Marrgaliny became the hammer head, and others into stingrays. The animals simply swam off and now they live in the water. One of those stingrays has a long tail. His long tail is the spear. The shark's fins are boomerangs sticking in the body."

Russell is quite concerned about developments such as the Burrup Hub gas pipeline."We'll talk about running pipelines coming closer to us. We were just talking about it the other day. There are risks to our area. We have Brue Reef that's seventy miles out. It's heritage area, right. That place got a dreaming story."

"Country is everything to not only me but all the indigenous people in this country. We have this connection to the land through our stories. We have to look after them. We have to make sure that these places are protected. If you destroy the place, you destroy the family."

For Russell, his people's law is timeless, "Our law doesn't change, it stays the same. Whereas government law changes with different parliaments." Respect for the law is a key part of what Russell calls, "gorna liyarn", a Bardi expression for feeling good about yourself: "spiritually, mentally, physically." Russell's boab nut carvings keep not only his people's stories alive, but also keep alive the connection to Country. We can all feel good about that.

About Russell Davey

Russell is a proud Bardi man, with many connections, but only identifies himself as a Traditional Custodian of the Ardi'ol clan group. He lives in Ardyaloon Community on the Dampier Peninsula. Wossy's art is inspired by his Bardi culture, creating designs that incorporate Dreamtime stories of his saltwater people, continuing to tell these stories through many art forms, using colours, animals and shapes that depict his natural environment. He also carves pearl shells, boab nuts, and traditional artefacts, whilst advocating that young people are taught the old ways, keeping law, language and culture alive, so the knowledge is not lost forever. Watch video, visit www.ardiol.org and magpiegoose.com/collections/russel-davey

Aboriginal | carving | G35 | wood

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Russell "Wossy" Davey ✿ Carving stories, protecting Country

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Russell "Wossie" Davey talks about the many uses of the boab nut and how it helps him tell the stories that keep the connection to Country strong.

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Toro Atua: Sentinels for living well on the land

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Toro Atua: Sentinels for living well on the land

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Inspired by ancestral rock art, Areta Wilkinson's public art installation recognises the Māori spirits that guard whenua.

Areta Wilkinson has an impressive history of adornment making, lasting nearly 30 years. Of the Ngāi Tahu - Ngāti Wheke iwi heritage, she focused particularly on jewellery's role in connecting to whenua (land). This is underpinned by a strong connection to her Māori community. An example is her collective jewellery project, " Ngā Whatu Piataata: Stars in my Eyes", which featured brooches woven from satin ribbon into a star shape that refers to Matariki. This was repurposed for "Arohanui (much love) for the whanau of Rapaki" to boost the spirits of a local Māori community recovering after the earthquake in 2011.

Elsewhere in Garland, you will find articles about her photogram work ( here and here). This work seeks to translate sacred taonga into a jewellery form appropriate for everyday wear. More recently, the series of pendants " Ka Taka Te Wā - Time Passed " was made with stone tools from the Waimakariri and Rakahuri ancestral rivers.

Toro Atua (sentinel) is a public artwork that scales up her designs for the town centre of Rolleston (Tauwharekākaho) near Christchurch (Ōtautahi). These works are based upon the cultural narrative Ngāi Te Ruahikihiki ki Taumutu gifted to the Selwyn District Council for the community hub. It references the whakapapa, kōrero and mahinga kai traditional food and resource practices. The narrative celebrates the "life giving forces" including the eel, lamprey, whitebait and black flounder. Eels in particular have left a permanent mark in the landscape as the eel weir of the ancestor Te Rakihouia. The site of the artwork functions as a pou whenua or identity marker for the traditional trails across the local landscape.

Toro Atua takes design inspiration from the ancestral rock art of Te Waipounamu (South Island). They are a key reference for Areta: "They're like the first art galleries. They're the first mark-making on this island."

The designs are realised in 20 light-reflecting stainless-steel figures, mounted on tall, slender poles to vibrate with life, shimmering slightly in the air far above people's heads. The tallest of these is four metres high and the 20 figures are arranged in groups throughout the reserve, leading people through the landscape and indicating areas of importance.

Eels play a key role in the cultural ecology of the Selwyn area. Farming has impacted water quality and the eel populations, thanks to nitrates running off into local lakes. For Areta, this is more than just an environmental issue, "It's a threat to traditional cultural practices." The lighting plan for Toro Atua is designed to celebrate traditional seasonal practices of the maramataka (Māori lunar calender) with one special contingency to turn off the lights signifying when eels are on the move. "At Wairewa (Lake Forsyth) in autumn when the eels cross the shingle bar at Birdlings Flat, they turn the lights off so as not to confuse the eels." This is one way Toro Atua can be informative and reflect cultural lifeways.

To ensure the ongoing care for Toro Atua, the council will accept a tikanga (protocol) plan to maintain the meaning of Toro Atua. Areta's work goes beyond the objects themselves: "I have created a tikanga plan as part of this package to help guide how this taonga work is culturally warmed in perpetuity. The main reasons behind this is to keep the cultural link to source communities alive & relevant ... and for the artwork to be useful to increase cultural understanding. At the opening community event, the artwork will be enhanced by Ngāi Tahu storytelling. It is an opportunity to elevate and share Māori knowledge. We're telling different stories with this work."

The inaugural celebration of Toro Atua coincides with Matariki, the Māori festival that heralds the arrival of the Pleiades constellation, which is now a national holiday. With a jewellery sensibility, Areta Wilkinson has been able to create objects that connect sky and land, symbolising ongoing care for the whenua that gives life.

About Areta Wilkinson

Areta Wilkinson's practice explores whakapaipai concepts of Māori personal adornment in the context of bicultural New Zealand. She is concerned with histories of contact, tribal knowledge, genealogical and maker relationships between the cultural production of ancestors and her own objects. Her recent work represents an ongoing investigation into the history of Māori wearable taonga (prized possessions) particularly in regard to her iwi community in Te Waipounamu, the South Island. Areta's practice extends over 28 years. Her work is seen in national galleries and collections such as Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland Museum, Dowse Art Museum and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A design lecturer in jewellery 1995-2008, she completed a PhD in Creative Arts through Massey University Te Putahi-a-Toi School of Maori Studies 2014 and is an independent artist. She is represented by Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland and The National, Christchurch.

Aotearoa | Areta Wilkinson | G35 | Māori | public art

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Toro Atua: Sentinels for living well on the land

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Inspired by ancestral rock art, Areta Wilkinson's public art installation recognises the Māori spirits that guard whenua.

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Jules and Jayne Christian

Jules and Jayne Christian share their journey to bring Dharug people together as mob on Country to help contest ongoing colonisation.

(A message to the reader.)

(A message to the reader in English.)

We are Julie-Ann ("Jules") Christian, born in 1957 on Wiradjuri Country, and Jayne Christian, daughter of Jules Christian, born in 1987 on Ngunnawal Country and raised on Wiradjuri Country. We are Baramadagal women of the Dharug language-speaking peoples (Reid/Goldspink), with European heritages including Danish (Christiansen), Irish (Kelly, Clyde, Orr), Scottish (Stewart Clan) and English (Goode, Perfect). Jules has previously written about what it is to be Burramattagal / Baramadagal in the Garland article, The eel as a totem and symbol of resilience (2021). While we primarily identify as set out here, we acknowledge that the sum of these identities informs our nationality of being "Australian", and we use the words Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Indigenous and First Nations relatively interchangeably throughout this article to speak to more broadly held experiences as a macro-identity which has micro-layers within it, not a homogenous identity in and of itself.

We are of family line that, due to colonisation, was disrupted by the early times of invasion on these lands now known as Australia. Due to the extent of the genocide perpetrated against the tribal peoples of lands belonging to Dharug-speaking peoples, much of the reckoning about what has already been done and its ongoing impacts on mob (Iyura) and Country (Ngurra) is still taking place, as is the healing processes we go through as individuals, family groups and Community members.

What are we re-building from?

Before delving into how nation-building looks to us, it is helpful to consider what it is first that First Nations are building / re-building from, in an ongoing reign of colonialism.

The work of Dr Gregory H Stanton gives us a framework for understanding the stages of genocide. It never "just happens", here is always a set of circumstances that occur or are created to build the climate in which genocide can take place (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust).

Dr Stanton's research articulates ten stages of genocide. While the stages are seen to build on each other, we know they often continue to be perpetrated simultaneously and continuously in settler-colonial countries. The stages are; Classification, Symbolisation, Discrimination, Dehumanisation, Organisation, Polarisation, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination and Denial.

Due to the severity of these stages and the systemic ways they have been embedded into Australian society, we understand that our family, like many others, live in an ongoing structure and legacy of genocide.

Because of the nature of trauma on our survival, it can understandably take generations for families to understand the impact of what has taken place, what has been fractured and what has been lost. Equally, we inherit intergenerational knowings grounded in the good-spirit of our old people, that continues to guide us in learning what our place is now in the rebuilding efforts.

What is re-building?

We were introduced to Miriam Jorgensen's work, from the Native Nations Institute at University of Arizona, as part of Nation Building efforts of Community members on Wiradjuri Country circa 2010. This was integral to our understanding of the Nation Building ideology and how such a framework could be applied to the Nation we belong to, as it is globally, given that settler-colonialism is perpetrated globally.

There is much academic research behind this ideology and courses to help formalise one's knowledge as a Nation Building practitioner. However, many of the relationships and opportunities that have held significance in shaping the trajectory of our "Nation Building journey" have come about in "coincidental", timely and organic ways.

To build/rebuild a nation, one person cannot do so alone, nor does one initiative or experience constitute an entire rebuild. Rather it is the consistent efforts of mob, when enabled to "be" in spaces together that are held by cultural protocols, and when taking action toward mutual objectives and visions. These build the steps for more people to then come and take the next steps, guided by those who've done the work.

Nation Building is ultimately a way to change the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the colonial government(s) that operate on our lands. Our focus to date has primarily been on cultural healing beginning within ourselves, our broader family groups, our Country and the broader Community. For generations, we have been denied cultural agency and self-determination, so it is only natural that people are at different stages of practicing racial sobriety on these microlayers. However, building this strength is what allows us to be effective in being strong Community members ourselves. This enables us to then share that strength, so that we can do the work that is altering the power dynamics that continue to be weighed against us.

As part of altering the power dynamics, we have formed relationships with local government and multiple museum and arts institutions, who are committed to walk this journey with us where they can, in support of our nation-building aspirations, as they sit on our lands.

An example of this type of relationship is the one we formed with Powerhouse Museum Parramatta in 2022, which will continue in the form agreed for five years. The partnership is an agreement that sees Powerhouse Parramatta manage the financial expenses that allow us to bring together a limited number of family members of the original family lines of the Dharug-speaking peoples, so that we can bring our family who are living as Aboriginal people off-Country, back on-Country, and we are able to spend time with Dharug family who live on-Country via this type of gathering.

We see this experience as creating a form of "stolen-generations justice". Parramatta, "the cradle city of Australia", is known to us as the birthplace of the policies and practices that saw assimilationist and genocidal measures performed for the first time against us. This shaped how laws were made that still achieve the same goals today and entrenched a system of societal conditioning which many remain ignorant of.

Opportunities to gather allow for meaningful relationships to form and develop and create a healthy sense of belonging among those who come, as well as reprieve. It is difficult for our mob who are being of service in other First Nations communities, but have limited opportunity to recharge with their own mob on their own Country.

Relationships with such institutions do not come without "rocky patches". So far, we have experienced this due to communication breakdowns stemming from our presumption that the spoken word holds the same clarity and value as the written. However, this has taught us that such relationships must fundamentally remain transactional, even if being used to serve our own relational purposes.

We must acknowledge that having staunch mob, not those susceptible to taking on the inherent behaviours of institutions themselves, working on the inside of such places, has been critical to creating space to name behaviours, hurts, expectations and in working with us to find actions that help to align the practice of our mutually held intentions.

We write of these realities because they are inevitable to some degree. Institutions should not be deterred from partnering with First Nations peoples because of what might be perceived as "failures" or "rocky patches", but rather be brave in forging new ways to work with First Nations peoples in creating forms of "justice", and by being committed to the ongoing improvement of best practice standards. This is ultimately done by making sure that lessons learned result in changed behaviour in how the partnership runs.

I, Jayne Christian, was one of the inaugural Galang Residency recipients in 2023 based at the Cite Internationale Des Arts in Paris, France. On residency, I began work on the exhibition Djiriyay and Révolution: woven yarns of ongoing resistance, which debuted at Blacktown Arts on 16 April 2024. The exhibition includes two Wiradjuri Aunts from the lands I grew up on, and collaborations with five other Baramadagal family members.

As an exhibition telling our cultural stories and reflecting on the broader human condition, it was important to me to embed our cultural ethos into each layer of the process, thus creating a Nation Building initiative. During the opening week of my exhibition, a group of us gathered in the gallery. This included Baramadagal family, including a couple of family members we met for the first time, broader Dharug community members whom we performed ceremony with, along with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mob, friends and allies, and representatives from the City of Sydney, City of Parramatta and Blacktown City Council.

The weaving brought together the people and created an environment that allowed for an integrated experience to occur, for the community members to hold the space on our terms, and for this to include Elders, community leaders and members, along with those beginning their re-connection process, and for the broader community who know us in different capacities to see our relational connections foregrounded in that space. It was empowering and gave everybody the opportunity to experience a space where the dominant culture was 'Blak'.

Cultural practices are essential

We believe cultural practices are essential to frame our time together, as they carry the lessons of our ways of being, which both teach and remind the young and old how to be together. It is a rewarding exercise to see not only family and mobs come to the circle, but also our allies who participate in the ceremonies when invited and learn the proper ways of being welcomed under our protocols. Nation-building in partnerships means that we have an ongoing responsibility to teach and educate others who come to live on our Country about our Country and its specificity. We share stories and food, and this creates laughter and goodwill.

A further binding part of nation-building is creating a setting where family members can share cultural stories and practices. Those with knowledges share and teach those who do not know, but want to learn. We have so far leaned into each other to share practices including; weaving, bush-dyeing, dance, thought leadership / debate and meditative grounding / cultural deep listening exercises. We are fortunate enough to be guided in walking together on Country, collecting natural materials for cultural practices, and this has created a family adhesive.

Why are we committed to re-building?

Country is hurting from this ongoing colonial era, and so are those who belong to it, consequently this adversely affects those who now call these lands home.

Our options as Aboriginal people today are either to; (a) become assimilated into settler-society and reject the knowledge and placement of who we are, along with the responsibility that comes with being First Nations peoples or; (b) be committed to connecting, sharing knowledges, and learning ways to exercise cultural responsibilities in these current times; like the old ones did over many thousands of years before us.

We know that First Nations ways of knowing, being and doing provide the ways for Traditional Owners to maintain healthy relationship with Country, and for Country, and these ways of being ultimately benefit the wellbeing of non-indigenous allies who seek healthy relationship to with First Nations peoples and Country.

Many of our family members work in therapeutic practices and First Nations support services. While there is a real need for mob to support mob in need of assistances, we must also be creating spaces where mob are working with and for mob and partnering with others on our own terms and conditions, in building communities grounded in culturally appropriate economic growth. This ultimately has the power to free our peoples from the cycles of disenfranchisement that keep us disempowered.

How we approach Nation Building on our tribal lands

Being a relational people, building relationships is at the heart of Nation Building practices.

We have always been committed to connecting with our Baramadagal family-line members. We have also worked with mobs from the original family lines of the Dharug-speaking peoples and the broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities to reconnect our stories and selves to the place of our ancestors.

...leaning into the cultural practices and skills we have between us

Through our commitment to be in connection with Country, we have been able to secure relationships with government and non-government institutions to resource our Nation Building aspirations, which focus on providing opportunities for mobs descended from the original Dharug-speaking peoples to be on-Country with each other, leaning into the cultural practices and skills we have between us, and calling-in the knowledge and relationships we need to capacity build our Community.

Our strength as a Community is building "propa way" between ourselves, and teaching institutions how to work with us as Traditional Owners, through equal-footing partnerships, not through the deficit dynamics they are accustomed to. To Think Sovereign Act Sovereign is a mantra of our gatherings, that keeps us anchored in the knowings that build the next steps.

Authors: Julie Christian BA (CSU), GradCert (CSU), GradDip (DEAKIN) and Jayne Christian B.A LLB, GDLP, FDRP and NMAS accredited, Baramadagal women of the Dharug language-speaking peoples.

About Jules and Jayne Christian

Jules Christian is a Baramadagal woman of the Dharug-speaking peoples, living on Wiradjuri Country in Wagga Wagga. Jules is on track to submit her PhD thesis in Indigenous Research and Knowledge Systems by 2025. Jules is active in her family and inter-clan nation building initatives and enjoys her weaving circle with the Aunts on Thursdays.

Jayne Christian is a Baramadagal woman of the Dharug-Speaking peoples. Jayne is a Lawyer and Mediator and runs her own creative and consultancy business, Barabirang Projects. Jayne's current exhibition is on show at Blacktown Arts until 29 June: https://jaynechristian.com/djiriyay-%2B-r%C3%A9volution

Aboriginal | Dharug | G35 | Jules Christian

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Nation Building practices in an on-going colonial era

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Jules and Jayne Christian share their journey to bring Dharug people together as mob on Country to help contest ongoing colonisation.

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Syd Bruce Shortjoe & Bernard Singleton ✿ Men of Country

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Syd Bruce Shortjoe & Bernard Singleton ✿ Men of Country

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Syd Bruce Shortjoe & Bernard Singleton ✿ Men of Country

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Jack Wilkie-Jans writes about two artists from Cape York Peninsula whose connection to Country includes Men’s Shed and cultural maintenance.

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Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation, East Coast Road, Dunwich QLD

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Bonyi ✿ A seasonal gathering of weavers on Country

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Bonyi ✿ A seasonal gathering of weavers on Country

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Bonyi ✿ A seasonal gathering of weavers on Country

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Freja Carmichael reflects on a gathering of weavers at Munimba-ja to celebrate the bonyi nut harvest.

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Dominic White

Dominic White continues the dance of his forebears with a material art that rediscovers Country.

(A message to the reader.)

I am not always comfortable writing on the page. Generally, I make holdable things. When making words, usually, I can see my intended audience as students in the classroom or during a talk at a gallery or cultural place. When writing I cannot see my words land nor see if we are understanding. In this text, I rhythmically bounce from one context and place-scape to another, hopefully creating wholistic insight into my artmaking and thinking process. My history and blood lineage means I can talk about Blakness from my personal perspective and in broad conceptual brushstrokes, with a caveat of flawed understanding and tentative projection. In writing this there is vulnerability, and the permanency of words on a page that only mark my understanding as I type at this point in time. My cultural and personal understanding is changing and growing. There are many influences buried in these words. The brail of country is key, to being in place.

We, you and I, are going for a walk-dance through my country.

A beat has started.

thud

I am an adopted kid. This means aged six-months-old, my name was legally changed to Dominic White, a name chosen by parents Rose and Nat, who I was given to, and who were given to me. In this home, I am loved. I have been theirs since I was four weeks old, like a pup.

I have always had two mothers, two fathers and now, oddly, three sets of parents and three sets of siblings. My birth parents have always been present in me, in the mirror, in the speculation of myself and with others, and in contrast to my family growing up. This is the way of many with 'untidy' histories. It is good to know almost all of them now outside the mirror.

Both my mothers danced and value dance.

Dun dun der, dun den dur

Others get to see your origins before you do.

I am 23 in the Museum of Tasmania. My friend Holly points to a painting of an Aboriginal Tasmanian man. 'That's you,' she says with conviction. 'Nahh... it could be I guess?'

Is that why Tasmania made my skin tingle and body vibrate with something more? Holly was renting in Gladstone on Trawoolway country. I had been home before I knew it. Odd to think about that thirty years later.

Thrum thrum thrum

Recently I have used the metaphor of a Hemiphytes to describe my growing. It's a plant that starts its life up a tree (epiphyte) and sends roots searching and when its roots find detritus or nutrients in a tree fork, they dig in. Any food in a precarious spot is welcome. Hemiphytes keep sending roots down until they reach the soil, then they shoot for the sun and, using another tree's structure, form a conduit between the soil and the sun.

It took me a while to connect with the ground.

Swish swish swish thud

Years ago, before I had met my birth mum Joan, I wrote a thesis that had three columns to a page. The central text was the academic script and either side was narrative and sketches or poetry. I was frustrated at the time by the singularity of driving an academic argument. All sharp points and false sequential narrative. This structure has power, yet lacks a wider context and depth. So today I am experimenting further.

A foot fall puff dust

I am talking to Hazel; we have never met before. It is after an artists' talk as part of the touring show CURRENT, and we are at Queensland University of Technology Art Museum. We have been talking about one of my works Collared that explores slave collars from the Roman Empire to invasive Europeans in Australia, chains about country men's necks, and our current "white collar" slavery.

I say to Hazel, "We are all connected to slaves by our undies," meaning that the folk who make our undies (or anything else we buy and own from most big corporations), probably worked in slave-like conditions, and we benefit. It is unavoidable, this cruel disparity of privilege and inequality. I am trying, in an unfair way, to understand the conundrum of present history. The history that is present from the past in the now. I want to process and understand what put Hazel and me in a place-time where we are ethically compromised or conflicted. And how this is as a state of humanness, and how this relates to our country's historical context and current bilious 'No' vote.

Foot thud

Ultimately, I make things to understand my context and process the information that is becoming part of me. I am sawing thumb-thick dry eucalypt branches about thumb length. I need about 17 of them. Do you see the wood dust fall with the rhythm of the saw? I can smell spotted gum.

voop vooopahh voopah

I watch his bright eye twinkle. I have brought two stainless steel trays with me to QUT Art Museum as part of the work I am presenting with CURRENT. One is about 120cm and the other is about 60cm tall, and they are both generic shield-shape. I am smiling with the artist and Murri man Norton Fredericks. We are finding commonality. The trays were first exhibited at McClelland Sculpture Park filled with clay from the park and red hill soil collected from the farm where I lived, worked and grew. Places I wanted to shield and protect, a part of Bunnarong/Boonwurung country that raised me.

I spent hours in the nearby bush, making bows, rafts, climbing trees, fishing, yabbying, building cubbies with bailers' twine and a hatchet. The bush was a part of me even then, it licked my wounds, listened to my reasoning, soothed the disconnected aloneness of being. My curiosity and romantic dreamings flourished from red hill soil.

In winter you could grow three inches by walking in the mud in gumboots. In the hot summer, the dam and the dust soothed the cracking. I learnt the concept of terroir, wine from a particular bit of land, its flavours captured in a bottle of wine or the taste of a fish.

Squelch swelch squish squelch

Near my own country, Trawoolway country as I understand it, I am beginning what will be a collaboration with the artist and cultural leader, Elder Dave Mangenner Gough, and I filled one tray with bivalve shells that have been washed and blown up on Mungiabittas country, Panatana. It's a bit of country now in the custodianship of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation. Dave and I share parts of our blood line and I walk on familiar and unfamiliar places that hold our stories. Writing this brings tears of absence and reconnection to cultural land. Dave's Welcome is profound for me, quietly echoing inside, making connections over time that awaken unexpectedly.

This plot of land had to be purchased. The concept of land being bought and sold jangles in my head-heart. Once owned, land can be trammelled, cut, scraped, fenced, restricted by law, and the community that lives around has limited say in how it is used. "Developed": its nurturance stolen, the diversity mismanaged and the obligation and relationships of Blak Law banished for profit. The bush on this block was probably saved by poor soil. And the springs and costal swamp, mixed woodland continued on without our hands as part of a healthy country. It's warming to see land and connection revitalised to mob.

The shield tray, along with the other selected works part of CURRENT, is shown at Devonport Regional Gallery, part of the Paranaple Arts Centre. The shells blown together, hold stories of tiny molluscs, collecting centuries and people present and gone simultaneously.

Cheeeiii shhhiiiiy crishhhy

Norton is responding to my trays offered as a prompt. I am a long way from where I grew up and I see the sweep of Bass Strait looking across to my country. This is someone else's place. I am a stranger here and cannot talk of what needs protecting and of connection. I see the shield tray a bit like a message stick, something to be received then added to and moved on. Each place they go to needs this kind of interaction. I hope Norton and I can find a way of keeping the trays honest and with local rootlings.

Norton's practice, "Retritus", uses local plant bush materials to stain, dye and fix colour on silk and linen. His work is softer and flows with tropical creek water and river currents. I add the structure of hut using cane and bamboo "borrowed" from the botanical gardens. The form is of a gathering Hut Hall of which I have heard and seen smaller reconstructions. One was documented by controversial and flawed invader Robinson as being 11m long with enough room for thirty or forty people. Norton's fabric covers the bamboo shell and tray floor to give the structure form. It is luminous in its welcome. It is good to connect with a local younger artist with a different holding of connection. There is poetry in the work. Within the process of making is the growing of relationship, friendship and depth.

Natter yarn natter yack

In the smaller tray linen is folded and coiled. Sheoak ( allocasurina) is framing and balanced above the shield tray. An unlikely coat of arms. These trees comb the air currents in all the countries the show will visit. The soft needles comfort and insulate bums (mooms), form spearheads, are helpful in starting fires and cooking shellfish. A cultural plant from the Top End to Tasmania. Always back to placescape, landscape, country and the mnemonic laying down of depth as we fleetingly be. The everywhen is making fertile soil for humans.

Brisbane's place rhythm is new to me: wind, river insects chitter, lizards skitter and bats screech. This exhibition with Gail Mabo and Lisa Waup has two other places to travel to: the Australian Design Centre Sydney and Benalla Art Gallery. I hope to work with folk in those places too. There is a loneliness and ego in presenting solo work. Working with others is centring and feels right culturally. The schism of solo artists and collective creative is tension in my practice, training and heart. Perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching so much.

Creekie tinkle Splops shhhhhhhhwwwwhshhhhhhshs

We are standing on a curb in Mornington, south of Melbourne. I am looking at the place opposite. It has gone now, yet the Mornington Youth Club was here once. Modern boxes of terrace units now occupy. It's present in my head-heart. A place where my mum (Rose) taught calisthenics, a kind or formulaic dance exercise for "girls" (said in a rising no nonsense teacher voice). It is also where I learnt Judo. I can hear my Aunty Lorraine, mother's and grandmother's directive instructive voices saying, "One, two, three, four, OH knees up Michelle". The classical and folk music which was my growing-up context, the rattling of the walls and the choreographed thud of marches, and the swish of expressive dance called PLASTICS... "Smile girls, one-two, one and two".

Thrum thrum, thrum thrum

I can also hear a thud as I break fall on to a dust and sweat-laden canvas as my Judo partner practices a Uki goshi (浮腰): Floating hip throw.

Oh, and there is the Bluelight disco too. My teen self, trying to dress cool and dancing with the girls, a rarity for a fella to dance rather than limp from foot to foot in a vaguely rhythmic way. Fergal Sharky and Peter Garret directing my feet with absurd contrast.

Thud Thud sweep tap thud

Look here now, I am barefoot, sitting amongst orchids and lilies in a sculpture park talking to an elder and artist from the central desert who has travelled down south for a residency. He is talking about the importance of touching country with skin, bare feet and moom. We are at McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park where the CURRENT exhibition has recently opened and my work is on show inside.

Back to outside, Uncle Robert talks about the dance of dust, of footfall during dance/ceremony activating and thrumming into country, making it whole and right. The action of dance is needed so the country can hear his people's care. We are not related. I think of him as Uncle and Elder given his thoughtful guidance, brimming engagement, deep cultural knowledge and authority. I can hear the clap stick striking and following the feet.

Click, click, click, dust thud

Come into my partner's garage. I have built a portable jewellery bench in the corner, in front of her car, under the window. Salvaged copper wire is being twisted into loops 3 to 5mm in diameter. I have drilled holes lengthwise through my thumb-sized bit of branch. The patterns beneath the bark are ridged and I feel them with my thumb. The wire loops are threaded through the bits of wood one at a time. One loop is joined to another. They woodenly clink.

Clink clink clinkity clink

I am looking at a page in my sketchbook. A mind map to help guide this writing connects in front of me. I am tracing the line between hypocrite and truth. I am thinking about the conversation with Hazel. How in my youth I might have called these two grey manes "hypocrites" for not doing more. That we both care for moral and ethical truths and abhor the suffering of others for our advantage yet buy undies and are compromised. A younger me might have felt contempt. I wonder how the word hypocrite removes someone's ability to moderate, adapt, negotiate and live with the truth of our lives. The purity of youthful idealistic thinking tries to force the world into a simplistic idiocy, when used in its judgemental form.

I am on country with my twenty-year-old son. We have come to be part of Mannalargenner Day and he and I probably now have covid. We are in a cheap campervan camping on Homestead Road. Looking out from Ransons Beach is Cape Portland where the celebration of our ancestor is taking place. I am sad that I am not meeting with friends, others of shared lines and history, and cultural practice. And I am joyful we are here on this beach together. I have hopes that my connection and sense of self, will be important to my two boys. It has certainly made me a better man and father for the two of them.

There are deep cultural sites full of occupation, laughter, sand stories and culture right here on this spot and that spot. The everywhen is present and close. I know the familiarity of kin now. The laugh of my sister who knows my humour before we knew each other. The decisions of Mac, my grandfather, whose knife I hold and use, full of his decisions and making ability and thrift. My roots and feet dig into the soil-shell, grit sand. My son and I swing in hammocks in the sun. Snotty and full of clean, clear air. He shares the latest music to capture him as we swing and motored along the skinny bent roads that follow old lines. As we recover, we fish and move through scrub as energy will allow.

I am horrified and saddened to watch a 4X4 power through beach sand and dunes. I later find out our old people are buried in the dunes, their bones and skulls exposed by tire and wheel in such selfish ego-fuelled antics. The 4×4 almost bogged now is turning back the way it has come leaving gouges and breaking in its wake. What sort of people are these? I think that is an old question for my kin. Yet my kin are them as well. There is a structure of thinking that allows this transgression. It rasps the eyes to watch. Compassion is sometimes abrasive. It wears away to expose yourself.

Stamp turn stamp dust raise thud

On this page of my sketch book is also written "gentleman" and "noble savage". The romantic aspects of these labels hide the desperate truth of an invasive colonial culture. The politeness and education that allows the colonial project to be waged by the crown and self-interest, behind the veneer of religiousness and Darwinism's unenlightened use continues destructive myth-making at this time.

The colonial thought projection of innocence and incapability of "Indians, noble savages" removes both agencies to "own land" allowing Terra nullius and the agency for the land/country by the folk who worked with long knowledge, were killed, harassed and removed. It took a particular mindset to be blind to law and lore that is deep and of a continent for many nations and people. It is interesting at a slow change of perception; fire stick lore becomes important as bushfires get hotter. It is still hard for many to see wisdom. The generosity of mob continues.

Crackle crackle crackle

I sit next to my partner. I am watching dignified Marcia Laughton and Rachel Perkins, in a pub in Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula, a few weeks prior to the referendum vote. With a Liberal party ally they explain the structure and goals of the "Yes" campaign. The audience is either those convinced of "yes" or small "L" liberals trying to negotiate their world view and understand the proposition, mostly with generosity. There is a divide in language use here: populist and academic intellectual depth, trying to share First Nations' thought process. Trying to push the English language to explain a trust in a structural process of yarn and decision making. It could be called "in process we trust", and language dances to balance point. The acute, patient, polite, clear assertion of a "voice to be heard" is admirable, poetic in its complexity, and intent. The personal toll is visible in my heroes' eyes. There is sadness here.

Yap Yap Tap yap

Deep dance here as metaphor and practical action. A pounding for renewal and change. The contrast between a Western dance for entertainment and performance, and a First Nations cultural dance being about giving, receiving and education as a form of renewal. I wonder what happened to other cultures that allowed process or renewal to be eclipsed by performance. Is that how Morris dancing in the UK broke down to a quaint folk dance? I wonder at how the need for humans to dance and connect and renew could be missed and dismissed. I think about the First Nation folk who are employed as performers, who then dance ceremony or reconnect with the rhythm of place as part of economic survival. Much like me selling artwork. I wonder who sees what in such performance. I wonder about the land speaking back as footfall and the tuning into place. How that happens when I have walked on my own distant country of the Trawoolway a partial stranger. We all dance across our lives, it's just a matter of why, for whom or who watches, and what choices we face.

Jiggle jiggle wiggle wiggle stomp

My artwork is coming along now. See an angled branch, mounted upright like a tree on a flat board. Extending past the end of the stick a twist of springy copper wire. Between the plank and the top part of the wire is a Limberjack or Jigg-doll. By tapping the top wire, the doll dances from its neck. A grim adaption from the folk toy. I feel a rich theme opening. Not finished, yet dancing.

Clink clapple clink

Limberjack and jig dolls were also made by my birth Grandpa Mac, whom I never met. I have been shown his dolls and heard from my brother, sisters, and cousins, how he made them. And then made them dance on a board. According to family, we are similar: Mac and I. I hold that connection closely, fertile ground for my roots.

Google searches reveal Limberjacks were made across colonial countries. A rhythmic performance toy, animated by adults. One doll online is poignant, showing a carefully made figure with an African body shape in an African dress, hand carved, for sale in a West Virginian antique store. The face is beautifully carved, it seems to have knowledge and love in the making. I wonder at its history and origins. I wonder who saw it dance in the 19th century when it was made. I wonder at feet dancing far from home and connection. A dancing joy of relief in music. There are Black minstrel dolls as well, all gollywog in their historical hateful condescending parody.

Crack crack crack

So my next theme or curious path is found. I, and perhaps we, will explore the Limberjack. The creative transition from one thought line and object to another is made. Now the process of collecting resources, finding funding, getting a gallery interested, begins.

We all dance, sometimes in love and renewal, sometimes for others, sometimes for cash and the joy of it. My partner Anna (a trained dancer) reminds me of the grace of dancing. I like the word grace and its meanings; as it is the ability to live well with horror and discomfort, and also to move with poetry through the world. I like the double meaning in jig/jigg as a dance and as a tool used to make other things in a workshop.

Swish, swirl, swish

Back to Hazel and my conversation about slavery and hypocrisy. There is no solid answer. We just dance, as best we can, for as long as we can, with grace and intent. Hopefully, our personal dance is connected deeply, and not just about us, but about joy from the sheer pleasure of living.

Finally, the jigs and reels from part of my genetic line mingle with soil talk, with country being renewed. Both my mothers danced. I have yet to dance on country. And still my feet remember walking sand and coastal grass in northeast trouwanna/ lutriwita (Tasmania), a swimming hole and farm my Grandpa Mac grew up on below Mt Rowland, the red volcanic soil of the farm that nurtured me in my youth on the Mornington Peninsula, that still clings to my imagined gumboots. A thrumming recognition of rooted soil. There were many years of thinking, before stepping into mob and a path of heritage that I couldn't be without now.

Can you and I, dear reader, speculate on how we will choose to, and be made to, dance in the future? With whom, and how, and where, will we dance?

About Dominic White

I am a Palawa, Trawoolway man, descendant of the Tyereelore, through my birth mother's family. I am an adopted Kid and have been following a process of reclamation of my heritage. I work as a multi-disciplinary artist exploring, connection, observation, responsibility, and obligation in different mediums. My work tries to understand the cultural, historical human activities and interaction with first nations people and thought, place and materials. Often the material cultural context informs the work. Trained as a Printmaker, my work spans contemporary Printmaking, Sculpture, Photography, Performative acts and contemporary Jewellery and design. I am based in Bunnerong /Boonwurung country (Mornington Peninsula), father of two and teach art to support my art-making. Portrait image by Alisha Davenport.

Aboriginal | G35 | revival | Tasmania

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Dominic White continues the dance of his forebears with a material art that rediscovers Country.

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Anne Nginyangka Thompson ✿ My favourite place out bush

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Anne Nginyangka Thompson ✿ My favourite place out bush

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https://garlandmag.com/article/anne-nginyangka-thompson/

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Anne Nginyangka Thompson

Anne Nginyangka Thompson talks about her commitment to preserving culture and Country through her ceramic work.

Anne Nginyangka Thompson makes ceramic vessels decorated with scenes that reflect the loss of traditional life. She grew up in Black Hill on APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands in the north-west of South Australia. Her father was a leader of the land rights movement and her mother is a senior artist. She began making ceramics in high school and then at the Ernabella Arts ceramics studio. Her awards include the Shepparton Art Museum's Indigenous Ceramic Art Award (2014 and 2022) and Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (2023), Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. She has also made jewellery with Kate Rhode. Currently, Anne is chair of Ernabella Arts.

The recent series of works exhibited at Sabbia Gallery employ the sgraffito technique to depict scenes of idyllic life before development and the busy cityscapes that have replaced them. Her works are an important form of memory to help preserve culture, story and Country.

✿ Where is your home?

My home is in the APY Lands. I grew up out bush away from community. My home is peaceful and quiet surrounded by trees and rocks with nature and the environment.

As a child, I wasn't allowed to play inside. We played outside, with the trees, rocks and skies. There were different sorts of birds and colours. With an old tree, we used to climb up and get little birds. We raised them and taught them how to speak our language. We had a Cockie who could understand and speak language.

My old man grew me up with lots of animals and turtles. I feel at peace. I fell in love with nature, colours of sunset and sunrise.

✿ What are the stories that you tell through your artworks?

I was born here knowing the land belongs to Aṉangu. I connect history based on how I supposed it to be back in the 1940s through to the 1980s. I draw on paper and then put that onto a ceramic.

My designs come from my mind that sees through the Country. I fell in love with the place, it breaks my heart if we are not connecting with it.

As a kid, we had colour pencils. We would draw a story about your favourite place to be. My favourite place is the sand dunes in Wamikata where the kids will normally go and camp out there and play footy and do somersaults. And you watch the sunset as well.

The technology world is an introduced life. It's not our way of living. The kids have got tablets. They watch YouTube on the phone. Their minds are distracted. You have to do different things, like going out bush and being better connected with a family, sitting around talking story

✿ What are some of the important issues at Ernabella Arts?

Artists have different knowledge and different stories and we like to share our stories with our people and also our children so they can carry them on.

I work now with Marika. She said "This Anne Thompson seemed an interesting person. I love her work. I want to be doing something like her. I want to do ceramics." I like being a role model for the community. Marika sits next to me when I'm working.

✿ Are there any problems with your natural environment?

Buffel grass has hit the lands and covered all of our bush food so we now go out further to look for food. Rubbish and pollution have also affected our animals and the environment. I remember seeing berries and bush tomatoes on the side of the road. That was the best part of growing up. You'd see them everywhere with lovely beautiful flowers. You don't see that any more. Buffel grass has taken over. It's hard to eat, not like the spinifex. We have to go into the Northern Territory border to get our bush foods.

✿ How do people look after the bush around Ernabella?

By keeping the area clean and teaching our ways. Our ways can teach each other (Aṉangu and whitefellas) more. We must listen to the ones who know this place.

About Anne Nginyangka Thompson

Anne Nginyangka Thompson is a ceramicist living in APY Lands and Chair of Ernabella Arts. You can find out about her works at Sabbia Gallery. She is also profiled at Ernabella Arts. You can also see her jewellery work elsewhere in Garland: In Ernabella, doors open for Aboriginal jewellery.

Aboriginal | ceramics | G34 | revival

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Anne Nginyangka Thompson ✿ My favourite place out bush

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Anne Nginyangka Thompson talks about her commitment to preserving culture and Country through her ceramic work.

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Wayne Martin Maranganji ✿ Painting culture, painting country

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Wayne Martin Maranganji ✿ Painting culture, painting country

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Angie Faye Martin

Angie Faye Martin connects with her Maranganji cousin, who connects to their shared Country through his art and commissions.

When I look at Wayne's paintings, I feel a deep sense of calm. I get lost in the patterns and the flow of the brush strokes and it always makes me think "I'm home".

Wayne Martin (Maranganji, Mardigan), a multidisciplinary artist from Cunnamulla, Queensland, is a painter, dancer, and yidikai player whose artistic pursuits are inspired by a deep love for Country, Maranganji Country.

Maranganji Country is in what nowadays most people refer to as South-West Queensland. It stretches from Quilpie to Cheepie and Beechal, along the Paroo River to Eulo, and along the Bulloo River south to near Thargomindah. It's semi-arid country dotted with mulga trees, sandalwood, gidgee and red river gums. An abundance of birdlife, including brolgas, emus and wedge-tailed eagles inhabit this area, along with unique varieties of fauna such as bilbies, echidnas, inland taipan and the deadly king brown.

It's the kind of place you need to tread gently to appreciate the patterns of colours, shapes and forms, and the sheer vastness of the landscape: the wide-open blue sky that becomes an endless canopy of twinkling lights at night; the ground that changes from red soil to a blanket of purple or yellow as the rains come in spring and wildflowers blossom; the gentle flow of the muddy brown waters; and the exquisite birdlife that sing and fish along their banks. It is beautiful country.

When I asked Wayne what inspired his art, he told me it was his deep love for country.

The land means everything to me. It's a place where I feel grounded, a place where I feel free, a place where I call home. Country is where I get my strength to keep my spirit strong and healthy. I love the Mardigan Maranganji land that my ancestors cared for before me and I always have the utmost respect and care for the land when I'm on Country and when I go visit. I will always have a strong connection to the land because my blood; it comes from country, mother earth, Mardigan Maranganji land. I have a place where I can recharge my spirit, my soul.

It's natural that Wayne's paintings make me feel like I'm home because his artistic inspiration is mostly drawn from the land, and his country (Maranganji), is close to mine (Kooma).

When we were children, my father would often take us out camping and fishing on these lands. You see, Wayne is my younger cousin (his mother and my father are first cousins), so when school holidays came around, we would set off on the road out west bursting with anticipation for all the adventures that lay ahead, swimming in the deep cool rivers, sliding down steep mudbanks for childhood thrills, catching yabbies with chunks of old meat, and laying on the sand hills to gaze up into the night time skies.

I've watched my cousin's career grow over the years and admired how he's maintained strong connections to culture, family and country.

Like many cousins, Wayne and I grew apart and moved away from our childhood homes. We travelled and pursued careers interstate. At the age of 19 Wayne, under the guidance of his uncle, became a cultural teacher with young Indigenous kids throughout New South Wales before moving on to Uluru where he further developed his passion for sharing culture. He became a cultural activities manager there and guided small groups in yarning and storytelling, boomerang and spear throwing, painting and artworks.

In 2016, Wayne performed in a short film Love is Like Water directed by Carl Emerton, which took him all the way to France where he received awards at the Nice International Film Festival.

He came home and settled into family life, giving cultural talks and yidaki playing at the Dreamtime Centre in Rockhampton. Then he connected more with Country through his work with Ausecology, where he did back-burning and land care, while also managing the Dukes Plains cattle station outside of Theodore. On the station, he oversaw their rotational grazing program, frequently moving groups of stock through smaller paddocks so the cattle have less impact on the environment, and caring for cultural sites on the property.

Our paths started crossing once more, first in Melbourne, then in Uluru and now we're both living in South-East Queensland again. Wayne recently came and stayed with my husband and I at our home in Redcliffe, and over endless cups of tea and yarning, we talked about everything from art, to food, to just getting by in life, and staying positive through the challenging times. Like many people, including myself, Wayne gets strength from his art.

It's peaceful for me and I am able to reflect through my painting, because I don't live on Country, so this keeps me grounded and still connected.

When I first started writing fiction, I also experienced this surge of spiritual strength. I gave up smoking and felt a renewed sense of purpose. Wayne tells me that when he paints he feels connected to a source that gives him clarity and strength. I can relate to this.

Wayne says he often doesn't plan too much before he starts a piece of art. He will usually set aside a morning or afternoon when he knows he won't be distracted too much by everyday activities. He will create space preferably in a quiet place, like on the back deck of his home, and prepare his canvas, paints and brushes. He only works with the best quality products and his canvasses are cotton duck grown and woven in India, primed with three coats of archival gesso that make the perfect backdrop for acrylic paints.

Sometimes, if he's been commissioned to create a particular work, the client will put forward colour preferences, but often, he selects his colour scheme depending on which shades he feels drawn to on that day. Once centred in front of his canvas, the design will emerge in his mind: a turtle, or an eagle, a meeting place, a tree, a series of animal prints in the dirt, a river flowing, or a still lake.

Everything has a flow and a meaning. The significance may not be immediately apparent, but as with all art forms, when one clears the mind and connects to a deeper source of inspiration, the meaning emerges,takes shape, and becomes understood when it is meant to.

The stories have been given to me and I get a vision of these stories and I paint that vision on canvas. What you see on canvas is what I see in my visions.

In our culture, as in many Indigenous cultures around the world, we are taught that we must care for the land. Simply put, we see the land as our mother who gives us everything we need to live and grow, and in return, we have to look after her by not taking more than can be easily replenished in a cycle, treading across her surface with care, using fire to regenerate certain areas, honouring her wisdom and generosity through our art, song and dance; and creating stories so that generations to come also carry this respect for the land. This is our Dreaming.

Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth, touches on these principles when he describes the Dreaming:

In its notions of time and soul, its demand to leave the world as found, and its blanketing of land and sea with totem responsibilities, it is ecological. Aboriginal landscape awareness is rightly seen as drenched in religious sensibility, but equally the Dreaming is saturated with environmental consciousness. Theology and ecology is fused.

Or perhaps more simply put, Bruce Pascoe wrote the following in Dark Emu:

If we are to attempt to understand Indigenous philosophy it has to begin with the profound obligation to land.

Traditional ways of life have been ravaged by colonisation, and the land theft, grief, trauma and disconnection that came with it disrupted so much that we hold sacred. Still, there are lessons that have carried through and deep knowledge that can still be found if we listen closely enough. As Debra Dank, a Gudanji woman who recently shared her powerful life story in We Come With This Place says:

Listen well when this country is telling you our story. Listen with your feet in the sand and your heart in your hands and give it over to this country. She deserves it most.

Today, Wayne makes regular trips back out to Country, sharing his art and culture, often taking his two daughters so they learn and grow in culture and remain connected to Country. He regularly performs at cultural events in Quilpie, the main town on Maringanji Country, such as during their NAIDOC Week ceremony.

It's important to keep the stories alive and my art is one way for me to share my stories. Also, I have gained knowledge around what I have been taught from the elders and this is how I am able to share my artwork with my two daughters, May May and Gabiyra, and also with others who are wanting to connect as well.

In 2019, Wayne designed the Premiership ring for the NRL and the base of the statue of Jonathan Thurston which stands in front of the new football stadium in Townsville. More recently, Wayne has produced art for Affinity Diamonds, and others further afield in Spain, Italy, Canada and the United States. One of his paintings hangs on the wall of US Governor Christopher Waller's home.

My art means everything to me, it's showing my country, expressing myself, it's sharing stories from Country. It's who I am. It tells stories and this reflects in my art works. When I paint my body with ochre paint for ceremony I become part of the land. I am connected!

Wayne's interest in learning new stories, his respect for elders and knowledge holders, and his deep appreciation for land make him a sought-after community representative. He collaborates locally on many projects where he shares his culture and stories, recently working with Health Workforce Queensland to share Indigenous cultural ways with recently graduated medical professionals so they have a better understanding of Aboriginal values before working in the community.

Follow @ gatyin_aboriginal_art and like RainbowGatyin.

About Angie Faye Martin

Angie Faye Martin (Kooma/Kamilaroi/European) is a writer/editor now living on Gubbi Gubbi Country (Redcliffe). She has a Bachelor of Public Health, a Masters of Anthropology, and an ever-growing passion for fiction. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, The Rocks Remain and the Saltbush Review. Angie was the recipient of the Inaugural HarperCollins First Nations Commercial Fiction Fellowship in 2019 for an early draft of Melaleuca, a crime thriller which will be published in 2025. Visit versedwritings.com and angiefaye.net.

Aboriginal | G35 | land | painting | Queensland

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Wayne Martin Maranganji ✿ Painting culture, painting country

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Angie Faye Martin connects with her Maranganji cousin, who connects to their shared Country through his art and commissions.

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Measuring up: Public art in Queensland through a craft lens

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Measuring up: Public art in Queensland through a craft lens

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https://garlandmag.com/article/public-art-in-queensland/

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Pamela See

Pamela See writes about public works by Brian Robinson, Bruce Reynolds and Judy Watson where the making is part of the message.

﻿ ﻿
(A message to the reader.)

The development of a civilisation might be measured by the state of its arts. A primary example is the capacity to commit resources to building big sculptures, which serve purposes that are non-material. The first human settlement, in modern-day Turkey, produced not only a temple but also an 180-cm tall sculpture. "Ur Man", named in reference to the state of Ur, is depicted holding his phallus. Carved from limestone and dating back to the ninth century BCE, the figure even has a subterranean foundation which enabled him to freestand. This might be considered a feat of engineering for neolithic man.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Art Built-in was adopted by the Queensland government as a coordinated approach to commissioning public art. "Art practice that occurs outside" of the gallery and museum sector, was the definition officially offered in policy documents. This slate in the state was comparatively clean, notwithstanding memorials to politicians and soldiers or "big" roadside renditions of crops and livestock.

A department would be dedicated to the distribution of funds, which were acquired from a mandatory two per cent allocation of all capital works budgets over $250,000. Espoused was the desire to generate opportunities for artists, designers and craftspeople. Its intended purpose was to foster the creation of art that encapsulated the "natural" and "cultural" histories of the sites. "Built-in" entailed the engagement of "artists" in "project development teams" from "the outset of capital works planning and delivery". The outcomes specified were inclusive of not only "sculpture, painting, or installation" but also "filing and storage items, lighting, door handles [and] carpet".

Regrettably, the reception was less than favourable, with art historian Rex Butler labelling the results as "bogus" and "bland". Amongst the reasons cited were the requirements imposed by committees for the site augmentations to be accessible, affordable and apolitical. It would be difficult to dispute this appraisal. However, the short-lived policy may have had some positive implications for craft practice within the state.

Woven Fish (2003) by Brian Robinson remains a beacon for tourists. The fountains entered the physical and cultural landscape, through the redevelopment of the Cairns Esplanade. In his design, the Maluyligal and Wuthathi artist drew on his upbringing on Waiben (Thursday Island). There, woven coconut palm fronds served a diversity of purposes. These included the construction of: baskets for carrying fish, mats for flooring, and sails for outrigger canoes. This ancient aesthetic, which embodies the enduring resourcefulness and ingenuity of his people, was applied to contemporary stainless steel sheet fabrication.

Art Built-in sought to simultaneously embrace both, in the rhetoric of William Morris's nineteenth-century Art and Craft Movement (ACM), the greater and lesser arts. This policy created pedestals for craft practice. The commissions exposed exquisite beauty in forms that might have otherwise remained unseen due to their ubiquity.

After eight years, it was superseded by the Art+Place program, but many of its governing principles were maintained. The change in policy included the pooling of resources across capital works into a 12 million dollar "global" "Public Art Fund", which was managed by a state curator in consultation with a panel. An extension in scope enabled both the purchase of existing artworks and the embellishment of established precincts.

The Pamphlet (2012) series was built in and about the Brisbane Exhibition and Convention Centre as part of its expansion onto Grey Street. The Australian-born artist with Nigerian heritage, Bruce Reynolds, signposts the significant, yet unsung role, played by Thomas Pamphlet. In the early nineteenth century, the former convict was tasked by John Oxley with taking him to the Brisbane River. This led to the establishment of the Moreton Bay Penal Colony, in which Pamphlet would later be incarcerated. The natural and social histories of the site are investigated through sculpture, hand-carved polyethylene, and linoleum collage.

The invention of linoleum occurred in England during the ACM. In the Victorian Era, the surfaces of furniture were decorated with decoupage. Parity could be found in Reynolds' adornment of polyhedral forms with vitreous enamel prints. They depict the vicinity from an aerial perspective and linoleum patterns from "houses being renovated". The characteristic style of housing referred to as Queenslanders, also evolved in the nineteenth century. The artist established his career by collaging the linoleum flooring he reclaimed from them. Pamphlet also chronicles change from colonial to contemporary times, including making reference to the 2010 Brisbane flood, which inundated South Brisbane.

Since 2010, the information released by the Queensland government about its funding of public art has been limited. However, tow row (2016), which it partially funded, appears to have set a gold standard in public art for the state. The bronze sculpture is permanently positioned at the entrance of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).

Waanyi artist, Judy Watson, drew inspiration from a style of "butterfly" fishing net woven by First Nations women. Although known as "tow row" in South-East Queensland, different versions are utilised in "other places" including Waanyi Country in North-West Queensland. Watson recounted seeing, "...one used on a remote outstation near Maningrida when I was working with the women at the community up there in the late 1990's." In turn, Watson invited Quandamooka emerging artist Elisa Jane Carmichael to fashion a net from "string" that she and multiple people collectively made with raffia and jersey material. It was then positioned across Watson's sculptural form and cast. According to Watson, the delicate appearance of these nets belies their "hidden" strength. She has engaged this form as a symbol for the "resilience" of First Nations people amidst "adversity".

From "Ur Man" to obelisks, the capacity to craft monumental, non-utilitarian structures, appears a litmus of cultural development. The Queensland government may have, arguably, been a late arrival to this table. The initial outcomes of its policy were also met with resistance from its citizens. However, its controversial approach distinctly elevated functional forms with ethnographic value. In some cases, the engagement of endemic and traditional techniques of fabrication was symbolic. Whilst their effectiveness as art might be contentious, their service to craft in making spectacles of skills which are often overlooked, is clear. By this measure, public art in Queensland may have set a precedent.

Further reading

Art Gallery of New South Wales. (n.d.). Judy Watson. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/watson-judy/

Art Gallery of South Australia. (n.d.). Brian Robinson - Patterns & Pop Culture. https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/education/resources-educators/resources-educators-themed/reconciliation-week/brian-robinson-patterns-and-pop-culture/

Arts Queensland. (2007). Art+Place: Policy Framework. Government Printer.

Arts Queensland. (2007). Queensland Public Art Fund: Guide for Applicants. Government Printer.

Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. (n.d.). Queensland and Brisbane 2010-11 Floods. Australian Government. https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/flood-queensland-2010-2011/

Betts, A. (2016, December 2). GOMA Turns 10: The Story Behind tow row, Judy Watsons's Bronze Fishing Net Sculpture. ABC Radio National. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-02/tow-row-judy-watson-fishing-net-sculpture-goma-turns-10/8082646

Bevan, R. (2018, August 3). Turkey's Göbekli Tepe: is this the World's First Architecture? The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2018/08/03/turkeys-gobekli-tepe-is-this-the-worlds-first-architecture

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. (n.d.). The BCEC Art Collection. https://www.bcec.com.au/visit/art-collection/

Butler, Rex W. (2003, June 7). Bogus Art: A Policy to Fund Public Art. The Courier Mail.

Contour 556. (2022). Bruce Reynolds. Canberra Art Biennial. https://canberraartbiennial.com/artist/bruce-reynolds/

Gross, L. (2018, March 19). The Evolution of Linoleum. Hagley Museum and Library. https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/evolution-linoleum

Hornibrook, J. H. (1967). Pamphlett, Thomas (1789-1838), Australian Dictionary of Biography. National University. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/pamphlett-thomas-2536/text3443

Indigenous Knowledge Institute. (n.d.). Weaving Designs into Local Materials. University of Melbourne. https://indigenousknowledge.unimelb.edu.au/curriculum/resources/weaving-design-into-local-materials

Martin-Chew, L. (2022). Bruce Reynolds Resists the Pretension of Art. Arts Guide Australia. https://artguide.com.au/bruce-reynolds-resists-the-pretension-of-art/

Martin-Chew, L. (2011). Profile: Mr Linoleum. Green: Sustainable Architecture and Landscape Design, (22), 18-20. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.543489061674053

McClean, B. (2017). The Story of Judy Watson's 'tow row'. https://blog.qagoma.qld.gov.au/the-story-of-judy-watsons-tow-row/

McNiven, I. (2015). Goemulgaw Lagal: Natural and Cultural Histories of the Island of Mabuyag, Torres Strait. In (Eds.McNiven, I., & Hitchcock, G.). Memoirs of the Queensland Museum. (Part 8. Volume 2.) Queensland Museum. https://www.museum.qld.gov.au/collections-and-research/memoirs/culture-8

Morris, W. (1882). "The Lesser Arts of Life", in Lectures on Art Delivered in Support for the Society of Protection of Ancient Buildings (pp. 174-232). Macmillan and Co.

Newell, P. (1979). The Origins and Development of the Queensland House. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 10(4), 18-28.

Public Art Agency. (2004). Art Built-in Creating Better Public Places: Policy & Guidelines. Queensland Government.

Public Art Online. (n.d.). Art+Place. https://publicartonline.org.uk/resources/practicaladvice/policiesguidance/policies_outside_uk/artandplace.php.html

QAGOMA. (n.d.). Judy Watson '"tow row". https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibition/tow-row/

Turkish Museums. (2020, 17 August). Do You Know the World's First Life-Sized Human Statue? https://turkishmuseums.com/blog/detail/do-you-know-the-world-s-first-life-sized-human-statue/10012/4

Urban Art Projects. (n.d.). Elisa Jane Carmichael. https://www.uapcompany.com/projects/water-is-life

G34 | Pamela See | Queensland | street

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Measuring up: Public art in Queensland through a craft lens

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Pamela See writes about public works by Brian Robinson, Bruce Reynold and Judy Watson where the making is part of the message.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/capybara/

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Yolanda Pocetti reintroduces the world’s largest rodent to the busy commuters of Tigre.

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Cabramatta: The nostalgic poetry of Asian shops

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Cabramatta: The nostalgic poetry of Asian shops

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https://garlandmag.com/article/cabramatta-the-nostalgic-poetry-of-asian-shops/

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Bic Tieu

Bic Tieu casts her childhood memories of a Sydney Indo-Chinese suburb.

I like to park up high in the Dutton Lane carpark each time I visit Cabramatta. I get lovely vistas of blue skies and clouds touching the rooftops of shopping centres. It overlooks the Gough Whitlam Place, a public space honouring the former prime minister's work and the strong connection he had with Cabramatta. I wonder if the migrant community is aware of this history. Nonetheless, it has become a popular gathering site for playing xiangqi Chinese chess. As you look around there are traces of oriental green and red roof architecture poking out between buildings. I imagine a sleeping dragon nestled in-between.

A significant cultural asset of Cabramatta is the large ornamental Pailau Gateway guarded by two large bronze lions in the town's centre. Accompanying these are stone and cement statues of the ox and calf, horse and turtle. They reference freedom, beauty and longevity. Look closer to the Pailau Gateway and you can see that koalas, kangaroos and eucalyptus motifs have been embedded into the design. Celebrating East and West through a visual design is also an aesthetic I like to convey in metal.

These tangible cultural features in Cabramatta's central business district echo familiarity with the homeland for many Chinese and Vietnamese migrant populations. They celebrate the culture through traditional visual motifs and language. I like the mythical reference and auspicious meanings connecting these symbols. In particular, the ornamental patterns that appear within the architecture. I was really inspired by the amount of sky in the photographic street documentation of Cabramatta. Clouds are a popular motif used in East-Asian popular culture and these lines and scrolls have been worked in as a structural backdrop to narrate some of the objects I am making.

By compositionally placing various scroll clouds in a visual graphic. The network of lines allowed enough space between negative and positive to allow for the layering of motifs to integrate into the visual dialogue. Popular imagery including Chinese characteristics, floral blossoms, and illustrations of animals is integrated. These are continuously constructed slowly forming a bowl vessel. I like that the cloud lines can metaphorically reference olfactory imagery associated with scent. This concept is very fitting for Cabramatta as it is a place associated with food. Even the council welcome sign greets with 'Discover Cabramatta A Taste of Asia'.

Cabramatta's streetscape offers a plethora of visual scenes. As you move between John Street, Park Road, Dutton Lane and Hugh Street, amidst arcades and laneways, it is bustling with mixed businesses one after another. As I walk through with my friend photographer, I am reminded of the days when our family did our weekly shop carrying bags of shopping for Mum. Our family knew a lot of the business owners. They were there at a time when many of the Chinese-Vietnamese started their own businesses in the 1980s. My grandfather used to frequent the Tan Hong Phat BBQ shop. He helped the Tan Hong Phat BBQ revise their recipe. Right until he died in the early 90s, he received lots of pork and duck as a gestural thank you. In his other life, he prepared and sold roast duck in Vietnam before arriving in Australia. Places like this allow me to imagine what life for my grandfather would have been like, a street kiosk of hanging ducks, a wooden board and a cleaver.

John Street is lined with street vendors, bá (older women) selling home-grown veggies across footpaths, lucky gift shops overwhelmingly filled with all sorts of red colours charms greeted by rows of the maneki neko kow towing as you enter. All kinds of hanging accessories to bring in luck in time for the Lunar New Year. Of course, I have to mention all the enticing snacks food and long queues for popular sugar cane juice, mochi cakes and recent establishment artisan tofu by Hòa Húng . Multiple shopping bags filled with fresh produce in hands everywhere. I cannot help but capture this into metal.

Cabramatta is one of the few places in Sydney other than Bankstown or Canterbury where you would find it rare to hear the English language. My family can easily converse in Chinese Teo Chew or Vietnamese. The majority of people shopping at Cabramatta are from Indo-Chinese countries. The Vietnamese community is the largest population, followed by the Chinese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Thai people. For this reason, you can see why shop signs are communicated in multiple languages.

Imported product labels are also expressed in multiple languages for the Asian market in Australia. I particularly love the graphics on food packaging. Harmonious characters and lettering sharing the same space represent a lovely metaphor for the different ethnic groups sharing the same place. This physical aspect of Cabramatta inspired the way I incorporate text and imagery together. I liked what these junctions suggested when expressed in metal as a visual graphic. Essentially, I am trying to capture the cultural vernacular of the place.

It is common to come across arcades and food packaging with cultural references. Traditional historical characters like Chinese scholars are found on rice vermicelli packaging, heavenly references of clouds, mythical motifs and floral patterns. Shop names "Lucky Plaza" and food brands like, "Golden Swallow" are associated with auspicious images using homophones to depict family gatherings and harmony. The nostalgia of "going to market" with my family for a meal or doing the grocery. The notion of a deity as a heavenly god inspired ways of composing floating images of bitter melon, Chinese characters and Vietnamese lettering on clouds in metal.

I would cut out and cast in metal food imagery; bitter melon, coriander, durian, mangoes, and in text, Vietnamese words; còm, phò, and cultural objects like clouds, bowls, lanterns. I slowly solder them into sheet forms. From the sheet form, the metal would undergo further shaping and construction to achieve the final form. I use a ball pein hammer and raw hide mallet to shape, raise and sink the sheet metal to create the bowl form.

Businesses come and go, but Cabramatta still holds the same atmosphere, chaos and nostalgia. The streets are concentrated with eating joints and displays to entice. Shops are crammed with goods overflowing onto the street fronts. I find the stacked compositions and overflowing boxes of seasonal fruits and vegetables lively and inspiring. It's summer now so mangoes, durian, dragon fruit, bitter melon, and seasonal greens all competing for spaces and finding their way into the visual composition I construct. Like graphic tokens before they become assembled objects. Cast metal allows me to distil and hold these memories to express my experiences with Cabramatta. As I work through the bowl (one in a series of four), I hope it can converse with time, space and place for community and intergenerational migrants of a shared experience.

Further reading

Gapp, Stephen. 2009. Cabrogal to Fairfield City: A History of a Multicultural Community. Fairfield City Museum and Gallery.

About Bic Tieu

Her works draw on traditional and contemporary craft and design methods inspired by her Asian and Australian cultural lineages to investigate themes of personal and cross-cultural narratives. Specialising in metal technologies, manufacturing processes, and traditional Vietnamese and Japanese lacquer, her practice often utilises a synthesis of these materials to create new perspectives on contemporary object-making and meanings. Follow Bic Tieu is a designer, object maker and jeweller. @bictieustudio and visit www.bictieu.com.
Bic Tieu would like to acknowledge that the material cost for this project was funded by the UNSW School of Art and Design 2023 Research Grant Scheme.

Bic Tieu | G34 | safe harbour | street | Sydney | Vietnam

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Cabramatta: The nostalgic poetry of Asian shops

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Bic Tieu casts her childhood memories of a Sydney Indo-Chinese suburb.

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Street Sweepers: Adornment for outside care

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Street Sweepers: Adornment for outside care

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https://garlandmag.com/article/street-sweepers/

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Anke Kindle

Anke Kindle pays homage to the invisible labour of street cleaners with a jewellery practice that turns brushes into jewels.

(A message to the reader.)

Street Sweepers is my ongoing collaborative jewellery project with Melbourne's Street Sweeping fraternity. The project contains a photographic component which is shown alongside custom-designed jewellery objects. The photographs document the street sweeping machines and in particular focus on close-ups of the brushes and mechanisms that animate the machines.

I conceived this project to illustrate and document the otherwise unseen work and labour of the street sweepers and to translate metrics into precious, wearable jewellery works that are closely linked to the body as a means of contemplating work that is industrial yet knowledgeable and intricate in its own right.

Jewellery and, in particular, the tactility of brushes was used as an intimate form of object that allows the viewer to focus closely and intimately on the various aspects of labour allowing for touch and contemplation.

Street Sweepers took the form of an exhibition that was first shown at Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne in October of 2023. The exhibition took place in the intimate setting of a small gallery space approximately 6 x 4 metres. Each wall displayed a distinct and unique series of jewellery pieces to create a story which I will discuss in more detail here.

The western wall sported a series of five neckpieces together with five photographs that showed different street sweeping machines as well as close-ups of these machines. The noticeable feature of the photographs was a keyhole mechanism that allocated the brush platform to be mounted onto the rotating machine part. The brushes are a pale industrial yellow and are angled outwards.

All these seemingly small features found their elements in the design work as a basis for the jewellery pieces.

The jewellery pieces are a saw-pierced elongated silver ellipse with keyhole details also pierced into the silver. Three neckpieces feature brushes in industrial yellow that are made from horsehair and bound into industrial-coloured nylon. The brushes slide up and down in the keyhole track to reiterate the moving part of the street sweeper machines. Two neckpieces are plain silver with keyhole details to emphasise the machine's beautiful and engineeringly ingenious locating mechanism.

Each neckpiece has a lanyard in black and yellow cotton which plays on the colour of barrier tape and the high-vis devices that are often used when observing parts of the street sweeping machines. This colour scheme is further repeated in the brush plate covering the neckpieces' brush component.

The northern wall showed five rings together with five different makes of street sweeping machines. This series was entitled Sweepers Portraits. Each ring carried the title of a different make of street sweeping machines such as the German-made "Bucher" and "Schwarz" vehicles for instance, and the English "Mac Donald Johnson" sweeper.

For the street sweeper portraits, each container that captures the debris is translated into miniature a container ring with accompanying industrial fastening mechanisms. The intimacy of the rings allows for contemplation of the machine's ingenious engineering idiosyncrasies as well as the labour that is conducted daily cleaning our city streets. Each architectural block was carved from a synthetic stone in a colour of grayscale varying from light grey to anthracite grey.

The synthetic stone containers were riveted and set in folded sterling silver. Four rings were solid forms set in a folded sterling bezel the fifth ring was folded 9K yellow gold and did not show an architectural container shape but was left in an open folded state. This ring was entitled "Empty" and sat alongside a derelict street sweeper photograph in contrast to the four functioning solid forms.

The eastern wall focused on three brooches each with custom dyed blue fibres as sweeper brooms. This work featured the angled brooms of the street sweeping machines and the industrial colour of the brooms as well as the black and yellow barrier tape that is often found on the moving parts of the vehicle to warn of the dangers and harms of rotational movement.

I am fascinated with their movement. All the brushes in this brooch series move up and down and rotate around their own axis as a nod to the kinetic nature of the street sweeper machines.

Accompanying the three brooches were two cone-shaped rings with yellow bristles that repeated the splayed form of the machine's brushes. This makes the broom an easily recognisable, symbolic and vital part of the street sweeping process.

The broader motivation to use brushes in my work stems from several reasons. I consider the brush as a political object that has the potential to explore ideas of labour both labour that is visible and labour that is not seen. The second reason to use brushes in the context of jewellery is the engineering ingenuity of the brush itself. The simple strength of the construction and the tactility of the object. This has led me to explore the brush as an object of jewellery that becomes closely linked to the body and quite intimate when worn on the body.

Lastly, the space contained a central table that showed two neckpieces both coherent with the graphic nature of the wall works yet also quite different in subject matter to each other.

One neckpiece sported two angled large red brushes fastened to a caterpillar-like, triangular shape. This piece looks most like a reconfigured and re-interpreted street sweeper machine with its angled, splayed brushes that are attached to a container.

The final piece discussed here was an anodised aluminium necklace that played on the industrial barrier tape of yellow and black.

This piece consisted of 34 triangular, anodised aluminium shapes that were centrally riveted together and moved in an articulated fashion like a lizard or snake skin in an elegant yet graphic, industrial way.

Through the Street Sweepers project and the accompanying jewellery work that resulted from careful research, I intended to present street sweeping not solely as an industrial process but as an act of care. It is an act of care for both each other and the planet we inhabit, celebrating the small gestures we can all contribute to ensure a healthy world.

About Anke Kindle

Anke Kindle is a Melbourne-based jewellery and object designer. She is the founder and head of a small jewellery workshop located in the inner North of Melbourne called S T U D I O B L A U. Studio Blau has been in operation since 2020. The studio has a strong investigative focus and is currently undertaking research that will lead to new work in the upcoming future. Follow @ studio_blau

G34 | jewellery | Melbourne | street

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Street Sweepers: Adornment for outside care

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Anke Kindle pays homage to the invisible labour of street cleaners with a jewellery practice that turns brushes into jewels.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/charters-towers/

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The Charters Towers' Wall of History returns past glory to a legendary country town.

The idea of a mosaic commission came to Paul McIver while renovating a pool in a newly bought house in Brisbane. Looking for an artwork to place at the bottom, he found a mosaic factory and was impressed with the one-metre circular image they produced. Then having purchased paintings by Peter Lawson (descendent of iconic Australian writer Henry Lawson), he decided to re-create them in mosaic for his development at Charters Towers, Goldtower Central. Emboldened by this achievement, he then determined to create a mosaic telling the town's history along the wall of Poppet Plaza, facing the Flinders Highway. For McIver, this promoted the concept of "LIve Charters Towers": "I wanted to promote a vibrant place where there was community pride."

The Charters Towers' Wall of History is the longest mosaic mural in Australia. The 80-metre-long artwork consists of over five million individual tiles. It cost around half a million dollars. The ambition behind the commission reflects the glory of the town's past.

Charters Towers was established in the 1870s after a local Aboriginal Jupiter Mosman discovered gold in a local creek. The population swelled to 30,000 and many grand buildings were constructed that are part of its heritage today. It was referred to as "The World", meaning that you could find everything there. Charters Towers even traded with London on the stock exchange. While it is still a regional centre, including three private boarding schools, as well as three state primary schools and a state high school, the population today is only around 12,000.

With the assistance of historian Michael Brumby, the team gathered a variety of images from the archives and other scenes such as the Pioneer Cemetery. Scenes included an Aboriginal cricket team and a Chinese Gardener watering vegetables. The third panel shows underground miners next to a bank. "It shows the miners propping up the economy." McIver was especially touched by the gravestone in the Pioneer Cemetery of a woman who died soon after the successive deaths of her children, "The purpose is to tell a history long into the future."

These were commissioned to an artist, Trisha Lambi, who rendered them into eight images. These images were then sent to a partner factory in Asia which translated them into 10 x 10 mm ceramic tiles. McIver was impressed with their skill, "They cut round tiles for the eyes which they fitted into the grid." Each painting took up to six to eight weeks to produce and was hand-laid in the factory.

In Charters Towers, the tiles were adhered to 300 x 300cm panels using a special mosaic grout that absorbs the surrounding colour of the adjacent tile. Local tilers then fixed the mosaic to the wall. A bronze plaque was placed in front of each scene, telling its story. Tania Ault of the local Gudjala nation designed the border trims and a wall was constructed with flags of all the nations represented in the town's history.

One interesting decision was to colourise the images from the archive. McIver wanted it to catch the eye, "I wanted vibrant colours. People don't always engage with sepia colours."

One of these images features a family in historical costume. That actually is McIver's own family in costume taken at the Sovereign Hill open-air museum. "We couldn't find a family image in the archive." In this way, the present folds into the past, bringing history alive.

G34 | mosaic | Queensland | street

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The Charters Towers' Wall of History returns past glory to a legendary country town.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/the-healing-wall/

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Jane du Rand

Through her wall mosaic, Jane du Rand brings the healing power of the Spring Mountain White Rock Conservation Estate to the Ipswich Mental Health Unit.

Approaching Ipswich Mental Health Unit, you find a tall concrete wall, lined with horizontal rock strata in terracotta on which grows new life. Delicate creatures are contained in circular pods, symbolising protection. Green shots grow out of the rock face suggesting resilience and hope. Birds look out from the hollows within the rock face, ready to take off and fly.

The mosaicist behind this work offers her perspective.

✿ What was the brief for this commission?

I chose to try to represent my response to the local environment. Spring Mountain White Rock Conservation Estate was chosen as a reference because it is a place I often go to bush walk and the rock formations there are unique to the Ipswich area. The birds I represented in the mural are all the birds I see often living in the Ipswich area, and so giving the work a local connection to Country.

The brief was quite extensive and multifaceted, the work was required to enrich the public spaces of the hospital, provide staff, patients, families and visitors a visual reprieve and sources of distraction and inspiration, and profile the talents of artists with connections to the West Moreton region.

The curatorial themes to respond to were Country, how the love of place shapes humans, conforming us to the topography and design of the landscapes and buildings we inhabit. In belonging to a particular place, we feel a sense of rightness and as if there is space to breathe. The individual characteristics of places are vital in determining quality of life and well-being. In the West Moreton catchment, the beauty and diversity of the natural environment combine with rich Indigenous and settler histories to provide inspiration. Artists are asked to think deeply about the diverse experiences of the people who will occupy this place and to respond with concepts that will help ground and orient them.

Healthcare facilities can be sobering places, but they are also environments full of triumph, courage, and compassion. A healing environment is a place in which people are supported through treatment and recovery. Essential to healing are feelings of safety, well-being, and community. Artists involved in the Ipswich MHU Art Program are asked to recognise that entering the facility, especially for the first time, might be intimidating. Artworks will be part of an overarching model of care which seeks to ameliorate that experience.

During periods of treatment and recovery, we rely on connection as a natural and poignant impulse. We tell each other our stories to help us consider the past, present, and future; to embrace the change and acceptance necessary for healing; and to comfort and inspire. Artists should consider the backgrounds of the people who will be treated in or who work for the health service; to unlock surprising or forgotten histories; and to reveal and celebrate everyday lives. This theme links to the spirit of community surrounding the hospital. Artists are asked to reflect on that community in order to deliver outcomes that are meaningful to the people the hospital serves.

I chose to try to represent my response to the local environment. Spring Mountain White Rock Conservation Estate was chosen as a reference because it is a place I often go to bush walk and the rock formations there are unique to the Ipswich area. The birds I represented in the mural are all the birds I see often living in the Ipswich area, so giving the work a local connection to Country.

✿ What was the greatest challenge in realising this work?

The greatest challenge of realising this work was the installation process. To install the work, I needed to be able to reach up to a height of 11 meters and there was very limited access at the base of the wall making the use of a scissor lift impossible. After much deliberation, consultation and many site visits, I decided I had to use an extra long reaching boom lift which was parked off to one side and find someone who had the skills and the licence to both drive the boom lift and help drill hundreds of holes in the concrete wall to anchor the steelwork. I was able to contract the services of Jamal Gittens of Beyond Events and Expo Services who assisted with the installation.

I made the work in my studio where I was fortunate to have many enthusiastic volunteers ready to help put things together. I also had a fabulous intern, Susan Trimble, who assisted with the ceramic pieces.
Photographs by Louis Lim
About Jane du Rand

An alumna of the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa, Jane du Rand is internationally recognised for her large-scale ceramic mosaics commissioned for public buildings and private homes in Europe, the UK, the USA, South Africa and Australia. Awarded "Best of Show" at the 2017 Ipswich Art Award, she was a finalist in the 2020 Queensland Regional Art Awards, the 2018 Ipswich Art Award, and the Mercedes Benz Award for South African Art Projects in Public Spaces in 2009. Her solo exhibition South-African-born, Ipswich-based Jane du Rand uses her art practice to document and better understand the world around her, building three-dimensional landscapes that feature the native flora and fauna she encounters while bushwalking west of Brisbane. Having made note of everything she's seen while hiking, she recreates these scenes using a combination of ceramic and mosaic techniques. Presented under glass cloches, they are reminiscent of the dioramas found in natural history museums - a contemporary sculptural version of the early natural history illustrations and specimen displays that existed in the Victorian era. Originally trained as an architect, du Rand's practice also extends to large-scale mosaic murals, with her intricate designs incorporated into the architecture of civic and private buildings around the world. Living in Ipswich was presented at Ipswich Art Gallery in 2020. Visit www.durandmosaic.com follow @ jane_du_rand

G34 | mosaic | Queensland | street

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Through her wall mosaic, Jane du Rand brings the healing power of the Spring Mountain White Rock Conservation Estate to the Ipswich Mental Health Unit.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/healing-country/

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Francesca Bussey writes about listening and talking about mosaics, middens, and that which is bigger than all of us.

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Petersham Escarpment: The mountain comes to the city

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Petersham Escarpment: The mountain comes to the city

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https://garlandmag.com/article/the-petersham-escarpment/

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Petersham Escarpment: The mountain comes to the city

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Through the mysterious alchemy of the kiln, Simon Reece brings the landscape of the majestic Blue Mountains to an inner urban plaza.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/a-bin-chicken-redemption/

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Kevin Murray

Napam is a street artist who lends her unique migrant perspective to walls for everyone to enjoy.

Strolling along a quaint side street in the vibrant Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, you encounter a striking sight: a leopard lithely adorning the wall of a Victorian house. As you turn the corner, you are met with the object of its pursuit: a bird mockingly referred to as a "bin chicken." The juxtaposition is intriguing.

Napam was born in Antwerp to a Belgian mother and a Vietnamese father. Her journey in street art began through a community program, but she soon realised that opportunities were limited in Belgium. After relocating to Brunswick, she sought to unleash her creativity and posted a request on a local Facebook group for a blank wall to serve as her canvas. A local, Emilie, a painter from France, generously offered her grey wall, providing Napam with complete creative freedom.

The engagement with the community and the street itself was an aspect of her art that Napam cherished. She found joy in the reactions of passersby, who would observe her work in progress and offer their interpretations. Additionally, she aimed to make a statement through her art, particularly with the depiction of the "bin chicken" bird.

"I was in Sydney for three months and I saw all these birds that I thought were so pretty. Then someone told me, 'Oh no, those are ugly, birds. We call them "bin chickens". I was like, why they're so beautiful. They reminded me of ancient Egypt."

Despite facing opposition from some local street artists who disapproved of purely decorative murals, Napam remained steadfast in her commitment to brightening and enlivening public spaces.

Notably, Napam's decision to portray the bird picking a flower instead of its typical prey was a deliberate choice to honour its beauty and challenge preconceived notions. Her art is not just about aesthetics; it carries meaning and seeks to provoke thought.

While some artists may aspire to showcase their work in traditional galleries, Napam finds fulfilment in being part of the neighbourhood's living gallery. She values the spontaneous interactions and connections that arise from sharing her art in public spaces, embracing the diverse audience that such settings attract.

"The street of the neighbourhood, that is your gallery. Every day people who won't walk into an exhibition will see your mural."

The house owner Emilie, finds the mural continues to connect her to the rest of her street:

"We have a nature strip and when I do a bit of gardening in front of the house, people stop by and tell me, "Ah, I really like your leopard."

As a result, she now knows more of her neighbours and, critically, the work has not been tagged.

Napam's journey as a street artist is a testament to her commitment to community engagement and challenging perceptions through art. Her story exemplifies the power of street art to spark conversations and foster connections within urban environments.

Follow @ napamgraff

G34 | Melbourne | mural | safe harbour | street

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Napam is a street artist who lends her unique migrant perspective to walls for everyone to enjoy.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/city-canvas/

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Sharon Tsang-de Lyster

Sharon Tsang-de Lyster's project allows refugees in Hong Kong to make their stories public through murals.

Max was my first refugee friend when I was a teenager in the UK. He had met some of my friends, Zeb and Theo, in a park in Manchester. He was 15, spoke simple English but excellent football. He was smart, passionate, and determined. It took a few months for me to realise beneath the charming smile and skilful footwork were layers of horrific memories from West Africa, and beneath all that was this unbelievable power of forgiveness and hope. He went on to become Zeb and Theo's adopted brother, playing for a local football club, and opening an outdoor fitness training centre. His talent has always been out there in public, only seen when there was an audience.

The rising number of displaced people in the world has amounted to an estimated 114 million as of October 2023. Across countries and neighbourhoods, refugees and asylum seekers are encountering walls of barriers to accessing welfare services, employment and social connections. Refugees have dramatic life encounters, having fled their homes to a new society, often bringing them traumatising experiences. They have limited platforms to express themselves, and most of the public remains unaware of their existence and stories. Yet, it only takes a moment of curiosity and trust to discover shared interests and perhaps a new friendship, like Max with Zeb and Theo.

For World Refugee Day 2023, I partnered with UNHCR-Hong Kong to produce the first City Canvas project which showcased stories of refugee individuals and their rich cultures in collaboration with local mural artists. Rather than building walls, we want to present them on walls across the city. The project essentially paired refugee individuals and artists in the city to share about each other's cultures and passions, from in-depth conversations over a meal to cooking a traditional dish together to introducing heritage design patterns or a language lesson. Everyone involved learned something new and gained a more profound respect for each other's experiences and cultures.

Artist Taka and I met up with a refugee woman, Joy*, from Rwanda whose family business was entangled with political opposition. Our conversation quickly surveyed the proud culture of Rwanda: the sacred cow, the traditional dance, the jewellery, the imigongo patterns, the language, and the food. There are quite a few Rwandans in Hong Kong, but they often blend into the wider African community when presented in arts and cultural performances. Bringing in more research, Taka crafted a complex and finely-rendered mural to thoughtfully fill a hoarding surface along a scope at a busy road. He explains the concepts worked into the creation: An abstract human face to represent the metaphor for life (and survival), the Kigali Skylines including the landmarks Kigali City Tower and Kigali Convention Center, the cassava plant pattern to represent Rwanda's name as "Land of a thousand hills", the sun in the national flag and rose as the national flower, the iconic Imigongo patterns, cow horns, and the connecting lines around all these depicting the helping and caring culture described by Joy.

Painted on the facade of the Vine Church is "Table" by Erin Hung, which reflected on her experience with Basem*, who causally made a profound comment, "We are all humankind". Having been a targeted journalist, Basem endured death threats and attacks in Egypt and eventually fled to Hong Kong a decade ago. Erin recalls, "Basem suggested that we meet over curry at Chungking Mansions and took us to a place he frequented called 'Moti Palace', where the wait staff knew his preferences and diet. In this setting, I saw the heaviness of our topic of conversation lift as we eased into the comfort of food and a setting of safety. In speaking with Basem, one thing that jumped out at me was his appreciation of food and how he seemed to light up when he talked about cooking and the sharing of food. We spent a good amount of time learning about Egyptian cuisine and what he considered a taste of home. This inspired me to consider how different cuisines are parallel to how we perceive people of other nations. It can sometimes feel threatening (like how I expressed that I didn't like my food too spicy) and requires an open mind to try and take a taste. It can feel similar when we hear a story of trauma and suffering from another that threatens our status quo of comfort. Are we willing to take a bite and see it from the other's point of view? In further exploring this analogy, I named it the "Table illustration" because we gather around it for food, but we also invite others to our table. Having a seat at the table means being an equal, having our voices heard and our personhood deeply known beyond labels."

Davido* is a refugee who enthusiastically supported the project. Over a coffee, illustrator Bo Law and I had a chance to hear the details of his experience before and after displacement, and the physical and psychological challenges when facing persecution and isolation. Yet, he is among the most social people I have ever known. To honour this honest exchange and new friendship, Bo worked it into his signature whale figure and created an incredibly dynamic painting currently on display at the Eaton Hotel in Hong Kong.

In Bo's words, "When we encounter something new, we can first observe what is unique about it and what information it provides to understand its essence. We accumulate experiences bit by bit, like puzzle pieces slowly forming a shape, creating a unique impression of that thing in our minds. This is my understanding of the process of building relationships. Davido faced discrimination and unfair treatment in his life, community, and country due to his homosexuality since childhood, which prevented him from having the opportunity to establish relationships and made him a stateless refugee. Life is about relationships and experiencing them intimately with others and ideas. Due to his sexual preference, Davido was isolated and forbidden from forming relationships with people and things since childhood. When there are no relationships with others and things, life loses its meaning, as if one does not exist in the world. In just a few hours of conversation, Davido's optimistic, colourful vitality left a strong impression on me. I was surprised that he did not idealise life or avoid forming relationships but simply yearned for basic respect and the opportunity to build relationships. In reality, he is just like you and me, an optimistic, positive, normal person. This piece is the image of Davido in my mind after building a relationship with him-my Davido. Through this experience, I hope that one day he will no longer feel like a caged bird, but instead soar freely in the complex world as Davido."

Other participating artists include Francesco Lietti and Tony Cheung who learned to cook a dish with a refugee, and Kristopher Ho who represented the refugee-formed United Asian Cricket Club. Beyond the physical mural outcomes, the making process of City Canvas held significant new human connections with genuine emotions and dreams on behalf of an otherwise stranger.

Through these paintings on walls, some refugees are made visible. I hope that they are windows to deeper curiosity and appreciation of the many cultures and experiences represented across the refugee community in the city of Hong Kong.

Learn more about the project at www.unhcr.org/hk/en/city-canvas-project

*To protect the personal privacy of the refugee, pseudonyms are used.

About Sharon Tsang-de Lyster

I'm an independent researcher for design and craft practices in developmental contexts and the founder of studio Narrative Made and digital platform The Textile Atlas. Partnering with grassroots artisan communities, brands and non-profits, I plan, organise and direct effective cultural design programs that encourage quality production, ethical sourcing and respectful storytelling. Current projects include working with the Kharnak youths in Ladakh, India, through my new organisation, Craft Frontiers Foundation. Visit www.sharontdl.com/ and follow @narrative.made

G34 | safe harb | Sharon Tsang-de Lyster | street

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Sharon Tsang-de Lyster's project allows refugees in Hong Kong to make their stories public through murals.

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Performing muggu: Art where home and street meet

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Performing muggu: Art where home and street meet

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https://garlandmag.com/article/muggu/

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Kaustav Chatterjee

Kaustav Chatterjee pays homage to the practice of decorating thresholds and the way it fosters local community life.

(A message to the reader.)

Any metropolitan city in India with a population of more than four million has enclosed narrow lanes which are mostly owned by the residents in many ways, whether it is extending the building part into the street or having winter chitchat in the mid-sun. These all other tangible-intangible human actions are happening in the inner streets which are free from the bombarded constructions of the metro railway along the high road. In such intimate lanes, away from the high road, where someone can walk without the fear of a giant truck behind, someone is carefully drawing the street/floor, muggulu.

Muggu or muggulu (plural) is a prevalent practice of ephemeral floor design with decorative patterns in some parts of southern India (in some parts known as "kolam") that has been transmitted by generations and is a crossroads of local knowledge and visual vocabulary. A particular visual art form is usually performed by women on the threshold of a house. It is traditionally done by washing, staining the floor with cow dung, then drawing the lines, dots, and geometric forms with rice flour and sometimes with other crushed colourful edible materials, as it is supposed to be eaten by ants and birds, get walked on, blown away in the wind throughout the day, as a recurring process for making a new one the next day.

I live in a lane in a city with many lanes in southern India, where muggu in the streets in front of every house is a life practice, a significant cultural idiom. My first interaction with muggu is sudden, leaping the design over to keep it intact while entering into a house over the legacy of local epics to historical intercontinental translocalization.

I just entered the lanes of a closed neighbourhood, walking by the streets, smelling the spicy air around a fast food corner, hearing the machine sound from a tailor shop, the metallic sound of a barber's busy scissors and seeing the series of muggu designs on the streets, being careful (about history or the piece of art?), not to destroy this outdoor museum. My encounter in a certain location as a practising artist questions the nuances of academic art endeavours toward more non-anthropogenic norms. Practising art/craft on the streets that is tremendously ephemeral opens up multiple (a)venues of disownment and performing life.

Embodiment and Action

The tenets of performing life in a metropolitan city are conceived in terms of the widely acclaimed idea of development blooming into highrise buildings and highways, and theme parks where the idea of street rises up to the sky. The city of Hyderabad is on the same path. Dr Baishali Ghosh has penned the historiography of the contemporaneity of its streets and transformation in her chapter titled "Thinking through the Residual Shrines on the Roads of SEZ Hyderabad". While the streetscape of the city is in construction, I am looking at changing the streetscape through an act of gestural mark-making as experienced with hand and body by the maker and viewer at the Entry/exit of a home and the street. So far, this proposes a making of art by the street, of the street, for the street, or, often said inward "street art" (?) by the women who cook and care for the interior world.

I grew up seeing women performing/ making "alpona" in a different process in eastern India as floor designs or decorating/embodying the street to the home. The very designs are interlocating in other mediums and also in needlework by women. There are multiple practices of floor designing in all the different locations with different names throughout the Indian subcontinent majorly recognized as the action of "Shubha"/Auspicious. Here muggulu is believed to bring prosperity to the household, welcoming the world inside that is being co-habitated by the pluriverse of humanism. It presents a transpersonal site on the street during the making process while exchanging emotions with the exterior world every day. Though it is not the only access to the street for them, women eventually, just after making the muggu, take their bags and leave for work outside by crossing over their recreated interior on the street.

Sunitha Ji, a woman who helps my rented apartment's owner lady with everyday household work, is responsible for making the muggu in front of our house every morning after washing away yesterday's design. In the morning while I leave my room to reach my destination, she does her Muggu on the street, following her unique energetic gesture through new exclusive designs every day. I used to have small interactions and leave while she was still making. After that, she must complete her assigned work and then also leave for another house to do the same job. Another neighbour, Anjali, an old lady, has a whole copy full of muggu designs that she has been drawing and collecting to decorate the street for generations. It is such an embodied knowledge practice that travels from mother to daughter whom I meet on the street while they are making, maybe in a mere morning or on a brilliant festival evening. Muggu became a major tool for performing aesthetics and perceiving streets as multisensory experiences.

Enacting the Cosmic

Experiencing the street has to deal with people. How about art? What about enacting art in public that is not street art, but art on the street done with cosmic dust, organic to chemical? It does not increase the economic value of a neighbourhood, but it can be practised silently against the evolving demographic composition and potential displacement of residents. Formally, it is done on a yellow-stained (cow dung) floor with the white of rice flour, yellow of turmeric, and Natural red of "Kumkuma", as Dr Rajarshi Sengupta also informs tamarind "kumkuma" as a red colouring agent in deccani cultural practice.

However, when I asked Anjali ji about the yellow floor where she was making a muggu, referring to her design collection copy, she informed me that the yellow colour is some cheap chemical colour available in the market most people are using nowadays. Since it was the night of the thirty-first of December, the whole para (neighbourhood) was in the street doing muggu to celebrate/welcome the very New Year in a closed, narrow lane of a south Indian State. First, I saw the use of chemical colour in the design also. While everyday muggu is made using white, red, and yellow organic substances, the festive muggu adds more colour by using some other colourful chemical powder available in the bazaar.

Even the designs are different in terms of welcoming the New Year. It is clearly understood that these are the modern adaptations of inter-localised elements of gentrification. It has been three months since I have been living in a locality making muggu, seeing the practice by women in everyday life and local festivals as well. During Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated across the Indian subcontinent, muggu comes out on a larger scale. On the very second day of Sankranti, they make rathas/chariots in linear form, applying very few colours as part of rituals. In rituals with other elements of harvesting, the chariot appears as an ephemeral, two-dimensional structure proposing the arrival and departure of the god Vengkateswara (Vishnu) at the very door of a domestic house adjacent to the street. Rathas are also meant for the streets, as it is a form of vehicle, exuberant ornamented, celebrated on the street.

So far, as an enjambment of interior and exterior, rituals, beliefs, and cosmic relocations, this decorative art practice perceives the plural human history through bodies, lines, oratories and practice in the private and public world connecting the human and non-human.

Further Reading

Ahmad, Perveen (2009), Bangladesh Kantha Art in Indo- Gangetic Matrix, Bangladesh: Bangladesh National Museum.

D'Mello, Melissa (2023), 'Alpona: The Artistic Evolution Of A Folk Art Form', Rooftop, Accessed 19 January 2024.

Dutta, Swarup (2011), ' The Mystery of Indian Floor Paintings', Chitrolekha International Magazine on Art and Design, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 14-27, Accessed 21 January 2024.

Ghosh, Baishali (2022), 'Thinking through the Residual Shrines on the Roads of SEZ Hyderabad', In S. Jha, and G. Bharat (eds), The Social Life of Streets in India, Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 348-371.

Kolam (2024), ' Rangoli Designs And Kolams ', Accessed 3 February 2024

Mapacademy (2022), ' Muggu ', Accessed 27 January 2024

Mehta, Riju (2019), ' Cost of living in 'new' metros: Hyderabad vs Bengaluru vs Ahmedabad vs Pune', The Economic Times, Accessed 11 February 2024.

Sengupta, Rajarshi (2023), 'ఎరుపు ( Erupu): Reconstructing Red Dye of Kalamkari Textiles', Decolonial Subversions, SI Vernacular Cultures of South Asia 2023-24, pp. 43-52.

YANAGISAWA, Kiwamu and NAGATA, Shojiro (2007), 'Fundamental Study on Design System of Kolam Pattern', Forma, 22, pp. 31-46.

About Kaustav Chatterjee

Kaustav is an art practitioner-writer-researcher in the fields of visual art and cultural studies closely involved with south Asian craft practices, embodied knowledge systems in practice and theoretical research. Kaustav proposes craft knowledge as a triangulation of archive, theory and everyday practice. It relocates the vision of craft as experience through art history, design studies, ecology, gender advocacy as an interlocutor of care as praxis. Kaustav has also formed a research project on theory and practice as discourse, currently working as a researcher in arts with Pleach India Foundation in Hyderabad, India. The city, where this written story is situated.

All the images have the copyright by Kaustav Chatterjee.

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Performing muggu: Art where home and street meet

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Kaustav Chatterjee pays homage to the practice of decorating thresholds and the way it fosters local community life.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/erpavilion/

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Melissa Cameron writes about the making of the pavilion for the Fremantle Biennale, adorned with bangles of crowd-sourced beach debris, conveying a message of sustainability and reconciliation.

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Blurred lines: Threshold floor drawings and their mediation between private and public

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Blurred lines: Threshold floor drawings and their mediation between private and public

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https://garlandmag.com/article/threshold-floor-drawings/

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Blurred lines: Threshold floor drawings and their mediation between private and public

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Alolika De from the MAP Academy presents the rich and constantly evolving variety of traditions involving threshold decoration in India.

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A shadow on the evil eye: The displaced idol makers of Dehradun

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A shadow on the evil eye: The displaced idol makers of Dehradun

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https://garlandmag.com/article/a-shadow-on-the-evil-eye/

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LOkesh Ghai

LOkesh Ghai finds one of the few idol makers on the streets of Dehradun. Now he has gone, who will protect us from the evil eye?

(A message to the reader.)

On a street of Dehradun, like many other streets of India, there are temporary sheds housing small artisan clusters of displaced families, with displaced identities. Often such artisan families are told that they legally are not supposed to be on the street. But if not for the street, then where else?

December 2022

In the pursuit of happiness, how do we deal with the unseen? Insurance covers only the monetary value after the damage is done. Prevention is always better than cure. What if it is an unseen danger? Could an evil be made an ally for protection?

Nagaram Bhati is an urban nomad. This is not a fashionable term, but his harsh reality. Under severe financial debt and the vicious money lenders' game, his grandparents were forced to sell the little land they had in the Pali District of Rajasthan. This only multiplied financial difficulties for the family.

The grandfather used to sculpt idols with earthenware clay. But times have now changed due to the economics of production. Nagaram focuses on POP, Plaster of Paris. He still uses the friendly coconut husk to bind and minimize the weight of the hollow idols. He has adapted the use of rubber mould lining, a recent innovation.

Having suffered from COVID twice and an unexpected accident, I needed the head with horns paired with staring eyes, to ally with the demon if the angels were not to be found. The evil eye is a demon face mask, hung on newly built houses and shops to safeguard your success from the envy of others.

Nagaram added the POP powder to the water, then quickly applied coconut husk, and started to press the mixture inside the hollow mould. The mould offers the possibility of quickly multiplying. The rubber between the mould and the mixture does magic. Once this dries a white structure, an idol, is achieved. This is dried and hand-painted by the women between their domestic chores.

For the last few months, Nagaram has been living in a temporary shed next to an open gutter in Dehradun. He has a ten-day-old baby at his in-law's house. The family will stay in Dehradun and then move to another urban town for a few months to sell the POP piggy banks and the evil eyes that would hopefully protect us all. According to Nagaram, the size of the evil eye hanging masks is bigger in Hyderabad and sold for better prices. But the cost of living even on the street side is way more expensive there. Perhaps, the "collection" made by the mafia in bigger cities is more organised.

(Morning in Dehradun.)

I inquired if a small-sized evil eye could be produced for my rented apartment in Dehradun. The next morning, I was surprised to find a smaller evil eye hanging on a basic temporary structure made of six bamboo lengths. I purchased the evil eye. Meanwhile, Nagaram produced more evil eyes based on the small prototype he had sculpted for me. Small, medium, and large evil eye masks hung next to each other, slightly differently hand-painted and adorned by the women of the family. I returned the next day with a blanket for the newborn as promised in return for his time. More evil eyes, flowerpots, mother and child, laughing Buddha, and the thinking girl in a hat as a piggy bank were all waiting on the side of the street. Who buys piggy bank toys in the age of digital currency?

September 2023

During the Ganesh- Chaturthi festival dedicated footpaths across cities are filled with one of the most favourite deities, the elephant God idol. These idols are placed in the house for one to ten days of puja (prayers) and thereafter submerged in local natural water bodies. For a few years now some of the cities have taken the initiative of creating man-made pool facilities to avoid the POP ending in nature. There are a few organizations encouraging clay idols, which Nagaram' s grandfather once used to make. But POP is what is affordable at the cost to the large middle-class population. Devotees carefully choose and purchase an idol according to their aesthetics and budget.

It is the week before the festival. Nagaram is no longer seen, his temporary stall is gone. The footpath by the street was dug up. The idol makers were forced to move to another temporary location and the next day moved again.

February 2024

There has been no sign of the family. Nagaram's son would have been one year old now. In these six months, he would have already travelled to different cities, finding temporary abode with his parents. There is no evil eye to protect the child and no saving for a piggy bank.

Meanwhile, a parallel change has been taking place. For the first time, in the last few months, plastic mask replicas of the evil eye are available in the local markets. In some cases it is hard to tell the material from a distance.

The clay demons who once rose from the earth and went back to the earth are now shadowed by an evil eye.

G34 | LOkesh Ghai | mask | sculpture | street

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A shadow on the evil eye: The displaced idol makers of Dehradun

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LOkesh Ghai finds one of the few idol makers on the streets of Dehradun. Now he has gone, who will protect us from the evil eye?

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https://garlandmag.com/article/rhonda-murray/

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Rhonda Murray gives identity to the familiar but anonymous people who populate our streets.

(A message to the reader.)

Rhonda Murray's Walk My Way project involves a book publication about anonymous people in her hometown, along with paintings of their shoes and stories of their lives.

Murray started work as a survey draftsperson. She eventually enrolled at TAFE to apply her drawing skills more creatively. When TAFE closed down, she went across the road to Wollongong University and took up a Creative Arts degree as the only mature-age student in the class. "I had this preconceived idea that 18-year-olds hadn't lived much, that they're pretty shallow." She was surprised and impressed by their life stories. That made her realise the power of sharing stories. "We all felt connected in different ways."

While on the arts board of Kiama Council, she discussed her interest with Gail Morgan who encouraged her to apply for a grant. "I'd be happy to help you write the stories."

The challenge was to find the people who would give her a diverse range of life stories. "Kiama is known as a white middle-class suburb. I wanted to challenge that." Contacts appeared by word of mouth.

Murray made the decision to leave the stories nameless.

"There was one particular interview with a young girl who was sexually abused. And her court case was going to court the following year, and she knew her perpetrator. I just thought I did not want to put her name to her story. And then I thought, well if I make everyone anonymous, people might be able to step into those shoes, in a way to imagine themselves in the stories."

She sought out "people on the fringe that are quieter, and just go about their everyday lives." Her husband was a firefighter and good friends with a policeman. "He's a really happy-go-lucky guy, extremely funny. But I know that he's seen a lot of things that everyday people or you and I would never even contemplate or imagine."

Her story was about the transformation when the policeman comes home and takes off his uniform to become a husband and father.

Despite this anonymity, most of her subjects appeared at the launch of the exhibition of these works in the local community art centre. "I thought, Oh, I hope they don't feel obliged to have to buy the paintings, but some of them did."

The Man in Blue

The Man in Blue comes from good European stock. His father was born in Poland in 1923 and experienced war as a young child. He saw his four brothers shot by the Russians. His mother remarried and he grew up with new stepbrothers. Throughout World War II, his father was sent to a couple of concentration camps and was lucky to escape. He fled to Australia.

The Man in Blue's mother grew up in the small Greek Island of Leros. When she was young, her brother moved to Australia, and she eventually followed him to settle in Wollongong.

His parents met each other and, with their thick accents and very little English between them, they somehow managed to communicate (although the Man in Blue thinks that communication was not necessarily verbal) and then married in Fairy Meadow. They eventually moved to Warilla where the Man in Blue grew up, before moving to Oak Flats.

School was tough because the Man in Blue couldn't rely on his parents for help with schoolwork as they weren't very educated and struggled with the English language, so a lot of his education was very much self-taught. He was very fortunate to have the support of good friends and their families to encourage him in activities and his love of sport. He remembers friends' mothers driving him around to sporting events such as swimming, soccer and basketball. He is very grateful that he grew up in such a close-knit community.

After finishing high school, the Man in Blue applied for university to do Commerce but didn't have the marks to be accepted. Ever since primary school he had dreamed of becoming a police officer, but his mother wouldn't let him. He instead became a trainee manager at Woolworths but didn't last 12 months - it was not for him. His mother eventually conceded, and the Man in Blue finally joined the police force.

After his training at Goulburn, the Man in Blue had his heart set on being sent to the Illawarra, however that was not to be. He was allocated Queanbeyan. A friend that he went through training with was from the bush, and she was allocated Redfern and was about to quit. Thinking that Queanbeyan was a little bit more country than Redfern, the two did a swap.

As a welcome to Redfern, on his first day of work the Man in Blue was driving down Everleigh Street on patrol when suddenly, a double balsa brick came flying and smashed the front windscreen of the car. He later found out that this area was a no-go zone.

In his early days in the police force, the Man in Blue was doing random breath testing on the harbour bridge, and found himself staring in awe at his surroundings, a typical country boy in the big city, only to be disturbed by his Sergeant yelling " you can tell you're not from the city ".

After seven years at Redfern, the Man in Blue returned to the Illawarra. He eventually earned a promotion and found himself back in the city again - this time in Surry Hills. He enjoyed his time there and managed security for major sporting events, protests, and visits from world leaders. He remembers the first time the world series baseball came to Australia, as well as leading soccer teams passionately marching through the city. It was stressful but at the same time enjoyable.

The Man in Blue was eventually posted to the Southern Highlands where he met a lot of politicians and celebrities. He oversaw the community during the Bush Fires of 2019 and had to prepare people for what was coming and help people in the aftermath. He sees this as a privilege, to be able to help these people in times of crisis, and keeps in touch with some of them to this day.

The Man in Blue has now come full circle and is working in Queanbeyan. He initially went there for a six week relieving stint and, two years later, is still there. He was encouraged by his peers to apply for the position of Superintendent and got this promotion, being very grateful for the opportunity.

The Man in Blue says that, as much as the job can make you cry, it can make you laugh. There has been a huge change in support in the police force - from the early days, where you went for a beer after work to destress, to now having mental health planning in place and psychological support available. Police officers see a lot of things that the human brain cannot cope with, so the Man in Blue is fortunate to have the support of his friends and family.

For the last fifteen years the Man in Blue has been a regular at what is known as The Table of Big Ideas - a once a week (or whenever they can fit it in) meet up over coffee with like-minded friends that include a paramedic, firefighter, builder and farmer. This Table started as a casual coffee after dropping their kids off at primary school and is still going today, even though those kids are now adults.

At times, everyone has been through tough patches, with work or personal things, and the Table is a good outlet for all. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and, whilst they don't achieve anything, they definitely come up with some great ideas that won't change the world but might help.

The Man in Blue's advice is to enjoy the people you work with rather than the job - if you work with good people, you can keep going. When he comes home from work, he says there is nothing better than taking off his work boots and putting his thongs on. Getting out of his work boots is symbolic of the end of work for the day and returning to his home self.

Perhaps, one day, the Man in Blue and the Table of Big Ideas will come up with a new idea for the Kiama community which may actually come to fruition!

About Rhonda Murray

Rhonda Murray is a visual artist and printmaker living on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Her work explores themes of human frailty, the internal body and the power and vitality of life, with a particular interest in the intersection of science and art. Rhonda has a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Deans Scholar) from Wollongong University and currently teaches Printmaking and Watercolours at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. Visit www.rhondamurray.com and follow @ rhonda_m_art.

book | exhibition | G34 | NSW | painting | shoes | street

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Rhonda Murray gives identity to the familiar but anonymous people who populate our streets.

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Hugs and Bugs: Everything is on the street

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Hugs and Bugs: Everything is on the street

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https://garlandmag.com/article/hugs-and-bugs/

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Sveta Dorosheva

In response to the horror of war in her Ukrainian birthplace, Sveta Dorosheva immersed herself in the absurdist theatre of her Tel Aviv neighbourhood.

I started drawing these large color images of life in Israel to take my mind off Ukraine. Apart from feeling my life's meaning taken from under me, like a rug, reality got so absurd with the pandemic and then Ukraine that I couldn't wrap my head around it. And I took many trips to Tel Aviv at the time in preparation for those exhibitions, which all seemed pointless. After meetings, I just walked around and stared at people and buildings in graffiti and read the walls.

All is real in those drawings. Every little detail. True, I might have combined walls from a couple of buildings in the same area, but it's all really like that in Tel Aviv. That was actually what blew me away and why all the effort. It's like walls are talking and messaging a crazy dialogue between buildings that no human mind or AI could possibly come up with: some sort of a kaleidoscope of "eat lsd", "make beautiful babies", quotes from Tora, drunk confessions, and portraits of Arthur Rimbaud and Kafka next to Jesus. I thought that's absolutely the absurd kind of stuff that reflects reality more than anything I could invent to express how perplexed I am at the world. I meant those images as stories that can't be deciphered, which is what they are in real life and which is what we are all experiencing as we watch the world. I came at it from the angle of "absurd and inscrutable reality", but every little detail there is from life.

We do what we do, even if it seems useless. I reconciled myself with my own work's insignificance by realizing I had no other skills. Maybe whatever I am doing is useless, but then I am useless at doing anything else. This one nonessential during wartime thing is the only thing I am good at, so... I'll continue doing that.

I had this conversation with an artist friend in Shanghai. She lives there, a local. As she was watching my studio wall filling up with drawings from the streets, she kept asking: "But why are you drawing this?! I mean, it's beautiful, no question, but why would you pick these scenes to depict? These streets, these buildings, these people? it's all so... ordinary. I would never have noticed any of this, let alone drawing!" And I was saying "It's ordinary to you. You live here. Look out the window. Everything you see is astounding news to the rest of the world."

She was unimpressed until one day I showed her my Israel sketchbook with pencil drawings from the streets (I've been doing that for years, and later used some of the sketches for large watercolors). She was mesmerised by those. "But, I said, this is all so very ordinary where I live. Arab women in the street market of Jerusalem, kids crossing the road from school, a street musician, a strawberry vendor, a woman hanging laundry... these buildings, these streets, these people. This is so ordinary where I live, I wouldn't have noticed any of this, had I not been an immigrant... And it grabs you. The same way I am grabbed by the Shanghai "ordinary" scenes." She asked me whether I had a series like that about Ukraine. I said no. She laughed and said "I guess, one is blind to a place of birth".

A similar thing happened later with the Life in Israel series. My parents immigrated to Israel twenty years earlier than myself, so they are way more used to it... When I was drawing the watercolors, mom did not believe me it was all real. She thought I was doing surreal artworks. She doesn't get out of Rehovot often. So I made a point of taking her to dinner in Tel Aviv, where most of the "raw material" was still right there, on the walls. It'd changed since, but I proved my point then: "See? Here's Kafka and Jesus and all the crazy dialogue in the messages between buildings, and just look at the people, what a diverse bunch of-" but Mom waved it off and said, "Well, it's different, because if it's not a picture in a gallery, why would one notice at all, in all this hustle and bustle?" I said "That's the whole point", and mom just gave me The Look. It's hard to impress your family, you know.

Stone Flowers
Sveta Dorosheva's only book translated into English is The Land of Stone Flowers A Fairy Guide to the Mythical Human Being (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2018). This book contains fanciful stories of humans as told by fairies. One of these stories is about the places where humans can be found: the "stone flowers".
People live in giant stone flowers called "cities."* The veins of the stone flower are called "streets,"** and each is given a name, to avoid confusion. All the veins lead to the center of the flower, weaving and merging together, and the closer to the center they get, the brighter and more magnificent they become. The center is often filled with massive stone stamen that pollinate the clouds.

Along each vein stand rows of stone boxes of apes-these are called "buildings." Each box contains a set of smaller compartments, called "apartments." This is where humans live. The stone boxes are reminiscent of playing dice, and sometimes, while everyone is asleep, the celestial giants combat their nightly boredom by playing a game of Bones with them. At sunrise, the houses run around on little legs, back to their original spots, so the humans wake up in the same place, with the same view out their windows, and don't suspect a thing. Sometimes, in the mornings, humans can't find certain somethings because they've rolled into some nook or other during the nightly runabouts.

* Not to be confused with "settees."

** Not to be confused with "seats." Settees are seats, while cities have streets.

Visit www.svetadorosheva.com/, follow @sveta_dorosheva_and like facebook.com/draw.lattona.

G34 | illustration | Israel | street | Ukraine

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Hugs and Bugs: Everything is on the street

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In response to the horror of war in her Ukrainian birthplace, Sveta Dorosheva immersed herself in the absurdist theatre of her Tel Aviv neighbourhood.

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The Selkirk House commission: Drawing is knowing

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The Selkirk House commission: Drawing is knowing

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https://garlandmag.com/article/selkirk-house/

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Bren Luke

Bren Luke's illustrations highlight the precious details of heritage architecture.

We asked Bren Luke about one of his important commissions, a drawing of the "Selkirk House".

✿ What prompted the work?

At the beginning of 2023, I was contacted to work on a special commission drawing for Morton+Co architects, a drawing of the "Selkirk House" on Wendouree Parade in Ballarat. The house was designed by Robin Boyd in 1960/61 and constructed to his design in 1963/64 for Ronald and Dorothy Selkirk and was saved from demolition around 2014. It has been lovingly and faithfully restored by Ballarat architect Alan Morton and his family and stands as a fine and unique example of Australian mid-20th century modernist architecture by one of our most revered architects.

✿ What is your creative process?

As an illustrator, I tend to mostly work directly from reference photos. In the case of this drawing, I was supplied with a variety of photos of the house viewed from different angles and I chose one which depicts the building "straight-on" to highlight the large overall width and shape of the house, the impressive central staircase at the entrance and the curved driveway and newly planted front garden. Once I've decided on the composition I will work on the preliminary pencil drawing and then I'll get working on the final pen and ink stage. All the ink drawing is freehand, no rulers used, and I will employ a combination of crosshatch line work and pointillism/stipple.

✿ What tools and materials do you use to make the work?

The paper I work on is 250gsm bristol board. I use a Tombow MONO mechanical pencil using 0.3mm leads and for inking I work with a Rotring Rapidograph 0.25mm drafting pen filled with Dr Martin's Ph Matte Black ink. I work at a beautiful old metal framed/timber board drafting desk which I recently purchased second-hand.

✿ Did you learn anything new in the making of the work?

While drawing Selkirk House, I immediately became an admirer of the hidden details and the considered design employed by Robin Boyd, brick by brick. Depicting what at first glance is a very simple rectangular building into a detailed pen and ink drawing initially posed challenges to making an interesting drawing, however, I was pleased to find that by accurately depicting the design elements used by Boyd and reproducing the repetitive patterns of bricks and pavers helped deliver a cohesive drawing overall. I'm never quite sure how any of my drawings will turn out exactly but I'm constantly learning to trust my instincts and techniques. I was really happy with how this drawing finished up.

✿ Has anything happened to the work over time? Have there been interesting responses?

It was great to be able to present the work to Allan Morton at the offices of Morton+Co. I love handing over the commissioned drawings to see the response they get from the client, that's the icing on the cake really. Allan was pleased with what I produced and it was fantastic to have a quick chat about Ballarat architecture. I think the plan was for the drawing to go up on the wall at Selkirk House, which makes me smile thinking about it. It's a house that my partner and I have always admired since we started going out and it now holds a special place in my heart. Following the "Selkirk House" drawing I was also commissioned to draw the facade of the Morton+Co Architect office building in Sturt Street, Ballarat.

✿ How can people commission future work from you?

I can be contacted for one-off/personal commission work directly via email at bren.luke@gmail.com or for commercial illustration work I can be contacted through my illustration agency, The Illustration Room

architecture | Ballarat | G34 | illustration | street | Victoria

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The Selkirk House commission: Drawing is knowing

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Bren Luke's illustrations highlight the precious details of heritage architecture.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/chloe-wardell/

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Chloë Waddell

Inspired by New York cityscapes, Chloë Waddell has developed a practice of memorialising domestic havens.

Chloe Wardell has developed a unique combination of collage, illustration and jewellery to depict the buildings around her. We ask about the origins of the work and the kinds of commissions that she attracts.

✿ What prompted the work?

These artworks are part of an evolving series that was born out of travelling, moving cities and exploring new places. I was raised by two voracious travellers. During my childhood, every spare dollar they had was put into travelling and when they travelled, very little was planned in advance. We would show up in a new town or city, wander about, find a place to stay and then explore whatever was on offer. This version of exploring new places has stuck with me to this day. On my own travels and when moving cities, which I've done several times over the last 20 years, I always start learning about a new place by walking through it. I have spent many hours wandering around cities and towns with a camera, capturing little sections, which for me, when put together, tell a story of how it feels to be there.

The first works in this series were based on photos taken during a trip to New York. As I travelled to more places over the following years and moved from Sydney to Melbourne and then up to Brisbane, this initial series then morphed into many more works focusing on where I had recently been and where I was currently living. Although personally, I enjoyed depicting the places I had travelled to and bringing them back to where I now lived, I found people wanted to see their own cities and local areas depicted in the works. I started making a limited series of works and then exhibited them in that area. Soon I began receiving commission requests to make works of people's favourite café, street, their own house or that of their friend who had recently moved overseas.

It is interesting to me that it has become the architecture of a city that has defined the city for me, rather than the geographical features. Having lived in three of Australia's capital cities, I have experienced first-hand how the architecture of our cities is reflective of our lifestyles and cultures. Moreover, I find it fascinating how I can make a work of a single house with a few trees beside it and it's often immediately obvious what area of the country it is from. As I am currently based in Brisbane, most of my recent works have featured Queenslanders. I didn't realise that had subconsciously become the "normal house" for me until a recent trip to Geelong. I was struck by how flat everything was, until I realised it wasn't the geography that gave it this feel but the houses which were sitting so much lower to the ground than I had become used to.

✿ What is your creative process? How do you develop your ideas?

My process has always been grounded in play. I start with a scrap of an idea or a feel of something and then begin drawing or playing with materials until the idea begins to evolve. It normally begins with some word association scribbles in my notebook or basic sketches on scraps of paper before I start working with the material. I have never been able to picture the complete end piece I want to create before I begin making, it is the process of making itself that informs my work.

I trained as a three-dimensional artist, studying Jewellery and Object Design at Sydney College of the Arts. It was through this foundation that I learnt to let my ideas and concepts dictate the form and materials of the work I was making. At SCA we were taught technical jewellery skills alongside our conceptual art projects but, through the process of concept development, often our pieces didn't end up as jewellery at all. Although I still love making jewellery and think of myself as a jewellery artist, it has ended up that much of my work isn't jewellery any more.

Around the time my cityscape series of work was born, I had been experimenting with collage and discovered that when coated in resin, the flour and water glue I was using created a beautiful white mottled effect, almost like snow. The first incarnation of these experiments was a series of abstract brooches. Then, when I was invited by Zara Collins to take part in an exhibition titled Places & Spaces, I started playing around with using more representational images in the collage, combined with the abstract colours and shapes I had been using. I was printing black and white images from my recent trip to New York, cutting them up and combining them with interesting colours and shapes taken from the street press magazines I would collect at the time. With the addition of the cityscape imagery, I could no longer quite fit all the ideas I was having into brooches anymore, so these works turned into small wall pieces which were, of course, two-dimensional but still with a three-dimensional feel.

✿ What tools and materials do you use to make the work?

These works all begin as photos. Normally I take them myself but sometimes I've been asked to make works for someone who lives a long way away, so I direct them in taking the photos for me from as many different viewpoints as possible and then crop, combine and edit the photos on the computer to get the composition I'm after. Once I've chosen the composition, I no longer print the photos in black and white, but wash them out as much as I can, so when printed I am left with a light wash of an image that I can work over. I trace over buildings and add texture to trees and gardens with black ink. Once I have the base image in black ink, I use watercolours and acrylic paint to add colour. Collage is still a large part of my work, but unfortunately, there are no longer many street press magazines to collect so I keep a look out for interesting printed images. I have used city council leaflets, market advertising, exhibition programs and old, damaged children's books to create my collage.

✿ Did you learn anything new in the making of the work?

One particular work offered an important lesson for me in the life an artwork has both before I begin it and after it leaves me. This piece was commissioned by the sons, daughters and partners of Kim and Noel who had lived in the house for 47 years at that time. The house itself was a work of art in its own right. Kim and Noel had moved here as a young couple, raised their kids there and now were entertaining their grandkids in these same walls. All the special touches reflecting the lives of the inhabitants, and all the little details added bit by bit over time made me feel a great sense of responsibility in being trusted to capture it all.

I came to take photos for the artwork during a particularly busy period for me and arrived with the intention of quickly getting in, taking the photos and getting out. Kim greeted me at the front door with her daughter, daughter in law and granddaughter and proceeded to give the grand tour of the house and garden pointing out all the special features and things I may have missed, telling me what they'd like included in the artwork and their favourite parts of the house. After the tour and taking the photos, Kim invited me to sit for morning tea with them and I realised what a significant event it was for her to commission this artwork from me to commemorate such an important place to her.

Although, of course, I always take great care in my work and ensure I am delivering on my client's wishes and fulfilling my own artistic expectations, the work lives with me for such a short time. It comes in and out of my life but lives on for many years in the walls of the houses and places it ends up in, becoming part of the daily life of its owners.

✿ Has anything happened to the work over time? Have there been interesting responses?

Three years after doing this work, Kim and Noel have since retired to a beachside town a short drive away from Brisbane. They were in their house for 48 years. One of their children is now the owner of the house and is currently in the midst of a large renovation. The artwork has captured this moment in time and lives on in their new house as a reminder of the house that lovingly held them and their family for so long.

Kim told me she loves showing the work to her new friends who had never seen her old house and feels it gives them an understanding of her and Noel and where they have come from.

✿ How can people commission future work from you?

The easiest way is to visit my website www.chloewaddell.com, click on the 'commissions' tab and fill out the form on that page with a bit more info on what they are after.

About Chloë Waddell

Chloë Waddell is a maker of jewellery, objects and art. She is currently based in Meanjin/Brisbane, but has lived and worked throughout Australia and overseas. Chloë's recent work is heavily rooted in place, capturing and documenting local areas through her artworks. Her upcoming exhibition will be on display at Art Gallery on Darling in Balmain, Sydney from 29th April to 5th May 2024. Visit www.chloewaddell.com and follow @ chloewaddell,

G34 | illustration | street | Sydney

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Inspired by New York cityscapes, Chloë Waddell has developed a practice of memorialising domestic havens.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/michelle-hamer/

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Kevin Murray

Michelle Hamer reflects on two decades of making tapestries that lovingly render the emptiness of our urban road signs.

For nearly 20 years, Michelle Hamer has been reflecting on the meaning of road signs through her ironic tapestries. These enigmatic messages are devoid of any human presence. They emit sentences that purport to be caring, but this concern is undermined by their lifeless form.

The absence of care is manifest in mechanical decay as pixels break down. This lifeless communication is contrasted with Hamer's purposeful weaving, each pixel stitched by hand.

While much street art aims to activate public spaces by signalling a human voice, Hamer's work does the opposite. She shows the absence of this presence in the messages that surround us. But rather than lead to pessimism, it prompts us to re-activate our public sphere, as evidenced by Hamer's beautifully crafted works.

✿ Have you noticed any change in road signage over the two decades that you have been documenting it?

I've always felt that the language of the street-instructional, advertising and graffiti-reflects the bigger picture fears and aspirations of our societies. It's the nuance and mood over a range of language rather than the specifics of any one sign that interests me, although there are also so many individually that I love.

When I first began documenting and collecting language, I was drawn to how darkly humorous and how much variety there was. It felt like there were many voices, perspectives and a lot of nuance. By 2011 there were a lot of mixed messages, many still clever but at times overtly optimistic, in denial of real-life events like the Global Financial Crisis, and the "you're either with or against us" post 9-11 sentiment held strong undercurrents (particularly in the US).

Early 2020 was interesting as there was a brief moment of global catastrophe (COVID-19) uniting people. I was inundated with photos people were sending me of signage from around the world. That collaborative potential appeared to hold strength in amongst the language of the Women's March and Black Lives Matter movement but ultimately gave way to the divisions that I'd been noticing building over the decade prior. Fear, misinformation, coopting and re-coopting of language and divisive rhetoric became prominent.

In the past year the official and branding language that I've noticed has been amongst the most benign I can recall. I'm having to make myself look rather than be drawn to it. I question if this is occurring in contrast to the toxic language playing out online and in the streets, which has become increasingly sloganistic and frenzied. Nuance, criticality and accuracy of language appear to be valued less as polarisation intensifies. This is something I've only previously understood as a historical phenomenon so I document it with concern.

✿ Has your weaving technique changed over the years? What's the largest tapestry you've done? Would you consider moving onto a large loom or do you prefer to keep it on your lap?

The size and physical expression of my works have changed over time. I'm interested in how techniques relate to what I'm exploring. Yet I think the slowness, the nuance of the language and the detail of the context perhaps allow space for as much of what isn't directly said as what is.

I enjoy the rhythm and familiarity of stitching but I also like to push the boundaries of where else my practice can go.

The largest works I've done involve hand stitching barrier tape through debris/construction mesh (115 x 300cm). It's a practice that perhaps becomes more sculptural as the works are bigger than my body so almost by default I become literally entangled in the work.

I've also made some larger stitched pieces (67 x 100cm) and created triptychs or series that become part of digital or video works which is a fun way of shifting the scale for me too.

✿ Are there other weavers or artists that you have an affinity with? How do you compare your work to Jenny Holzer?

I don't tend to compare my work to other artists, perhaps due to how my practice has developed but there are many I love and learn from. I've always been a huge fan of Jenny Holzer's work. I particularly love Holzer's declassified series. It hits me hard in person and stays with me.

Our practices circle some similar subject matter, materials, undercurrents and approaches but in many ways are the inverse of each other. Her best-known works are loud public/street facing and overt statements claiming space with mine generally more about the nuance, documentation and being present/observant of the public space we occupy. Although she has done many more intimate works and I've had very public video works shown recently.

Perhaps my work wouldn't have come about without her's coming first. Both our works bear witness and reflect back the language and movements of our times particularly in regard to the street/public realm.

✿ What do you think are the prospects for the human race? Do you imagine that the machine and the algorithm will eventually control most of our lives? Could that be a good thing?

This question is way out of my league but I think we're already largely controlled by machines and algorithms. Part of my interest in the language of the public realm is this feedback loop. I'm less interested in the binaries of it, or people, being a good or bad thing per se. I am interested in how society responds and what we learn from history as well as what new opportunities it opens up.

✿ What are the themes that you are working with at the moment?

I'm working on themes of gaslighting in everyday language. How people are disbelieved and dismissed. The lens I'm currently using is healthcare and for this project, I've received official documentation from around the world which forms the basis of the project. It includes hand stitching and, for the first time in my practice, screen printing. A few monoprints combine both. Including printing onto a hand-stitched base and printing this printed stitched work back onto the paper.

I undertook a residency in Eastern Europe in mid-2023. The politics and language of the street alerted me to undercurrents I was more naive to in Australia at the time so this is something I'm aware of and navigating.

Visit michellehamer.com and follow @ michelle_hamer

G34 | Melbourne | street | tapestry | textiles

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Michelle Hamer reflects on two decades of making tapestries that lovingly render the emptiness of our urban road signs.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/the-big-build/

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Jessie Deane

Jessie Deane honours the ugly but beautiful industrial landscape around her, stitch by stitch.

The Big Build Is a large, illuminated image of the 250-tonne green gantry crane that looms large on Whitehall Street. It's an immense, unyielding, and vibrant presence, a landmark image but it's not permanent. I wanted to document this moment in time. It carries the weight of the West Gate Tunnel build which is a massive topic for Melbourne's west right now. I live in Yarraville and have done for several years. I'm absorbed into the landscapes I recreate. The proximity to industry in the West really inspires me. It is a perfect playground for my creative interest. I use thread to hand stitch the often decaying industrial and urban landscapes of Melbourne's West.

I am interested in subverting the medium of needlepoint to explore dichotomies between the heavy-duty and the hand-made; the cold, rigid industrial materials, and the warm malleability of the thread; the "masculine" world of industry, and the "feminine" world of craft. Melbourne's west is the ideal stomping ground for source material. It's also my home, and I'm obsessed with the West. I'm obsessed with paradox and drawn to oppositional forces, attracted to counterpoint. Melbourne's west has a landscape that is entirely contradictory: ugly but beautiful, intimate but vast, mundane but colourful. It's my inspiration.

I'm driven by compulsion. I must do it. My creative drive has always been paramount. As a child I relentlessly made. Every present I received growing up was connected to making.

My decisions are often impulsive. I'll see something I've been surrounded by on a particular day in a particular light and decide to make a needlepoint of it. I could drive past something, and I must pull over to capture it.

I capture images on my iPhone which are never particularly accurate replicas of the moment. That's when the thread, colour and creative license come into play.

My visual memories are vivid so the images I capture hold the basic structure and then the rest is my imagination. I build the artworks from my memory and the experience of that moment. Using this process, I can play with my obsession in colour and my desire to mess with colour.

I include colours that may be completely out of place. My favourite thing is to run fluorescent-coloured lines up a telegraph post or along the line of a building. Often the most unlikely colour for that moment but it always seems to work and is often the very thing that people comment on when they look close. From a distance it just becomes light and shade and blends into the image, but close up, it sticks out like a sore thumb!

I certainly have a strong desire to express love for the unloved, to bring beauty to the mundane and to draw attention to the unnoticed.

I certainly have a strong desire to express love for the unloved, to bring beauty to the mundane and to draw attention to the unnoticed. My biggest joy is infusing beauty into what is often perceived as ugly, and bringing to life something that has been seen by so many but not really seen.

I think the medium of thread, its softness and malleability, is a perfect way to represent the changing industrial and suburban landscape of Melbourne's west. There is something joyful in representing hard, industrial, "man-made" infrastructure by using soft, colourful thread.

I've been engaged in textiles my entire life. It's firmly in me. I studied art and then completed my degree in Fashion and Textiles specialising in Woven Textiles. I also have a family legacy. My great aunt Cecily made needlepoints from kits back in the 70s and 80s and I would have received a few kits throughout my childhood. I never loved the images in the kits all that much, so I started making my own canvases. I just thought that when I went to the effort of spending 100s of hours on a needlepoint project, I'd like to end up with an artwork I want to live with rather than a ballet or floral scene, or The Last Supper!! It grew from there.

My Great Great Aunt was a rug maker. She was relatively well known in 1920s European interior design circles. Her name was Evelyn Wyld, not to be confused with the Miles Franklin and Stella award-winning author, Evie Wyld, who is my cousin and Evelyn Wyld's namesake! Evelyn worked with the very influential designer and architect, Eileen Gray. They were best friends having been at school together and then they went on to collaborate. Initially, Eileen designed the rugs and Evie made them, but Evie went on to design her own and had an atelier with her 'friend' named Eyre de Lanux.

My favourite Great Aunt Biddy (who I named my dog after) told me the story of Evelyn when I was around 19 years old. I had just decided that I was going to specialise in woven textiles, at university. Biddy was my confidant and when I revealed my decision to study textiles, she told me I had an Aunt who was a weaver and who "enjoyed the companionship of women". I later discovered Evie was part of the "Sapphic Modernism" movement in Paris. As someone who had recently discovered/admitted the same leanings, I took that moment as an opportunity to come out to Biddy. Her response was "Of course you are darling. I knew it from the day you were born!" There is a resurgence in textiles for sure, and that is a great thing. But proudly, my Great Great Aunt was a pioneer and that is a driver for me. I feel I owe it to Evelyn to carry the mantle.

The biggest amount of feedback I get from people is: "I've walked past that building every day of my life for the last 10 years and I've never noticed it, and then I saw that piece and I suddenly started to notice it. It makes me feel good when that happens."
The Big Build won the acquisitive award at the Footscray Art Prize in 2023.
About Jessie Deane

I am Jessie Deane, a textile artist working in needlepoint. I live in Yarraville, at the heart of Melbourne's west. I use thread to hand stitch the often decaying industrial and urban landscapes of Melbourne's West. I am particularly interested in subverting the medium of needlepoint to explore dichotomies between the heavy-duty, and the hand-made; the cold, rigid industrial materials, and the warm malleability of the thread; the "masculine" world of industry, and the "feminine" world of craft. Visit www.jessiedeane.com/ and follow @jessiedeaneneedlepoint/

G34 | Melbourne | street | tapestry | textiles

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Jessie Deane honours the ugly but beautiful industrial landscape around her, stitch by stitch.

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The flip side: Art protest and making ceramics

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The flip side: Art protest and making ceramics

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The flip side: Art protest and making ceramics

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Joana Partyka explains the paradox of making expressionist ceramics while also defacing masterpieces to highlight the damage of fossil fuel projects.

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Industry relief: The Newport Railway Workshop Project

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Industry relief: The Newport Railway Workshop Project

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https://garlandmag.com/article/the-newport-project/

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Geoff Hogg

Geoff Hogg recounts a poignant public art project to honour the treasured history of a railway workshop

The solid, concrete relief at Newport Railway station looks to me now like a simple, straightforward idea for a public artwork. Take the imposing Melbourne Road overpass, dividing the local shopping centre and use its weight and 1960s utilitarianism as the foundation for an artwork. In that way economically achieve scale and meaning through the strategic addition of new, considered elements. Not disguising, but rather re-contextualizing, and even increasing the volume of its presence.

This, however, wasn't our starting point when we won the commission from the former Williamstown Council to plan an artwork for the station.

By 1994 when we began, Newport had changed from a pre-World War Two industrial suburb to a notable place of settlement for diverse migrant communities. It was also showing the first gentle signs of possible new affluence spreading through the inner city. As artists new to the area, we needed to understand as much as we could. Not simply about the physical character of the place, but also its makeup and evolving character as a community. After all, this was to be a site-specific artwork: that involved more than the topography. At that stage, only the design had been funded and a budget for the completed project needed to be acquired. Our job was to create a concept design that would help the Council achieve funding from the State government by presenting a ready-to-make, relevant, and achievable project.

I had been involved in public art since the 1970s and the idea of community consultation was part of our then radical agenda. By the 1990s, this concept had entered the mainstream of government-supported commissioning processes. Community engagement was part of our work method and the makeup of our planning group reflected that need. Enver Camdal and I were both artists, but our third collaborator, Fiona Tinney, was a Social Worker with years of experience. Creative and unconventional, Fiona devised a range of consultation methods from setting up a table in the local underpass to visiting people in their clubs and meeting places. On a number of occasions, we organized barbecues on the station platform to connect with early-morning commuters. Walking around the suburb, shopping and meeting people, the neighbourhood felt quiet but changing.

There was a determinedly old school pub by the station, but the shops were varied and, not far away was an unassuming but sizable mosque in what looked like an old hall. City workers packed the station in the morning, heading for white-collar jobs in town as the old manufacturing industries phased down. With this diversity, it was interesting, and a little surprising to see through our consultation, how one local theme kept coming up. The Newport Railway Workshops and the unique working-class culture they brought into being were a distinctive memory that still resonated across the community. Completed in 1889, the Workshops were a centre of heavy engineering in Victoria, constructing and servicing locomotives for the Victorian Railways, and, during World War Two, building aircraft components as part of the Australian war effort.

Employing thousands of workers in its heyday, it had its own sports clubs, and workers were credited with the invention of the game known as "Trugo" which used train components and tools as part of its play. This gave us the basis for our idea and the design flowed easily. References were everywhere and we planned the artwork as a giant broken machine with large concrete "tools" hung in the tunnels as a remembered "workshop". We planned the project in such a way that the finished artwork could exist, even if damaged, as a modern ruin.

With the concept design completed, all we could do was wait to see if the actual artwork would be funded. At the request of the Council, we had budgeted the project in three stages allowing for funding overtime. As it turned out, only the first stage received funding.

Once this support was secured, we began the making stage of the project. Our team now expanded to include Gary Donnelly and Ardanan Esen. My colleague, Enver and also Ardanan, were of Turkish background. They both completed their training in Turkey through an educational system strongly weighted towards well-developed craft skills. With the work ahead of us we needed a lot of space to begin production and, by a stroke of good fortune and the Council's support, we were able to establish a studio in the substantial red brick factory yard, the heart of the old railway workshops that inspired our thinking.

I had known Enver since 1985 when he arrived in Melbourne as a refugee following the military takeover in his country a few years before. From the start, I was impressed by his skills working with metal, glass, and ceramic. Enver introduced me to Ardanan, and with Gary, a recently graduated sculptor, we had an effective team.

When I first began considering this project, walking the streets of Newport, I thought migration was bound to be a part of it. As it turned out, the Railway Workshops and their legacy of a hard-won craft industry built around organization, engineering and metalwork took over our plans. Migration, however, remained a present, although not entirely apparent part of the project. The skills and collaborative work methods that Enver and Ardanan brought were in short supply in Australia, and without their involvement, a project like this couldn't have been done in the way that it subsequently developed.

Time-honored techniques were employed. First, forming the relief elements in clay, then cast in plaster before fibre glass moulds were taken to re-caste the refined elements in concrete ready for installation. This was a laborious process and scores of pieces were made. As we began to transport them to the site for installation, I felt glad that we were only building part of the original design. The site installation phase introduced another Turkish craftsperson to the project. Cevat Yucel was a builder, and after sign-off from our engineer who was required to certify the integrity of the sculpture, Cevat worked with us to fix the newly made concrete parts to the wall.

When we had set up the site by the station for work, it looked like conventional road maintenance was happening as we signed and secured the area in the usual way. Work began by installing the concrete screwheads, placing them along each side of the wall's existing expansion joints. As we were putting up the screwheads, they must have appeared realistic as a patron from the pub opposite asked if we were reinforcing the overpass. Through the course of the project, as what we were doing became clearer, we met an increasing number of former workers from the Railway Workshops interested in talking to us; one of whom pointed out correctly that we had the thread of the main reoccurring bolt sculpture running in the wrong direction.

The artwork, as we see it today, opened in winter, 1995. The final two stages of the project were never built but looking at the work, I think my earlier judgment was right. It is finished enough. After all, when do we know when an enterprise comes to an end?

Inspiration

My favourite mural is Diego Rivera's painting for Edsel Ford in Detroit. I'm impressed by the compositional structure and the activity it demonstrates. I also like the surface appearance of fresco. It's a great craft that I studied in Mexico for a time.

About Geoff Hogg

Dr Geoff Hogg is an artist and researcher living and working in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. Practising across a range of media, he was an early contributor to the revival of contemporary public art, focusing on transcultural practice, collaboration and art and social engagement. He is the former Program Director of Post Graduate Studies in Art in Public Space at RMIT University, Melbourne and was the founding Director of the Centre for Art, Society and Transformation (CAST). Geoff Hogg is also an Honorary Professor at Xian Yang University, Xian, China, a region in which he has worked for over forty years.

G34 | Melbourne | street

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Industry relief: The Newport Railway Workshop Project

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Geoff Hogg recounts a poignant public art project to honour the treasured history of a railway workshop

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https://garlandmag.com/article/vginmary/

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Emma Cieslik

Emma Cieslik documents Vginmary's project to re-sacralise the vulva in Poland's religious iconography.

In 2020, Poland's Constitutional Tribunal ruled to remove one of the exceptions-fetal abnormalities-to Poland's law prohibiting abortion, imposing a near-total ban on abortion. This went into effect in 2021, followed by conservative laws reinforcing orthodox Catholic principles and education aimed at promoting the image of a traditional family. Like many people who could become pregnant, Vginmary, an artist based in Wrocław, Poland, felt blindsided. In response and despite facing potential persecution for creating art with religious symbols in a conservative country, Vginmary joined a continent of artists bringing the familiar figure of Mary to the streets as their own visual champion.

Vginmary is no stranger to creating Marian art. In fact, with the help of her religious parents, she has been creating religious paintings featuring Mary and Jesus for commission for years. It wasn't until high school that she first learned about street art from a partner. He was interested in stencil art, and Vginmary created her own and pasted stickers throughout the city. She left street art until 2020 when she funneled her anger and frustration into street art. She creates her art as part of the Holy Mart project, "created as a manifesto against the current religious and political situation in Poland."

Her art explores "what it means to be a modern woman and what it means to be in a very religious society" she explained. Those two things clashed, and artists including herself reacted to not having a significant Goddess figure within the same patriarchal religious systems that contributed to the abortion ban. Her first work of art, depicting a lightning bolt inside of an outline of Mary, represented her anger. Painted in a cold spot away from the heart of the city, Vginmary made this painting to see herself in Mary, to visualize someone who was also angry.

"I felt if there was a goddess," she explained, "if there was someone on our side, this deity would be angry, this deity would be furious with what happened." She drew on Christian imagery, which she admits in turn largely co-opted prior religious imagery of gods like Zeus to depict the Christian God. Mary, she believed and depicted in her art, was at war with the patriarchial gods, and embodied divine rage through that bolt.

She recalled her own frustration when creating commissioned religious art, when buyers sought a specific image of Mary. "They are really thinking about what is attractive to them, what they are pleased to look at, and during those conversations with my clients, they were expecting a very specific face." They were seeking a cultural ideal, a Mary within whom they could see themselves. It was an ideal that does not historically exist and one that does not reflect who she is. In the same way, she does not represent herself and other individuals with vulvas within religious systems.

Vginmary's art, however, does reference a rich artistic history. Over wine with a friend, Vginmary came to the realization that the figure of Mary herself bore a close resemblance to a vulva. At the time, she liked this visual symmetry, specifically "this representation of feminine energy and the most beautiful organ that brings life" when Polish society was regulating this organ and was offended by its imagery. Vginmary's psychedelic Marys sought to connect Mary-a highly regulated religious figure-to something that deeply upset modern Poles.

The symbolism of Mary as a vulva is best seen in Vginmary's earlier pieces, shown above, which explored the use of negative space. Photo courtesy of Vginmary.

While at the time, she created art based on her own feelings, she now realizes that her work actually reflects a Medieval art tradition involving the vulvar symbol mandorla. The mandorla has an almond shape and is drawn, painted, or sculpted around Jesus, Mary, or other religious figures. Over time, the overwhelming presence of the mandorla shifted to Jesus-his side wounds were even visualized as a mandorla. However, traditionally the mandorla represented the holy portal through which Jesus entered the world and was associated with Jesus's mother, Mary. Vginmary didn't initially realize she was reviving a historic tradition.

But despite her art's historical precedence, she had to be careful to remain anonymous. Only one year earlier, Polish LGBTQ activist Elżbieta Podleśna was arrested for placing stickers and posters around St. Dominic's Church in Plockwith images of Our Lady of Czestochowa with a rainbow halo, symbolizing the LGBTQ+ community. Podleśna, along with Anna P. and Joanna G. were responding to the homophobic decor in St. Dominic's Church in Plock, which equated the concepts of "betrayal," "lies," and "hatred" with the LGBTQ+ community. In March 2021, Podleśna and two others were acquitted of the charges but the ruling was appealed. In 2022 the court found them not guilty by final judgment.

That same year, the time was right for Vginmary: the COVID-19 pandemic had just begun and most people remained cloistered in their homes. Those who did venture out had to wear masks. In 2021, she even spoke about the persecution of artists in Poland at a conference in Tromso, Norway. She also shared a small exhibition of her work at the conference but remarked honestly that this exhibition or even this discussion would not have been possible in Poland. Even this article, she noted, would not be possible.

Even with this space and her activism, however, she still chose to largely avoid blatant political imagery or slogans. "Polish people," she explained, "do not like to riot. Rather, they prefer guerilla methods. You're not direct, you're not in your face, but you're there, and we had this during communist times with a lot of clever ways in art to portray different messages, to portray some ideas that were banned back then." She aimed to create something that lived on the line, not over the line, so that people who are religious do not know what to do with the art, and do not see the message, but people who are facing this persecution, see it.

"I was hoping just to give a small nudge to people, like a wink maybe." Even her religious grandmother bought and displayed one of her paintings in her home, believing it to be a traditional Marian icon.

Street art provided the freedom and accessibility to create art that walked this line. Unlike art in galleries or sanctioned murals, she did not have to submit extensive documents nor did she have to seek approval from a committee about her art's content. She created her art on her own terms in public spaces, where people could see her art without paying an entrance fee, and where people could see the message even if there was a language barrier since all of her art involves symbolism that dates back to the Medieval Era-a time when symbols were also used to connect with faithful people who were illiterate and send messages.

In the time of the Ukranian-Russian War, she views her street art as even more significant, returning back to the Medieval tradition of pilgrims bringing vulva amulets for protection and carving vulva imagery in churches and homes to dispel evil. "I think it would be awesome to think about this imagery as a war amulet because I know that the symbol of the vagina, people thought it had this power to repel evil. If there was some disaster, like the crops were dead or there was war coming, people either showed imagery of the vagina or showed [actual] vaginas."

Two of Vginmary's recent murals incorporate Mary into and on top of existing graffiti. The right mural was created while she worked with other graffiti artists. The silver paint was left over, which is why this piece is called Holy Mary of Spontaneity.

Her murals, painted tiles, and stickers, she believes, serve as amulets to protect against war in all forms, whether a war on reproductive rights or a war on Slavic soil. Her street art is thus an accessible, often covert form of sacred protection and rebellion in plain sight.

About Emma Cieslik

Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer writer and museum worker based in Washington, DC. She studies the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion, and material culture, with a focus on Marian devotions. She has been researching Marian statuettes, graffiti, and devotional art for the past year.

Note: The artist's name is the same as the name of her project. Vginmary is spelled together as a type of code, where the name can be read as Virgin Mary or Vagina Mary. Like other street artists, Vginmary does not take dimensions of her work, outside of the length of arms outstretched. The nature of her work means that it does not always fit conventional artistic descriptors, including specific titles.

Catholicism | G34 | Poland | street | USA

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Emma Cieslik documents Vginmary's project to re-sacralise the vulva in Poland's religious iconography.

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Walking in the expanded field of jewellery

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Walking in the expanded field of jewellery

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https://garlandmag.com/article/walking-in-the-expanded-field-of-jewellery/

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Roseanne Bartley

Roseanne Bartley recounts a series of pathfinding projects that take jewellery to and from the streets.

"Paths need walking," observes travel writer Robert MacFarlane, and it's within the notion of interdependence that this essay gains momentum. Intersecting this tableau of paths and walkers-spaces and bodies-is the supplementary theme of jewellery, framed through a contemporary jewellery practice.

For those new to the trail, a working definition of jewellery generally goes like this: a decorative object worn on the human body as a means to signify status, power, and identity, be it personal, social, political, and or cultural. However, I'm equally interested in what happens if we go wayfaring with jewellery, asking questions of its autonomy, agency, and affect.

What lies ahead is the recounting of a not-so-epic quest, where, after several years in the field, I embarked on a journey to question everything I knew about jewellery. I began to reimagine jewellery as a verb, emphasizing its role as a dynamic process rather than a static object. By introducing social processes and public making into my repertoire, I proposed that within this polyamorous mix of techniques and moving bodies of matter, jewellery, both aiding and abetting, could more freely intermingle or "correspond," as Ingold suggests, within a "meshwork" of lively human and non-human interactions.

Years before undertaking a period of practice-led research, I relocated from Aotearoa New Zealand to Naarm Melbourne to study gold and silversmithing at RMIT University. Upon graduation, I chose to remain in Australia, but for some time I grappled with an underlying sense of dislocation-not only from my place of birth but also from the dominant culture in which I resided, its political narratives founded in colonialism, and its overbearing relationship to the land, or country as referred to by First Nations peoples. While I wasn't intentionally one of "the disconnected people" identified by indigenous writer Victor Steffensen, I felt out of place.

At this juncture, I was working with text and remnants of material consumption. I explored alphabetic/botanic patterns, the Australian vernacular, and how detritus could tell of the social habits, leisurely activities, and seasonal weather patterns within the suburb in which I lived-an amateur approach I termed Surface Archaeology. By surface, I was referring to both the liminal topographical zone (the Anthropocene), which holds the relatively recent material residue I was interested in (remnant woods, plastics, and metals), and the depth of connection to the urban environment that I felt I and many others operate within. Official pathways, such as council surveys or historical societies, are one way to obtain data on community interests and services. However, I was more interested in following the desire lines, where and how people and things played, strayed, and got waylaid. I wasn't attempting to souvenir what was memorable about my suburb; rather, I sought to highlight the localised, under-acknowledged cultural value of the suburban.

Encouraged by Jane Bennett's notion of "vibrant matter"-those troublesome objects, materials and forces that participate in shaping events and experiences-my involvement in the networks of urban detritus began to deepen. I realised that the separation between the processes of walking and gleaning and studio making was artificially imposed. It felt unnecessary to remove my creative process from the other modes of material transformation that were already in motion: organic and inorganic processes brought about by leisure activities, weather events, illegal dumping and transportation, to categorise a few. We were on the tail end of a lengthy period of drought and, in an effort to deepen my appreciation of the impacts of human and non-human activity on the environment in which I lived, I began to experiment with an ambulatory technique of collecting and making jewellery during extended walks along the Merri Creek shared trail, surrounding streets, and parklands.

Seeding the Cloud: a walking work in process (2010 -)

The process begins with going for a walk: Wear comfortable shoes, allocate 2-3 hours in the morning is best.

Equip yourself with a backpack containing essential tools: Hand drill, drill bits, scribe, wooden wedge with a hook attached, wooden block with screws drilled into the top, silk thread, pearlescent plastic beads, glasses, water bottle, collection bags, rubber gloves, and a sun hat.

Pickup fragments of hard plastic: Explore crevices, corners, and edges and liminal spaces like lane ways, playgrounds, car parks, etc.

Pause at intervals: Adapt park seating, exercise platforms or bus stop benches as temporary workstations.

Assess plastic: Sort them for size, colour, thickness and shape. Check for brittleness.

Drill fragments: mark out holes, drill, and collect plastic shavings in a take-home bag. Thread plastic: Utilize the double-thread technique, inserting a bead at each drill hole and as a spacer between fragments.

Continue the process: Walk, sort, drill, and thread until the thread's end.

Tie off and wear your necklace home.

When immersed in the process I was frequently led astray and went off track absorbed by the process of gathering materials and the repetitious act of beading. This ambulatory process of beading created and mapped its own network of relations. The wearable trace shifted the site of value from price point to a milieu of relationality, inviting a deeper sense of attentiveness and connection, not only to the creative process and the urban environment, but also further afield to the pelagic plastic clogging the currents of ocean gyres and poisoning the food chain.

Through national and international iterations, an extended network grew through and around the Seeding the Cloud project. I facilitated the distribution of the project by hosting walks and decentered my authorship by open-sourcing it via an instruction booklet and a very amateur YouTube video. The project was restaged by others in various locations-Hong Kong, Iran, Dunedin, Edinburgh, Canberra, Auckland. Through these beaded layers of circulation, I caught a glimpse of the co-constituted makings of the "first" necklace makers and began to fantasize about an alternate origin story and scenography for practices of jewellery than the modernist Western version I had been scripted in.

During a three-day stopover in Barcelona, and without access to tools of my trade, my grasp on the making of autonomous jewellery objects, the pathway most favoured by the Contemporary Jewellery Movement and its subsequent waves, momentarily loosened from the established applied art storyline.

My Shadow Wears: Barcelona 2013
The day begins in the familiar manner of a walk, though, on this occasion, my sense of location is uncertain, and I lack a specific plan. I feel disoriented, more out of my body than in it, a sensation intensified by jet lag. While I know parts of the city from a previous artist's residency, the lack of a specific task leaves me feeling somewhat adrift. Stepping out the door, I'm filled with the anticipation of opportunity that comes with a life that is "not fully joined up, not fully articulated."I allow myself to meander, weaving in and out of foot traffic. To centre and familiarise myself, I begin a practice of surface archaeology. Like in Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust, "I catch sight of what at a little distance looks like a jewel or a flower." Although, instead of dismissing small debris as trash, as Solnit does, I suspend my disbelief. If it's caught my eye, I usually insist on picking it up because later I won't be able to resist thinking about its potential as something wearable. On this particular morning, the brightness of the sun and the time of day conspire and my rule begins to function more like a prompt. Rather than immediately pocketing selective debris, I surprise myself by casting my shadow in relation to it. Veering and pitching forward, I project my silhouette towards debris on the ground, aligning material residue as if it were already appointed as an ornament. My attempt to engage and simultaneously index a brooch is captured on the screen of my smartphone. With hands slightly forward, I continue the process, framing the alignment of the cast shadow with debris-ornament using the phone screen. Within the to-and-fro of doing and seeing my bejewelled silhouette on the screen, I sense a loosening of the armature between the precious jewellery of the jewel and the identifying features of me, myself, I. In practising this ornamental penumbral technique, my sense of identity begins to unfasten from the spectre of self, and correspondingly, the debris "brooch" appears to detach from the characteristic preciousness of a jewel. The cumulative effect of this non-precious non-preciousness event of jewelling absorbs me. Time and space merge as I/we are carried along by the technique of broach/brooching, wayfinding the city streets by way of a train ticket, pie bag, chocolate wrapper, scrunched paper, chewing gum, cigarette butt, and a plastic bag.
It's possible to view the broach-brooching technique as a ghosting of jewellery, an apparition that proposes to flatten our anthropocentric attachment to the jewel. The anthropological implications of abstract thought are said to separate us from other sentient beings. However, this experience seemed to support political theorist Jane Bennett's account of "the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other." Feminist theorist Karen Barad also notes that "'Environments' and 'bodies' are iteratively co-constituted." "Bodies ('human,' 'environmental' or otherwise) are integral 'parts of,' or dynamic configurations of, what is" and it is from Barad's notion of co-constituted that I felt compelled to ambitiously yet naively script an alternate storytelling means to account for the origins for jewellery.

Sidetracked and once again in Melbourne, I ventured out on several shadow-casting walks using a makeshift accoutrement: the conveniently named (yet indelicately titled) strap-on selfie stick. Images taken from these walks were mounted into a concertina booklet, the performativity of which evoked a similar gesture in the hands of the beholder. I also printed the images as postcards and exhibited them in Mailbox Art Space, an artist-run initiative located in the foyer of a building in the CBD. From here, we headed out on walks in which I invited participants to indulge with me in the making of a Paleo fantasy exploring ornament through the handheld and hands-free shadow cast technique.

Notes from a Paleo fantasy
Intuitively, we form a procession; in single file, our pace is meandering. Even though I've taken the bookings, I haven't fully planned our route. Our way forward is chartered according to the nearest available light source: cultivated light (hand-held spotlight), artificial light (existing foyer, mall, or parking lot light), and natural light. I guide fellow paleo-fantasists down a scaffold-covered side alleyway. It's dark, dusty, and smells of urine, and I am quietly thrilled by the theatrics of the space. Let's imagine, I say, this is where it all began and this is the site of the Blombos cave. Emptying buckets of felt, plastic, and paper shapes, participants begin to sort them, arranging them as symbols on the ground and walls. Holding the spotlight high, one by one, I back-light each of them in turn. Where acting out what I refer to on occasion as a paleo-fantasy. Our gestures may not be cast in the same configuration that Plato envisaged with his cave allegory, but small shifts in our perception begin to occur just the same. It's music to my ears when I overhear "I'll never think of jewellery or the city in the same way again."
The previous passageways offer a limited account of exercises in ambulatory jewellery initiated through walking and furthered by social process and public engagement. These works are adaptable to localised re-enactments and participant elaborations. The makings of these projects paved the way for alternate desire lines of jewellery practice to emerge, influencing my thinking and approach to the relational scenography of jewellery. In this literary rendition, I positioned the operations of contemporary jewellery within the broader workings of the accessory, as well as the meta praxis of ornamentation. According to podcaster Joshua Schrei, "the word 'adorn' and 'ornament' relate directly to the word 'order,' to the pattern of the cosmos." Schrei suggests that, rather than jewellery forms representing the world in abstraction, "to adorn has also been associated with aligning to a greater pattern, a pattern evident in the harmonic structures of nature and expressed in the aesthetics of culture and ritual."

It appears that bodies need adornment and vice versa.

Further Reading

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning. 2nd ed. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. GB: Routledge.

Langley, Michelle. 2018 How 'bling' makes us human.

MacFarlane, Robert. 2012. The Old Ways: A journey on foot. England: Penguin Books Ltd.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2000 Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin

About Roseanne Bartley

Roseanne Bartley (PhD, Melbourne/Naarm) is an artist-jeweller whose practice focuses on the social and symbolic function of jewellery in studio, exhibition, and public engagement situations. She works with text, found objects, peripatetic, and social processes, devising solo and participatory activities that yield jewellery in wearable and non-wearable formats, inclusive of objects, performance trace, video, and printed material. She was awarded an ARC scholarship in 2014 to study her PhD in the School of Architecture and Design, an Australia Council Barcelona residency in 2006, and has received support from Australia Council (2001, 2004, 2012) and Arts Victoria (2001, 2008), Punctum, and the Ian Potter Foundation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New Zealand, Munich, the United Kingdom, New York, Thailand, the Netherlands, and collected by NGV, Powerhouse Museum, and Toowoomba Regional Gallery.

G34 | jewellery | Melbourne | Roseanne Bartley | street

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Walking in the expanded field of jewellery

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Roseanne Bartley recounts a series of pathfinding projects that take jewellery to and from the streets.

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The Protest Banner Lending Library: Democracy in the making

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The Protest Banner Lending Library: Democracy in the making

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Aram Han Sifuentes' banners aren't just about protest, the workshops for making them provide a rare opportunity for open dialogue between political differences.

(A message to the reader.)

Aram Han Sifuentes's family migrated from South Korea to the USA, where her mother became a seamstress to earn a living. Aram took this childhood experience to her studies at UCLA Berkeley and the School of Art Institute in Chicago, where she developed a practice of socially engaged textiles. Sewing was the perfect medium for reflecting the lives of people like her parents.

Aram started making banners in 2015 for an exhibition about voting rights. "The project then was to speak about the millions of people who can't legally vote in the United States, which is something that doesn't get talked about very often."

This quickly grew into a key part of her practice. After the Trump election in 2016, "Protests were happening everywhere." Aram posted images of her banners on social media, which led to inquiries about how to make them. "I would just say, 'I'm making them again tomorrow. Come to my house.' And so people would start showing up at my house."

Aram had a one-year-old child at the time who wasn't a citizen, so she didn't feel safe going out to protest herself, but she was more than happy to supply banners to others who could attend. "There were multiple banners that were being entrusted to me for me to check out for people to use and return to me. And so, I was like, 'Oh, this is a lending library!'" She produced library cards with a checkout and return date, along with emails. There was also a space to share where they used the banners. "There's no deposit. Nothing happens if you don't return it and quite a few have never come back so maybe they're still being used. That's okay."

It was self-financed at the beginning, but eventually paid workshops helped cover the costs. There have been around 3,000 banners made in the workshops. Of those, there were only around five that contained messages she didn't agree with, like a few "All Lives Matter". Rather than prevent them being made, Aram used the workshop is a space where differences of opinion can be safely discussed.

Aram recalls a woman who made an anti-abortion banner.

"I was helping her make the banner and I asked her, 'Hey, what inspired this slogan? Where are you going to use it?' And she told me how she had for years been volunteering at this organization that provides support and resources for teens who get pregnant on a low income. So she wanted to make this banner to put it in that center. And I was like, 'That's really kind and generous that you volunteered your time you support these.'"

The collective process of banner-making is as important as their use on the street. "That's what I really love about the project, right? Because there are times where I am in the room with people who I don't agree with, but we can have these conversations. And in a lot of times, it ends up being like, I can see your humanity."

In terms of the craft, the Protest Banner Lending Library features very colourful and often comical fabrics. As not everyone has sewing skills, she uses a fusible web-like iron-on adhesive. "it's like, 'You just have to be able to cut and I can help you iron', and they're like, 'Oh yeah, I could do that.'"

Currently, there are many protests about the invasion of Gaza. Unfortunately, opportunities for workshops have dried up because arts institutions don't want to cause trouble. "It's sad because many arts institutions right now would rather stay silent."

Meanwhile, Aram has produced a series of Korean nonggi banners for an installation at Steppenwolf Theatre for a production, Sanctuary City. Through workshops, she collected stories from immigrant and BIPOC community members to tell their stories and their hopes and desires for the world.

As she writes in her Instagram post,

Nonggi have been traditionally used for diverse communal purposes and cultural activities such as festivals, gatherings and rituals. They follow the tenets of Korean shamanism to protect from evil, bring about worldly blessing and foster societal harmony. During Japanese occupation and protests fighting for Korean democracy, nonggi were used against oppression and for resistance.

The world certainly needs this kind of protection, and Aram's humanism, more than ever.

About Aram Han Sifuentes

Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist based in Chicago, who creates participatory projects that center immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; moCa Cleveland, Cleveland; and Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles. She has received numerous awards including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 3Arts Award, 3Arts Next Level Award, Map Fund Grant, and Joyce Award. Her project Protest Banner Lending Library was a finalist for the Beazley Design Awards at the Design Museum (London, UK) in 2016. She earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a professor, adjunct, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a board member of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) fighting for Citizenship for All 11 million undocumented immigrants and adoptees. Visit www.aramhansifuentes.com and follow @ aramhansifuentes

G34 | politics | South Korea | street | textiles | USA

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The Protest Banner Lending Library: Democracy in the making

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Aram Han Sifuentes' banners aren't just about protest, the workshops for making them provide a rare opportunity for open dialogue between political differences.

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Nepalese street art: Democracy at the wall

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Nepalese street art: Democracy at the wall

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https://garlandmag.com/article/nepalese-street-art/

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Gary Wornell

Gary Wornell is impressed by the creativity, skill and commitment to Nepalese culture by the new generation of street artists.

It's more than a decade now since I first landed in Nepal for the Kathmandu International Arts Festival and nearly a decade since I have spent the greater part of my year living and working here. Before coming I had reached out to various arts organisations in the city offering photography workshops as a way of meeting young creatives in a country that I only knew by its incredible Himalayas and the predominant spiritual practices of Hinduism and Buddhism. From the list of contacts I had, one young artist, Kailash K. Shrestha, stood out as a dynamic force and committed practitioner and educator, and in late November of 2012, I got up at 5:00 am to travel across town to begin my series of workshops to a packed classroom at 6:30 in the morning in his studio. I wasn't prepared for the eagerness that awaited me and the enthusiasm of the participants. I'm reminded of those days each time I take my morning coffee before sunrise on my terrace opposite a college where students are drifting into the schoolyard at 5:30 am. These young hopefuls are early birds in their black uniforms vibrant with energy.

Kailash, I soon realised, exhibited a strong independent and catholic approach to the arts. I remember one of our first conversations where he expressed his view that the art scene in Nepal follows two distinct paths: the traditional paintings that adorn the doorways and walls of temples including the Buddhist thangkas that have been meticulously copied over hundreds of years (for which he expressed a deep respect and love), and secondly, the more formal Western-influenced "gallery" exhibited arts which for the most part ignore the ethnic origins of the artists, precluding engagement from a general public, and attempting to reflect something contemporary in a country struggling to provide adequate health and education services, infrastructure and political stability for its citizens. Kailash felt at the time that the formal setting of a gallery was so alien to most Nepalis busy with their everyday struggles that there was a golden opportunity to bring contemporary issues into the public domain. It lay firmly on the walls of the city-the walls that people pass daily. This was a natural place for creative expression, comment, political and social discourse.

My experiences with marks on walls in the developed countries where I have lived for the greater portion of my life are informed by the graffiti sprayed hastily on grubby underpasses in urban settings or on the sides of public buildings with a scale determined by arm's length arches of stylised letters whose sole purpose could be summarised to say "Here I am - I exist". The desire to make marks in challenging socioeconomic circumstances is deeply rooted in our psyche but it was the work of the renowned British artist Banksy that brought, at least for me, a sea change in the way I thought about street art and the power to influence public opinion and affect change.

When Kailash first talked about his passion to promote wall art in Nepal, I struggled to see how this would materialise in a city so cluttered and dirty as Kathmandu. Helsinki, yes: plenty of architecture as pristine as a gessoed canvas just waiting; Montreal, yes; London, sure. But Kathmandu seemed to me to present huge challenges. Not only those of appropriate locations in a visually cluttered metropolis, but the daring freedom of expression on sensitive subjects in a fledgling democracy could present significant risks to anyone publicly challenging the status quo.

Nepal is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. It has over 120 distinct languages and an equal number of dialects, each with its own customs, traditions, and family values spread over the rolling hills of the Himalayas and down into the flat plains of the Terai. Each of these ethnic groups has its own distinct art forms; some are more easily recognised than others like the Mithila arts of Janakpur or the religious works of the Newar as well as those of the Sherpa's, Tharu's and Abadhi's. Acutely aware of the importance of validating and encouraging these indigenous groups to expand their audiences and promote free expression, Kailash determined to engage selected communities across Nepal in expanding their repertoire normally confined to private interiors, to bring them into public spaces, breathing life into otherwise bland locations and dive into the important issues that affect their lives, opening up public discussion at the same time enhancing the urban landscape. Keeping in mind that although Nepal became a democracy of sorts in 1951, it wasn't until the monarchy collapsed in 1990 that creatives in all disciplines had the opportunity for free expression since before that, the King had absolute power.

Once the gate of the paddock was opened, it took decades before anyone felt confident enough to venture into the unknown. Most wouldn't even consider wall art something one could do, and Kailash set out to curate several pilot projects to test the waters. It is hard for us in the West to imagine only thirty years of freedom of creative expression; something those of us lucky enough to live in democracies take completely for granted. Considering the ten years of civil war that the country faced from 1996 to 2006, that number is more like twenty. Nothing.

Contemporary Nepali art struggles to find support from government and municipal authorities when other more pressing development issues demand attention. Traditional, religious and secular art are grouped together in a privately funded Museum of Nepali Art, but there is no state-funded collection available to the general public and tourists to the country are faced with the limited choices of MoNA or privately run commercial galleries relying on sales which attenuate the expression to what can sell. Thus, the opportunity for young artists lies mainly on the landscape of the city walls where provocative social statements promote awareness and initiate discussion of important issues on the subjects of social inequality, health, domestic violence, rape and political unrest to name just a few.

Nepali street art seems to have taken leaps and bounds into the public arena since around 2010. Kailash K. Shrestha's vision to bring graffiti artists and mural painters together has led to a series of high-profile works over the last decade on the boundary walls of schools and colleges, hotels and commercial buildings and a few government institutions. Notably his initiative of 2011 "We Make the Nation" marking the Democracy Wall in Bagbazar, Kathmandu on "International Youth Day" departed from the traditional messages promoted by the numerous political parties to a non-partisan reflection on the "essence of democracy" as Nepal struggled to find unity across the socio-economic divide. Since then Kailash has curated a number of inspiring community-based street art projects throughout the country including "Breaking the Silence - Art Against Women Violence"; "I'm You - Questioning Identity and Socio-political Realities" and most recently "Ekatako Bhitta: The Wall of Unity - 2022", engaging a wide range of ethnic minorities and promoting and encouraging visual artists to use the urban landscape as a canvas for the issues to be aired.

A few days ago I met up with Kailash and we drove out to see "Ekatako Bhitta: The Wall of Unity". I was surprised how well it had weathered in the two years since its completion given the high humidity during monsoon and the intense UV from sunlight. Most wall artworks in Nepal have limited lifespans suffering from crumbling surfaces and fungal growth. Our conversation focused on the cultural diversity of the artists brought together for this project; artists from the far west in Mustang to the far east in Janakpur; and the cohesive way in which it had all come together: the celebration of a unified nation. The Wall of Unity symbolises the potential of ethnic minorities to express themselves through their unique perspectives and bridge the gaps that have divided the country for centuries.

Ratification of Nepal's constitution in 2015 made the inequalities of the caste system illegal, but the prejudices inherent in the social hierarchy, work and education are deeply embedded in the culture and remain even to this day. Artudio has sought to address social caste-based inequality by engaging minority groups in the east of the country, like the women of Janakpur, in collaboration with international guest artists, to express themselves through their traditional art form of Mithila and create street artworks on contemporary themes that delve deeper into the issues that reflect their place in today's world.

The growing presence of street art projects whether they be curated by Kailash K. Shrestha's Artudio or the numerous independent creators who have been inspired by his initiatives are playing an increasingly vital role in raising awareness and initiating discussions around important subjects including child protection, women's health, corruption and labour exploitation, to name but a few.

Street art in Kathmandu has brought into the public eye the young creative talent in the city. From the early forms of graffiti of a decade ago, the change that is taking place is inspiring. The result of initiatives instigated by the art community has not only brought forth a shift in attitudes, but has also induced the commissioning of murals from a wide range of corporate patrons including restaurants, malls, educational establishments and private individuals. Nepal is entering a new era of artistic expression in the public domain, embracing the past and looking to the future. The city that I first came to all those years ago, struggling to embrace new technologies and build efficient infrastructure is rapidly changing. Improvements in essential services, roads, electricity and water supply have made a significant impact on the urban landscape and the acceptance of street art as an important part of that landscape is contributing to the story.

I recently went across town to Patan on the south side of the river. On the outskirts of the ancient kingdom is a modern mall; clean, elegant and inviting and not unlike something one would find in any highly developed country, but the thing that caught my eye was a work towering above me on the side of the building by a Nepali artist, Vijaya Maharjan and painted with the help of street artist, Sudeep Balla, a bold and vibrant mural fusing traditional elements in a contemporary style celebrating Nepal's unique cultural heritage and reflecting the positive energy of a young demographic who started their careers with spray cans and brushes a decade ago on the back streets of the city.

G34 | Gary Wornell | Nepal | street

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Nepalese street art: Democracy at the wall

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Gary Wornell is impressed by the creativity, skill and commitment to Nepalese culture by the new generation of street artists.

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Western Pennsylvania School For Blind Children, North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

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https://garlandmag.com/article/traffic-island-oasis/

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Sharon Massey and Sean Derry

Sharon Massey and Sean Derry find a rare piece of public land on which to stage fanciful worlds in cardboard.

This project was directly inspired by the COVID pandemic shutdown in the summer of 2020. As we talked over Zoom about how to continue working on participatory public art projects despite travel restrictions and the need for social distancing, we came up with the idea for Traffic Island Oasis, a temporary tropical getaway located on a traffic island. This location would allow us to make use of an underutilized public space while adhering to pandemic safety guidelines that called for outdoor gatherings, and most importantly, it provided a way for participants to "travel" and have a new experience during a time of isolation and uncertainty.

We located a suitable traffic island and made a nine-foot-tall palm tree from cardboard and a fake sandy beach using burlap fabric. As educators, we wanted to collaborate with our students on the project, and so they were each tasked with making an item for the island using post-consumer cardboard. They came up with a wide range of ideas for objects for the island, including chairs, sharks, boats, lighthouses, chickens, treasure chests and more. We placed everything on the island and invited masked friends and family to tour Traffic Island Oasis on a sunny Sunday afternoon in 2020.

We've repeated the event five times so far, adding to it each time. Now we have tropical drinks, island-themed music, and a vote for the People's Choice Award (the trophy is a pineapple). We typically have approximately 100 visitors to the island during the one-hour duration of the installation. This doesn't include the many motorists who drive by and wave or honk at the island's inhabitants. As a side note, we've never asked for permission to host an event on the traffic island, and so far we haven't had any problems.

We acknowledge and embrace the absurdity of Traffic Island Oasis, and feel that the unusual public location helps to disarm the viewing of art for people who might not otherwise engage in such an activity. We are also motivated by providing our students with a public venue for exhibiting their artwork, which appears to improve their investment in the project and introduces ideas about site-specificity and social engagement.

Traffic Island Oasis credits PARK(ing) Day by the collective Rebar as an inspiration. Starting in San Francisco, California in 2005, Rebar created mini-parklets in metered parking spaces, taking advantage of extremely affordable real estate in an otherwise expensive urban landscape. In the 2009 PARK(ing) Day Manifesto, Rebar defines such terms as Tactical Urbanism, "the use of modest or temporary revisions to urban space to seed structural environmental change," and Generous Urbanism, "the creation of public situations between strangers that produce new cultural value, without commercial transaction." More information about PARK(ing) Day can be found at myparkingday.org

These ideas of Tactical Urbanism and Generous Urbanism are central to the premise behind Traffic Island Oasis even though our projects are located in a more rural setting in Western Pennsylvania. By installing a tropical island on an otherwise unused grassy space, we hope to raise questions about the ownership of public spaces and increase a sense of belonging for local residents. We also aim to instil a sense of curiosity and creativity by providing an unexpected cultural experience for participants and observers. Traffic Island Oasis is a completely free event-even the material used in the project is free post-consumer cardboard which is recycled at the conclusion of the installation.

We plan to continue to install and iterate on Traffic Island Oasis each Fall with our students and would consider taking the project to other interested venues. As with any outdoor project, wind and rain are sometimes challenging factors, but we've tried to embrace bad weather as a "tropical storm." We love to see what unusual items our students decide to create for each new version of the project, as do return visitors to the island. The winners of the People's Choice Awards are frequently the most creative and well-executed objects on the island, reinforcing some of the values we try to instil as arts educators. Even more important is the sense that the project requires collaboration and authentic input from every participant. Traffic Island Oasis celebrates the creativity of each contributing artist, and the coordinated display of their work produces a project with broader perspectives than would be possible by a single artist.

About Sharon Massey and Sean Derry

Since 2017, artists and educators Sharon Massey and Sean Derry have collaborated as Local X Change. Located in Western Pennsylvania in the United States, Sharon and Sean seek to democratize art and technology through civically engaged projects, such as their forthcoming Studio Stream project featuring a mini-truck transformed into an earthbound communication satellite that will broadcast a teen-led radio station.

G35 | sculpture | street | USA

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Sharon Massey and Sean Derry find a rare piece of public land on which to stage fanciful worlds in cardboard.

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Karl Chitham

Karl Chitham bears witness to intricately woven works by Tyrone Te Waa that honour the Māori tradition of elevating the ancestors.

In late August 2022 Tyrone Te Waa travelled to Te Awakairangi Lower Hutt, Aotearoa New Zealand to install his work Te Wā, Ringaringa, Garage, Hinengaro, Bones, La Fibra, Ngākau and Rākau as part of the exhibition Whetūrangitia/Made As Stars at The Dowse Art Museum. Featuring thirteen artists from Aotearoa, Nepal, Canada, Hawai'i, Sāmoa, Tonga and Laos, this exhibition explored the real-time, lived relationships first cultures have with their ancestral gods. Through the retelling of histories, each of the artists generously shared the concepts, practices and belief systems of their cultures.

Within this diverse mix, Tyrone's work offered a unique tactile perspective that utilised found, discarded, and repurposed materials with a particular focus on fibre and textiles. This was his largest installation to date, which brought together hard and soft sculptural elements to create a structure that became a focal point for the exhibition. While Tyrone's working process usually involved him labouring alone in his studio garage to manifest the curious forms of his busts and screens, it was the construction and covering of the timber framework elements that offered a surprising opportunity for others to share in his process and understand the unique qualities of working with cloth.
Upon arrival at The Dowse Tyrone asked to see the timber off-cuts we had been putting aside for him over the months leading up to the show. Each rejected and redundant baton was inspected diligently for its new purpose. Tyrone then methodically erected his wooden assemblage, making alterations and adjustments as he went. A team of helpers were invited to assist with wrapping these "bones" with a "skin" made from strips of off-white canvas drop-sheets. In an almost ritualistic way, we wound the mummy-like coverings studiously around and around these rigid forms-one helper describing it as "meditation through repetitive action".
Tyrone has defined his practice as "knowledge weaving", suggesting that the maker's hands breathe life and transfer generations of experiences into the materials in a way that is absent from mechanical processes. The touch and feel of creating the works is an intuitive process for Tyrone. By employing methods of hand-tying, binding, concealing, knotting, tangling and fastening Tyrone has created a language of the hand that links him directly to his tūpuna (ancestors). It is transformative on a personal level as a way of transcending non-indigenous notions of time and space, but it also welcomes others to take part in their own way.

Of Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāpuhi ancestry, Tyrone's practice is an expression of his whānaungatanga (family relationships), referencing his tūpuna and atua (gods) while embracing those who are still to come. This system of connections reflects a well-known whakataukī (saying) "Ka mua, Ka muri" (walking backwards into the future) suggesting that time for Māori is not a linear concept but one that shifts and moves, and where past, present and future can all exist simultaneously like the threads that circle and overlap many of Tyrone's forms. These ideas are also present in the connections that come with raranga (weaving) and other textile-related practices that are most closely associated with maternal lines and express the deep cultural traditions that fibre symbolises across generations and between the physical and spiritual realms.
This sense of association was accentuated during the period of installation. As we helpers sat or stood wrapping and twisting in the dark gallery spaces, receiving quiet direction from Tyrone at each step, there was a feeling of peacefulness in our collective effort. At one point, Tyrone asked me to help repair one of the new screen works that would be suspended from his timber and canvas structure. He demonstrated how to twist and turn the fabric in a way that covered the wire armature while also becoming its own unique textural form. It takes me some time, through trial and error, to find the perfect balance of control and instinct to replicate Tyrone's seemingly effortless understanding of the materials.
The installation is punctuated by individual works. The screens that hang between structural components offer support to Tyrone's signature busts that are mounted stoically on small platforms. These figures are non-specific in their appearance: some have recognisable head-like shapes and face-like features while others sprout appendages that could be wings or jazz-hands. Protuberances morph from familiar to alien as you move around them. The thing they all share is the deep investment of time spent in the winding of continuous strands to build these figures line by line into personality-filled characters that Tyrone has described as a "gateway to memorialise my thoughts and experiences."

The entire installation references a Māori architectural tradition called whata ("elevation"). Like stages, these arrangements made from wood and historically lashed together with fibre represented moments of respect. Some of these structures would be two or three stories high and would display the wealth and hospitality of the host iwi (tribe) to visiting manuhiri (guests). Another form of whata, however, was more personal. Recently deceased whānau (family) would be placed on these platforms, high in trees, before eventually being laid to rest in caves or other sites of interment. Tyrone's intricately hand-woven busts are not necessarily representative of either of these specific subjects but are more an embodiment of the connections we have with our tūpuna and acknowledging their mana (status).
As the installation progressed, and helpers came and went in their various tasks, it became clear that this moment of connection was coming to an end. While visitors to the exhibition may not have recognised it, this enshrouded skeletal form was not a haphazard arrangement of components but was a lesson in the harmony and balance that comes with being open to following your gut and listening to your instincts. As we completed wrapping a length, we were confronted with the conundrum of the awkward angles of platforms, cross beams or joins. Under Tyrone's patient guidance, our fingers folded, tucked and smoothed the cloth endeavouring to mimic the same fluid approach he had used in other places. With a final flurry of activity, we searched the structure for any holes or untidy moments. It became second nature to run your hands over the surface, feeling rather than seeing where adjustments needed to be made. Some of us stayed to watch as Tyrone placed his busts and screens in their allocated positions, giving the "body" of this installation the gift of sight. These last gestures end the helper's physical relationship with this work as it is handed over to be cared for by the gallery and the ability to touch the work is removed. It is only during the karakia before the exhibition is opened for the public that we are able to feel the texture of the canvas one final time-a moment to savour and a memory to keep.
About Karl Chitham

Karl Chitham ONZM is the Director of the Dowse Art Museum and Head of Arts and Culture for Hutt City Council, Te Awakairangi Lower Hutt. He has written for multiple arts publications including co-authoring the ground-breaking publication Crafting Aotearoa: A Cultural History of New Zealand and the Wider Moana Oceania.

Aotearoa | exhibition | G33 | Karl Chitham

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Karl Chitham bears witness to intricately woven works by Tyrone Te Waa that honour the Māori tradition of elevating the ancestors.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/skillful-touch/

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Curtis Benzle

Curtis Benzle argues for the need to appreciate the work of the hand in a digital age

"Touch", by itself, has never been enough to define significant accomplishment in creative ceramics. "Skillful touch" however, has historically been a core principle in the complex, ceramic aesthetic and a hallmark of exceptional quality and value. Unfortunately, as the lure of technology and engineering prowess beckons, clay artists, curators, collectors, and critics have failed to convincingly define and defend a traditional clay art aesthetic. Not to suggest the omission of technological progress, but certainly human touch should retain a critical role in this definition. The steady deterioration of appreciation for touch as an artistic element is subtle, but evermore omnipresent. How rarely now do we hear reference to a clay artist's "skillful touch", as opposed to the more persistent reference to social relevance? As if clay has been curiously transformed into a primarily effective tool for sociological transformation or political persuasion? While it is difficult to critically address "skill" as a core aesthetic, especially when immersed in a popular culture fixated on self-infatuation, the importance of an inclusive and comprehensive clay aesthetic that includes touch has not diminished-only our willingness or ability to accurately and honestly define it.

I recently experienced David McDonald demonstrate his impeccable technique at the Mississippi Clay Conference. It was an event small enough to allow for individual interaction with the artist and realize an up-close appreciation of their movement and marks. David's integration of traditional African patterning, informed by an intensely personal interpretation, was inspirational and honest. While using a potter's wheel to form the substrate for his decoration, he proceeded to use only his hands and a simple, ebony contouring tool (of his own making) to control the shape and dimension of his linear decoration.

Watching David work, I was taken back some forty years to an equally engaging demonstration by Nigerian artist, Ladi Kwali. While she formed and decorated her traditional pottery, Ms Kwali was asked about the social significance of her decoration. She indicated there was not much: she mostly repeated what her mother and grandmother had taught her. Pressed further by an MFA-infested audience, she did admit that on occasion she would subtly modify a design to suit her personal taste, but it was skill and respect for tradition that mattered most.

My reaction to both artists was that the core principle guiding their work is a synthesis of incredibly skillful touch, in service to the inspiration and intentional respect for tradition. That this principle is modified and moved forward by a deep personal perspective provides the impetus to transcend repetition and create art.

Shortly after experiencing David McDonald's demonstration, I came across a review of Mark Goudy's work in the September 2023 issue of Ceramics Monthly. I admire Mark and his work and especially appreciate his use of appropriate technology to express his very personal aesthetic. However, the article I was reading was not written by Mark, but about Mark and therein lies my dilemma as it relates to "Touch".

Writing in June 2023 for Studio Potter, Mark related his attraction to clay; "the draw for me with ceramics was to turn completely away from the virtual digital world and simply create objects with my hands. After a twenty-year career as a digital hardware logic designer, I found hand-building unique, organic forms in clay to be a captivating and cathartic experience". Mark continues to state that later, using digital 3D CAD software to design forms, 3D printing mother molds, and then creating plaster slip-casting molds from these 3D prints, he could "create shapes and forms I could envision in my mind's eye but could never build directly by hand".

In what is a disservice to Mark's very honestly described utilization of appropriate technology (in this case, commercial software and 3-D printing), to create an incredible body of work, the article's author was seemingly unable to avoid a very confusing linkage between marks made by a 3-D printer and the human touch that is so intimately linked with traditional ceramic expression. Her reference to evidence of the artist's, "proficient hand skills" contradicts Mark's own observation that his current work could not be created by hand. Subtle and seemingly insignificant, this confusing commentary exemplifies the misrepresentation that threatens a thorough understanding and appreciation of the traditional ceramic aesthetic, including and especially "touch".

In the same vein, an article covering the work of Niko Conte in the February 2021 Ceramic Review, reveals a similar confusion between the writer's reference to touch in contradiction to the artist's own stated interest in machine-generated creation. While Mr. Conte references his fascination with using a machine to create something that, "hasn't existed yet", the author draws an awkward parallel with the organic patterns in handmade, lace filigree. More confusing still is the author's reference to a production process that entails, "hundreds of painstakingly intricate layers", thus humanizing a mechanical operation that is not particularly painstaking to a machine.

My concern, in either case, is certainly not with the introduction of new ceramic technologies, as I have used such technology in my own studio to, as Mark Goudy says, "Do things that the human hand either may not do or find incredibly difficult". But an inaccurate misrepresentation of these technologies that confuses machine-aided production and human touch undermines a significant ceramic aesthetic and the full appreciation of ceramic's unique contribution to the art world.

We can certainly celebrate and benefit from the insightful incorporation of new, appropriate technologies, as is so evident in the work of significant artists like Mark Gaudy and Nico Conti. But at the same time, we must hold our critics, curators and collectors to a higher standard to accurately define and, as necessary, defend the complex aesthetic that has always been essential to the accurate appreciation of significant ceramic art. New forms of creative expression should never engender confusion between the amazing capacity of modern manufacturing and the magnificence of skillful, human touch.

About Curtis Benzle

Curtis Benzle's signature artworks are translucent, porcelain sculpture and architectural lighting. He is represented in major museums and collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Smithsonian, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Art, Seto(Japan) Cultural Center; The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, Cleveland(Ohio) Museum of Art, and the White House Collection. Curtis received his B.F.A. from the Ohio State University, MA from Northern Illinois University and apprenticed in pottery with Robert Eckels. He is Professor Emeritus at the Columbus College of Art and Design (Columbus, Ohio) and has taught over sixty workshops throughout the world. His most recent workshops were at La Meridiana, Tuscany, Italy and the Pottery Gym, Madrid Spain Curtis is included in over twenty-five books on contemporary ceramics, including; "Lithophanes", Margaret Carney, "Masters: Porcelain", Richard Burkett, "Clay in Art", Kostas Tarkasis, "Ceramic Form", Peter Lane, "Making Marks" & "Clay and Glazes for the Potter", Robin Hopper and "Art That Works", Lloyd Herman. Curtis is a former Trustee of the American Craft Council, past Executive Director of Ohio Designer Craftsmen, served on the Board of the Craft Emergency Relief Fund(CERF) and is the past-president of the Alabama Visual Arts Network where he continues to promote learning and career success for all studio artists. Curtis is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics. Visit Benzleporcelain.com

ceramics | G33 | skill | touch

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Curtis Benzle argues for the need to appreciate the work of the hand in a digital age.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/peter-hawkesby/

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Lucy Hammonds

Lucy Hammonds writes about a New Zealand ceramicist whose work is grounded on the land he walks.

Earlier this year, as the southern autumn gave way to winter, I made my first visit to the studio of Peter Hawkesby. While mutual friendships had previously thrown us into orbit, this was my first opportunity to meet Hawkesby in his workshop since he had made the move from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to Ōtepoti Dunedin, one of Aotearoa New Zealand's southernmost cities. A classic ceramicist's shed, his studio perches above an industrial lot in a central city suburb: concrete and corrugated iron are punctuated by deposits of clay in assorted buckets and bags.

My first encounters with Hawkesby's ceramics came through the lens of art history. His hand-built teapots, cups and incinerators from the early 1980s sit amongst museum collections like punks at a conservative party conference-anarchistic, unpredictable and totally compelling. Within the recent history of ceramics in Aotearoa, Hawkesby is one of the radicals. Briefly flirting with life as a rural studio potter in the 1970s, he soon realised that he got "no thrills whatsoever" from a life producing domestic wares for a ready market and went looking elsewhere. Turning away from the wheel and the stability of the studio, Hawkesby followed a path that led to Waiheke, an island in the Hauraki Gulf that, at the time, was an enclave for those seeking alternatives. A bush-clad island, seamed with clay, it was here that Hawkesby found his artistic voice. His work was wrong in all the right ways, and he was recognised as a singular figure in a crowded field of ceramics. Five decades on from the time when Hawkesby first plunged his hands into a lump of clay, his works still brim with this energy. Despite moving south for a slower, more sustainably-paced practice, the most recent phase of his career has been marked by an outpouring of ideas, his studio shelves stacked with works at all stages of completion.

Hawkesby's are works to be "visually felt"...

Hawkesby's works are typically handbuilt compositions of assembled elements. Although primarily sculptural, their formal and material language is one of intimacy. The way Hawkesby brings the different parts of his work together encourages thinking about the relationships between object and body. His works are recognisably domestic in scale and form, with loops and swishes of clay, and stacked, squashed and overlapped elements. They are made through push and pull: their curves, cracks, cuts and joints trigger the muscle-memory of rolling, kneading, cutting, pinching, and squeezing. As Richard Fahey, a writer and curator, once wrote, Hawkesby's are works to be "visually felt", the eye "translat[ing] in purely abstract terms a bodily experience."

Following this idea that Hawkesby's work has a transformative quality, translating visual into tangible, then his most recent "Heart Baskets" (2023) can be thought of as a recasting of experience as form. On my first visit to Hawkesby's studio, the "Heart Baskets" remained unfinished. Unglazed and waiting on a lower shelf, the works were in a state of suspended reality and he was still processing their next steps. Hawkesby explained the origin of the works, and how they had been made over a period in which he was experiencing a slow-moving heart attack. It wasn't until later that he became fully aware of this cardiac episode, and so the works became an object-based record of this time. With a central structure bracing an enclosed internal void, the Heart Baskets are open, basket-like forms. They are squat and grounded, with side panels wrapping around a solid central handle. As Hawkesby described making the works during this cardiac event, parallels arose between form and experience: the sculptural language of the Heart Baskets echoes the unique conditions of their making.

Returning to Hawkesby's studio several months later, the "Heart Baskets" had been completed. Glazed in shades of black and brown, the body of the baskets had developed into a patchwork of texture and tone. They are unified by a central handle, which binds together the internal skeleton, creating a structure to which the side panels attach. This makes the handle important, both compositionally and conceptually. Talking about these works, Hawkesby made connections between the handle and physical expressions of strength. Thinking about this in relation to ideas of touch, which are guiding this particular discussion of Hawkesby's work, the "Heart Baskets" remind us that there are few things more reassuring, more dependable, than a sturdy handle to grip.

While Hawkesby's "Heart Baskets" are held together by a strong handle, they are bottomless. They hold nothing more than an empty void, an assorted cast of additional elements slung over the side panels, or propped up against them. This assembly of loose parts has other stories to tell, other ways to think about the relational nature of ceramics. Hawkesby moved to Ōtepoti from Tāmaki Makaurau, where he had easy access to the abundant clay deposits of that region. Arriving in Ōtepoti, he discovered that it was more difficult to locate workable clays directly from the land. Gathering, storing and exchanging clay with other artists, he has gradually built up his resources, creating a material library that is rich with embodied stories of time and place, of geology and geography.

While finishing the "Heart Baskets", Hawkesby had returned north to Tāmaki Makaurau, tacking on an extra day and an extra bag in order to bring back clay from Waiheke, his former island home. Traversing the familiar coastline hunting for clay, Hawkesby found the landscape had been significantly impacted by the cyclone damage that ravaged parts of Aotearoa earlier in 2023. Wading along the beach, fearing his expedition might prove fruitless, he felt clods sticking to the soles of his shoes. These clumps of waterlogged clay had been dislodged by slips and were now dispersed across the sandy foreshore. Gathering a small supply, he transported this back to Ōtepoti where it was worked into the loose elements of the "Heart Baskets". Hawkesby pointed out that the qualities of the clay came from this particular location, the unique colours of the clay, and the textures of shell fragments that had revealed themselves during firing. The patchwork of the works was transformed into a topography, the clay itself mapping a journey from north to south shaped by the intimacy of a maker's understanding of their material.

In our last conversation about these works, Hawkesby had brought his set of three "Heart Baskets" into the back room of his studio, setting them amongst other works that were being prepared for a forthcoming exhibition. While they spoke in the same formal language as his wider practice, these works felt as if they were in a different conversation. Hawkesby's work is full of energy and movement, with different forms, colours, tones, and textures coming alive and interacting within his works. The "Heart Baskets" have a different tenor, their quieter nature inviting the viewer into their depths. Despite being born out of times of turbulence and change, they feel stable and anchored, offering a safe harbour when wild weather is on the horizon.

Further reading
Tender Brick: The Material Epiphanies of Peter Hawkesby
About Lucy Hammonds

Lucy Hammonds is a Curator at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, one of Aotearoa New Zealand's metropolitan art galleries. She was previously Curator of Art and Design Collections at Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery/MTG Hawke's Bay, and trained in the Critical Studies programme at Unitec School of Design, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Lucy currently lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin with her family, where much of their spare time is spent exploring the beaches and mountains of Te Waipounamu, the South Island.

Aotearoa | ceramics | G33 | touch

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Peter Hawkesby ✿ Building a heart basket

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Lucy Hammonds writes about a New Zealand ceramicist whose work is grounded on the land he walks.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/dana-falcini/

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Crafting entrails to recover forgotten worlds

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Dana Falcini recounts the alchemy in the hands-on transmutation of hog intestine into unique and precious objects.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/chozetsugiko/

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Chozetsugiko ✿ The transcendent technique of Meiji craftsmanship reimagined

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Sachiko Tamashige heralds a remarkable new generation inspired by the hyper-realism of the Meiji era.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/peranakan-tiles/

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Ananya Mallick

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(A message to the reader.)

Ananya Mallick explores "hands on" the production of traditional tiles in Malaysia.

There is a charm in old cities that beguiles my heart like no other. I often find myself wandering through ancient cities that are as if frozen in time. Malacca is one of those old small towns in Malaysia where the enchanting era of Peranakan hasn't moved forward. There I first came to know about Peranakan tiles-a symphony of colours and motifs.

The enthralling beauty of Peranakan tiles found their way to the Malay Archipelago in the early 1900s. Chinese migrants known as "Hokkien" were settling down in the region bringing with them their artistic skills in pottery-making. Their pottery techniques gradually began to intertwine with the local cultures and traditions, which led to the birth of Peranakan tiles.

Five years ago, I was on a summer getaway in Malacca. It was a delightfully whimsical afternoon, caressed by the tender touch of golden sunrays. I was time travelling through visiting traditional Chinese shophouses, and then I first encountered the Peranakan tiles inside a shophouse. The bold and vibrant colour palettes immediately immersed me in bewilderment.

Malacca is not the only place that can hold pride in this ravishing architectural heritage. George Town in Penang is another city in Malaysia that too boasts a myriad of Peranakan tiles that are very common in its colourful facades of the shophouses. These decorative tiles can also be found in Singapore, especially in Joo Chiat Road and Katong, due to their strong roots with the Peranakans.

In the early days, Peranakan tiles served a functional purpose while adorning the walls and floors of traditional Chinese shophouses. Their utilitarian function soon transformed into a form of artistic expression. Influenced by Chinese mythology and folklore and twisted with Malaya flora and fauna, Peranakan tiles became a visual representation of the vibrant and multicultural Peranakan society.

Each motif tells a story

The motifs of Peranakan tiles carry a deeper meaning. Geometric motifs dominate many Peranakan tiles, with recurring patterns of dovetailing shapes and symmetrical formations. These motifs not only create a visually striking effect but also symbolise balance and harmony-the foundational values in Peranakan culture. The "geometric lattice" is a common pattern used on Peranakan tiles believed to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck to the household. Another commonly used pattern is the "basket weave" design, which consists of interwoven squares. This pattern represents unity and strength, reflecting the tight-knit nature of the Peranakan community.

Floral designs are another prominent pattern of Peranakan tiles that mostly includes lotus, chrysanthemums, and peonies, each carrying its own symbolic meaning. Lotus flowers, for example, represent purity and enlightenment, while chrysanthemums embody longevity and resilience. These floral patterns serve as a way to connect with nature and embrace its abundance.

One of the most iconic Peranakan tile designs is the "phoenix and peony" motif. This motif mirrors prosperity, longevity, and beauty. The phoenix, a mythical bird, represents renewal and rebirth, while the peony is a symbol of wealth and grace. Another prevalent pattern is the "rooster on a perch," a popular symbol of courage and strength. Paired with playful geometric patterns, this design showcases the Peranakan's zest for life and their willingness to face any challenges with determination.

The "bamboo and chrysanthemum" pattern combines Chinese and Western influences. The bamboo represents resilience and flexibility, while the chrysanthemum indicates longevity. "Blue Blossom" features delicate, blue-hued flowers set against a white background to exude sophistication and charm.

The "Kerawang" is a lace-like pattern created through painstakingly carved and painted details. The "Sarong Kebaya" pattern is another beloved motif in Peranakan tiles. It is inspired by the traditional attire worn by Peranakan women. This pattern features diagonal or diamond-shaped motifs reminiscent of the Semen Kebaya, or the kebaya fabric. The Sarong Kebaya design embodies elegance and femininity, making it a popular choice for those seeking a touch of luxury in their interior spaces.

The craftsman behind continuing the legacy

As time passes, the beauties of the past fade away, and finding craftsmen who can preserve these delicate tiles is becoming a challenging feat. Ronald Wong, a pottery artist, is one of the dedicated young practitioners to revive this historical art form. His creative venture Zen Ceramic is breathing new life into Malacca's local architectural heritage by producing and selling customised Peranakan tiles. This Malacca-based creative hub often offers workshops and classes, allowing the new generation to learn about the history and artistry behind these tiles. It also has a little shop at the corner where art lovers and tourists can buy these tiles as souvenirs.

I learned the painting technique for Peranakan tiles from Wong at Zen Ceramic. Later he showed me the entire process of the making of a Peranakan tile in his pottery space.

It requires a blend of artistry and technical expertise

The creation process of Peranakan tiles is truly a labour of love. It all begins with a design, then it is transferred onto a mould. The mould is typically made from cast iron, which serves as a template for creating multiple tiles. Afterwards, the makers proceed to mix the clay. The composition of the clay mixture determines the durability and colour of the tiles. So, the makers need to carefully measure the combination of clay, sand, and water and mix them in specific proportions to achieve the desired consistency. This process requires precision and experience, as even a slight variation in the mixture can affect the final product.

Once the clay mixture is poured into the mould, the makers scrape off the excess clay to ensure a smooth surface. The mould is then left to dry for several days, allowing it to harden and take shape. This drying process is crucial. It strengthens the tile and prevents cracks or warping during firing.

The dried tiles are then carefully placed in kilns, where they are fired at high temperatures to solidify and strengthen the clay. After the tiles have been fired, artisans add paint to the tiles. Then undergo a meticulous glazing process. This glazing technique is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Peranakan tiles-making process that gives the tiles their signature glossy texture.

Then the tiles undergo a second firing process. This firing enhances the vibrant and glazed finish. The high temperatures of the kiln cause the glaze to melt and fuse with the clay, creating a durable and long-lasting surface.

I asked Wong, "What's your favourite motif among all?" Wong has created a new floral motif with a contemporary and very vigorous colour combination. He has named it Modern Vintage. "I love it because of its colours and elegant design. It is a timeless and beautiful choice for display or gift for someone special," Wong describes his personal liking for Peranakan motifs. He keeps innovating new motifs intersecting the old ones with contemporary themes that celebrate the transformation of the modern Peranakan community.

About Ananya Mallick

Ananya Mallick works in project management and lives in Malaysia. She is also a freelance journalist and photographer focused on art and culture and solutions journalism. She is currently working on her landscape photography project, The call of the mountains.

ceramics | Malaysia

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Peranakan tiles: A harmony of colour, motif and texture

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Ananya Mallick explores "hands on" the production of traditional tiles in Malaysia.

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Sarajevo City Center, Vrbanja, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

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Forging connection: An interview with master coppersmith Eldin Sprečo

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Forging connection: An interview with master coppersmith Eldin Sprečo

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https://garlandmag.com/article/eldin-spreco/

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Yasmin Masri

Yasmin Masri delves into the world of traditional Bosnian coppersmithing with Eldin Sprečo and learns how this practice can connect through generations.

"When I make a piece in my hands, I can't explain it," master coppersmith Eldin Sprečo reflects, "some part of my soul, it goes in the metal." Certainly, there is a kind of connection when holding one of Eldin's handmade objects. Marks of where skilled hands worked before yours. Something human left behind.

Eldin Sprečo's studio is on Kovaci, a steep street just outside of Baščaršija, the old Ottoman town centre of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The studio is surrounded by similar spaces. As you climb, the sound of hammers hitting copper spills out from open doorways.

Coppersmithing has been practised in this part of the world for more than 500 years. Under Ottoman occupation, the craft grew into a respected and highly skilled profession. Before that "people made only ordinary things, like a plate for eating or a dish for soup," Eldin tells me, the Ottomans "made a renaissance [for copper]."

Historically, many coppersmiths have had studios on Kazandziluk, a narrow cobblestone street with small workshops and stores. The street, in the heart of the Baščaršija, takes its name from kazandžijas, a term to describe master metalsmiths. Now, as tourism grows in Sarajevo, spaces for working often give way to spaces for selling and so many makers, like Eldin, have moved a little further out.

A Sudden Spark

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, coppersmithing generally runs within families as businesses are passed from fathers to sons. However, Eldin's pathway into the craft was different. After working as a sound engineer at a TV station in Sarajevo for 17 years, Eldin developed a sudden fascination with copper. "It [was] like a flash" he tells me.

One day, a colleague who lived nearby visited while Eldin was working on a copper item in his garden. "He asked me, 'What are you doing?'" Eldin recalls. "I was working with a screwdriver, which is so embarrassing for me [now]. I didn't know anything about copper [then]."

Eldin's colleague suggested he meet his grandfather, who was a local master coppersmith, "[he told me] 'you could learn something from him'." After thinking about it for a few days, Eldin went to visit the master one morning. They hit it off - "I stayed for two and a half years."

Eldin's new master had a studio in his garden. While it was just a simple workshop, for Eldin, it was a space of wonder and learning. During his apprenticeship, Eldin often woke up in the middle of the night thinking of new things to try with copper. "It's a passion."

At the start, tools and processes felt unfamiliar and unwieldy. "I've never taken a hammer like this in my hand before," Eldin recalls. But slowly, he learned new ways of moving with the material. How much pressure to apply. What angle to hammer from. The tools became extensions of Eldin's hands. A way to explore his curiosity and turn ideas into a physical reality. "Shaping metal, bending metal, hammering metal. It is fascinating for me"

Form and Surface

Perhaps the most archetypal copper item in Sarajevo is the džezva: a pot for making thick, Turkish-style coffee. For Eldin, coffee is an important ritual in his day, "I wake up early and drink coffee with my wife. It is some kind of social moment in my country." The trick to making a great brew? "Try boiling the water twice," Eldin tells me, "you [will] have coffee like chocolate."

The base of a džezva is wide, narrowing as it gets higher. Towards the top of the pot, the form widens again and an indent or open spout is created to guide the liquid. A long brass handle is then attached. Delicate fingers kept away from the hot copper.

Sometimes the džezva is curved, nestling into the palm of your hand. Other times, it is sharper and more angular. Size varies depending on how many people are drinking together. Sometimes the džezvas are plain. Other times they are covered in ornate decoration: twisting scrolls, blooming flowers.

While Eldin often makes traditional forms, he also likes to experiment. "'I like very strange shapes ... I'm so happy when I make something different." Often these experiments start with a flat disc of copper. Using a hammer and applying force to add dimension: the form emerges.

"When I make things with my hands, I never know what I will make," Eldin tells me. "Maybe when I start [I think it will be] a cup for coffee, but in the end it is a cup for something else, or maybe a box for jewellery. ... I enjoy that." During these experiments, the function comes from the form. How it might physically feel to use the object for a particular purpose.

For Eldin, the shape of the copper form tells him what should go on the surface: "I exactly know." Many of his patterns reference his local heritage. Eldin often uses embossing techniques like repoussé (raising metal by hammering from the reverse side) and chasing (hammering from the front to lower or indent metal). These processes add texture and undulation - "you can touch that, it's very important."

Tinning, Retinning: Layered Hands

Copperware made for cooking and serving food, such as a džezva, is normally covered in tin. This metal coating protects against damage from acidic foods, and stops the copper leaching into cooking when heated. Beyond this, the tin creates a smooth "non-stick" surface.

The process of applying tin is a delicate one. The object is heated, creating a surface that is just the right temperature. Soft enough to melt tin, but not so hot as to tarnish copper. Eldin explains, "When you want to tin something, you need very slow fire. Not too much. Not too strong." In this process "the tin is a rod, like a pencil in your hand."

As the tin is pressed into the hot copper surface, it liquifies. Eldin shows me how he then spreads the melted metal with scrunched-up cotton. You must be quick, moving before it cools and hardens. You must press carefully and consistently to create an even coating.

Sometimes, when tin is applied, that is where things finish. Other times, on the outer surfaces of decorative objects, the materiality of the copper below is revealed through a cutting process. "When you put tin on top of copper [and engrave], you see everything [underneath]." Orange lines on a silver background. Fine grooves under fingers.

But, tin is a soft metal. Over time, the coating is rubbed away by use. The life of the copper item can be extended through a process of reapplying the protective surface, known as retinning. This activity is "very similar to restoration" Eldin tells me. Old tin is removed. The object is cleaned. New tin is applied.

Retinning requires an intimate engagement with the item being restored. There is a careful examination: holding, turning, exploring. Learning of each bend, each join, each line. Through this process, the hands of the restorer follow the hands of the maker. New marks are laid over old ones: an addition, rather than erasure.

For Eldin, this restoration work is one of his greatest sources of inspiration. "I like re-tinning very old plates," he tells me, "it's a way I can learn something from the old masters from 200, 300, 500 years ago." The object becomes a map of where someone else held, pressed, shaped.

This work becomes even more intricate, and more difficult, when restoring items with lots of engraving. The process is a careful one, "you need to make every line you see [match the one] underneath." Grooves on top of grooves. It is, unsurprisingly, slow work. As Eldin explains, "I need time for that ... maybe sometimes three days or a week."

While this kind of restoration work is not cheap, many people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are happy to pay. These objects are not made for one lifetime. Rather, as Eldin tells me, "copper is a family treasure," connecting generations.

About Yasmin Masri

Yasmin Masri likes working at the intersection of creativity, community and place. She has started and run festivals, developed and delivered cultural strategy, facilitated community engagement, and produced countless exhibitions, events, pop-ups and creative projects. She also has an independent art practice, which you can see at www.yasminmasri.com.

Bosnia | copper | G33 | metal | Yasmin Masri

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Forging connection: An interview with master coppersmith Eldin Sprečo

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Yasmin Masri delves into the world of traditional Bosnian coppersmithing with Eldin Sprečo and learns how this practice can connect through generations.

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Touchstones:The sensual work of studio potter Jane Sawyer

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Touchstones:The sensual work of studio potter Jane Sawyer

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https://garlandmag.com/article/touchstones/

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Carolyn Leach-Paholski

Now darkness falls,
quail chirps
what use hawk eyes?

Basho

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(Sounds of making recorded by Mark Newbound.)

Carolyn Leach-Paholski reflects on the pleasures at hand of a slow ceramics.

One of the first conversations I have with Jane Sawyer about pots concerns a plain Korean rice bowl. This was many years ago, but the memory of it is sharp. The pot is four centuries old, and counting, a treasure from her own collection and yet she allows me to turn it in my hands, put it against my cheek, to hold it to my mouth. In appearance, it is so understated it seems disappointingly obvious. It's a conundrum, it's everything and nothing and I'm worried that I won't get it. Am I bringing my mind to it rather than my heart, I wonder? But the very act of holding it, receiving its shape, flaws, bumps, curves, polish, puts me directly in touch with its maker, my fingers closing around it as his must have close to half a millennia ago. How well the clay remembers his every gesture. How fitting that Jane allows the pot to speak. Now I am listening to the pot's stories as told to my hands.

To touch is to test, to enjoy, to know. It is as though the mind's eye manifests in our fingertips. Both the artist and teacher in Jane understand this. She has saved herself an hour or so of talk by putting the pot in my hand. The eye can read an object, but it takes the hand to know it. The eye is easily tricked. It needs points of reference to judge size. It needs light and shadow to read shape. It has really no idea about volume or heft. In darkness, Basho reminds us, what use are hawk eyes?

Her own work is irresistibly touchable. Her tableware, made by hand, perfectly fits the hand. Cups do without handles, having dimpled nooks instead. Glazes fix gesture, forever remembering the wheel, the brush, the hand. She tells me that she enjoys making plates, cups and bowls for daily use. And that the use of them day after day gives them poetry and life. The kitchen table is an intimate space but also a theatre. It is domestic, idiosyncratic. It is the centre. Bodies gather, plates pass from hand to hand linking one person to the next, heads draw down to bowls, cups are brought to the lips. The ballet of gestures performed at the table recalls those made at the wheel. Despite the process of hardening, of firing, the poiesis, the making of the object, remains alive in the hand.

✿

When Jane's grown sons leave home, they each take a set of deep dishes and bowls. Literally and metaphorically, they are still in touch.

It seems Jane's ceramic wall pieces also remember being bowls. They may appear like poems, spare, crafted, but the function is implied. Her Massage series are thrown rather than built. But their bosomy softness depends on technique, a slow wheel, soft clay, an economy of touch. Mounding, centring, opening, pulling up of walls, rounding over the rim: all this is textbook. But everything else departs from common sense. The clay is loaded with water, altering its direction and fluidity. All-of-a-sudden it is remembering being at the bottom of a river. Everything else is momentarily forgotten. What should hold together, pulls apart. It shouldn't work. Water is chaos, but also freedom, fluidity, freshness. While Jane's experience and skill marries everything up, it is the wobble that gives the work its living edge, its humanity: the illusion of bodily warmth.

Her Pillow series both delights the senses and confounds the brain. How can terracotta which should speak in a mineral-cold voice, be in fact, contralto? How can it convey such softness, that we feel a desire to hold it, or let it hold us? To be cradled by it, to have it pillow a chin or cheek. How can a material of water, kaolin, oxides, the grit and grist of long-dead stars be so alive to the touch?

Again, process and technique shape both the pot and our experience of it. Each piece is wheel-thrown, the walls growing and inclining to become a sphere. The circle doing what a circle wants: to be complete, to enclose air trapped within it, like a sigh. This whimsical, voluminous body of work invites touch and puts us in touch with our sensual selves.

I have the full moon in my house. It hangs in the hall. Every night I walk towards it, tracking into its orbit. I am pulled towards it as I go to bed. During the day its subtle lustre elevates my housework, (such as it is). The Full Moon came from a body of work Jane called Planetary. It was her response to a lunar eclipse. Exhibited alongside: Harvest Moon, Red Planet, Gas Giant, Black Hole and others, most were works hung on the wall and seen from below, as though still spinning through space. Being hung gave them a temporary alignment, as in the phenomena of eclipse. Only Blood Moon Falling (made to reference the Korean moon jar) had indeed fallen to earth. This was exhibited more classically, to be seen in the round, close to, so reachable, touchable as the moon sometimes appears to be.

This week when I was sent for an X-ray of my hands, the radiologist said to me, "hold your hands as though you are carrying a bowl ". Actually, I think on reflection he said, " ball". But I close my eyes and hold myself as though carrying Jane's precious Korean rice bowl. Once again, I am in touch with this 400-year-old potter. Again, I am listening to the pot's stories as told to my hands. "Now bigger", he says, "much bigger". I move my hands apart and rotate them until he says to stop. Now in my mind's eye, I am cradling Full Moon. I can see its white lustre and feel the cool, heavy terracotta. Coaching me from inside his glassed-in booth, he says, "you are a natural, you're doing well". But I ask you, who would not want to hold the moon?

About Jane Sawyer

Jane Sawyer is ceramic artist and educator based in Naarm, (Melbourne), Australia. From her studio she produces work for exhibition, limited edition runs, commissions and collaborations. She is the founder of Slow Clay Centre; a facility dedicated to ceramics studies and holds a Masters of Fine Arts by research from RMIT University. She is actively involved in supporting and promoting ceramics and craft and is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics. Visit www.janesawyer.com.au and www.slowclay.com.

The soundtrack that accompanies this writing comes from a film about Jane Sawyer's work by documentary maker, Mark Newbound. If you listen you can hear touch: clay being wedged, patted on centre, the sticky sound of water, the chattering of the wheel: all the processes of making a pot. There is a trove of Newbound's beautiful work on Vimeo and Garland. He can be contacted at mark.g.newbound@gmail.com

About Carolyn Leach-Paholski

Carolyn Leach-Paholski lives in Naarm, (Melbourne) and is a long-time friend of Jane Sawyer. She is a freelance writer and poet. Reach cleachpaholski@gmail.com

Australia | ceramics | G33 | touch

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Touchstones:The sensual work of studio potter Jane Sawyer

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Carolyn Leach-Paholski reflects on the pleasures at hand of a slow ceramics.

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https://garlandmag.com/article/stevei-houkamau/

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Zoe Black

Zoe Black tracks the journey of Stevei Houkāmau in finding whakapapa connections through ceramics.

There is an inherent slow reveal in the recent work of Stevei Houkāmau (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Rangitāne). Her lengths of uku kākano (clay seeds) have a commanding physical presence, but it is necessary to also view at an intimate distance to understand the delicate details etched on the surface of each component and the stories these patterns convey.

This macro/micro reveal relates to the foundation of Stevei's work: the relationship and exploration of whakapapa. The connection individuals have to whakapapa is seen in the singular notches and lines inscribed on each kākano or seed, spiralling out to full chain lengths, representative of generations of tūpuna, stretching back to atua and beyond.

Stevei's practice is one where the surface of uku is crafted to honour the texture and beauty of the material. Her forms are a collaboration between the clay and the artist, a reciprocal exchange where the works bring balance to each other, shaped by the wā (time and space) that surrounds them.

Stevei Houkāmau has been pushing the forms of uku practice since she first approached clay in 2011. After closing a prior career as a professional sportsperson, Stevei was first drawn to the beauty and challenge of tā moko and approached her study at Toihoukura (School of Māori Art and Design) with the intention of becoming a tā moko artist. However, during a wānanga at Toihoukura she witnessed Manos Nathan carving into uku and realised the synergy between marking clay and the traditions of tā moko. Seeing the fluidity that was possible in this technique redefined her practice and she intuitively began carving uku as her primary method of making with support from kaiako Dave Cameron. Stevei saw the connection to Papatūānuku and the way in which earth cracked as representative of scribing skin, how the texture and sympathy of clay was a perfect conduit to convey the vital relationship between tangata and whenua. Uku became the preferred vehicle to explore her whakapapa and define her artistic language.

"From the first moment I made an ipu and carved it I was hooked, it was like a whole world opened up and I literally did a 180 degree change in direction. It's now part of my life, it's not just an art form but part of my spirit and keeps me grounded."For me clay is an alternative to skin, I approach clay as if it is skin, I see a vessel and imagine how I can adorn and mark it to not only tell the story but to also enhance it, just like a tattooist approaches the body."

It has been widely noted that fired clay does not have the legacy within toi Māori of other creative practices such as whakairo or raranga. However connections through our traditional whakaaro to the origins of clay, through creation stories and atua wahine such as Hineahuone and Hineukurangi, have provided artists with mātauranga to explore the creative potential within uku. Stevei expresses the inherent relationship Māori have with the whenua as a cursor for the ease with which she is able to work with uku. "Our hands remember the clay. It is healing, it's the ultimate material for us to feel a connection with this land."

Collective Ngā Kaihanga Uku was formative in the beginning stages of Stevei's career and she acknowledges Wi Taepa as a tuakana in her practice, teaching her how to sustain creative momentum and shape her confidence in pushing the possibilities of clay. Her focus during these foundational years was vessels, hand-built with a carved exterior surface and bold red pigment embellishments. Sustained time was spent perfecting her hand-building techniques and understanding how she could maintain structural integrity with forms that echoed natural shapes in te tai ao (the natural world) while experimenting with surface precision cuts continually in reference to whakapapa.

As part of the 2016 group exhibition, Whenua Hou - New Māori Ceramics, Stevei created three vessels representative of her practice at the time. She incorporated patterns indicative of toi Māori and designs found across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, acknowledging visual connections and the shared kinship between tangata whenua and Pacific peoples.

"The three spheres Marama, Mun and Pulan represent the three moons of Oceania, watching over the group. Line, colour, and the form of the vessel are utilised to tell Houkāmau's story of this collective group - interconnected and reliant on each other for support and nourishment. They become an extension of a lifeline to whenua (land) and the interconnectedness of all things."

Progressing from vessel forms, the development of the uku kākano began while staying at an artist residency in New Mexico in 2021 where Stevei worked with Santa Clara Pueblo Native American artists Roxanne Swinzel and Rose Bean Simpson. Seeing centuries-old seeds stored in Roxanne and Rose Bean's heirloom seed bank had a lasting impression. In holding the heirloom seeds, she described holding a literal expression of whakapapa in every sense of the word.

"I was lucky enough to have been allowed to hold blue corn seeds, the whakapapa went so far back it was hard for Roxanne to pinpoint the date. I felt like I was holding a part of Roxanne and Rose Bean's whakapapa-their past, present and what will be their future."

Since then, Stevei has considered the uku kākano as a repeated form to continue to push her technical skills and experimentation of scale, all the while expressing her understanding of whakapapa.

Each work in her uku kākano series combines hand-built seed or bead shapes that differ in size, reflective of individuals, tūpuna and atua within the genealogy line. The carved surfaces relate to taonga in te ao Māori that incorporate incisions or notches as a physical prompt in reciting karakia or whakapapa-tokotoko (orator's staff) and tokotauwaka-alongside rosary or prayer beads. When strung together, the uku kākano become physical manifestations of encoded knowledge connecting us to past and future.

Winning the 2023 Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award with Kia Whakatōmuri te haere whakamua, a strand of uku kākano draped across the wall, celebrated the power of Stevei's conceptual understanding of whakapapa in this form.

"Kia Whakatōmuri te haere whakamua is about my great great grandmother Hinemaurea. She is the daughter of Raramaitai and was married to Te Aotaki. They occupied Wharekahika in the 16th century and had five children. She was mother of Ruataupare, who Tuwhakairiora (the great Ngati Porou chief) married to ensure the security of Ngai Tuiti whenua, which infused the stock of Porourangi throughout Tairāwhiti. Hinemaurea was seen to have great mana and has two existing marae named after her, including our marae in Wharekahika, East Coast."

This work, as a direct representation of Stevei's tūpuna and whakapapa, was praised by the award's judges as masterful in its execution, exquisitely representing the proverb 'kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua' - walking backwards into our future while keeping our eyes fixed on our past.

Her latest work, Ngaro nga tikanga tuku iho / Lost traditions of my ancestors, looks at traditions of hei (lei, neck garlands) to extend whakapapa as uku kākano.

Ambitious in scale, the installation consists of five strands, the longest over four metres. The strand forms are evocative of hei / lei, the adornment ubiquitous in the Pacific but not widely seen now in te ao Māori. Traditionally, hei were made from feathers, plant fibres, seeds or flowers and may adorn poupou, showing the mana of the carved figure. Now, within Aotearoa, Pacific lei are more easily found, often draped around photographs of whānau members passed, as a way to show aroha and connection.

Within this work, Stevei acknowledges whakapapa across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa and ancestral lines back to Hawaiki through patterns drawn from Aotearoa and further through the Pacific. Stevei's uku kākano as hei recognise the disconnections to whenua of both Māori and Pacific whānau through displacement and migration, and the reinterpretation of traditions that happen when these disconnections occur. The strands are installed at scale to adorn the space as a lament for traditions lost and to create a visual portal, pulling and twisting on the notions of time and space that run through Stevei's practice.

Reimagining lost traditions and reclaiming mātauranga Māori will continue to be a provocation for Stevei in future projects. Stevei sees the potential in this focus to reflect the urgent motivation to reshape narratives and ideas within contemporary Māori experience and ultimately a formidable outcome for her creative practice.

"We are not just people who are struggling, there is richness and celebration in our culture, a beauty that I want to keep drawing attention to. Each seed is an extension of a person and it tells a story. It tells a history of a people. It tells of a present version of us as a people and a society. It holds the hopes and dreams of who we wish to become and who we must become to ensure the future of our people and of our whakapapa."

About Stevei Houkāmau

Stevie Houkāmau is a full-time uku artist who lives and works within the Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Region. Stevei Houkāmau has worked with clay since 2011, preferencing uku because of its ability to convey our links to the geological and spiritual past-uniting tangata, tūpuna, and whenua, while speaking to the critical connection tangata whenua have to place and earth. Stevie has exhibited and has works in collections both nationally and internationally. Stevie has represented Aotearoa at FESTPAC, Guahan and Indigenous Art Gatherings and completed residencies in the US, Australia and in Aotearoa. Recently she has exhibited at Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua; The Suter Art Gallery, Whakatū Nelson and Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Follow @ ukumad

About Zoe Black

Zoe Black (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Pākehā) is the deputy director of Objectspace in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has been working in galleries for the past ten years. Her curatorial practice has focused on community development and advocating for critically under-represented craft and object art forms. Follow @ zoe.a.black

Aotearoa | ceramics | G33 | garland | jewellery | Zoe Black

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Zoe Black tracks the journey of Stevei Houkāmau in finding whakapapa connections through ceramics.

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Rabindra Shakya ✿ Gleaming Nepali repoussé

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Rabindra Shakya ✿ Gleaming Nepali repoussé

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https://garlandmag.com/article/rabindra-shakya-nepali-repousse/

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Gary Wornell

Gary Wornell discovers Rabindra Shakya's workshop of gleaming copper sculptures and appreciates its success in a country abandoned by its youth.

Inside Rabindra Shakya's Image Atelier, the dark copper face of a Buddha towers above me standing more than four metres high on a steel frame. The eyes, half closed, stare at a space on the floor relaxed and in meditation. The workshop is the largest I have seen in Nepal: a hollow three-story high building in brick and reinforced concrete. A spiral staircase in one corner leads up to a series of narrow concrete walkways lined with copper sheets, parts of sculptures and poster prints of assorted deities. Below, the floor is covered in copper sculptures in various states of completion.

The noise of hammering is intense-metal on metal-sharp to the ear competing with the Hindi pop songs from the radio. At the entrance to the workshop craftsmen sit on wooden benches, their backs to the light, absorbed in their work, partly formed objects propped against polished steel formers. Rabindra's brother is working on a large rectangular copper plinth, drilling holes into the bright metal and offering up small, carved copper details to check their fit. A woman with a grass brush walks across the open spaces sweeping up the dust as the sun streams in through the high windows from the south.

Rabindra comes from a long family tradition of metal workers. His family are direct descendants of the Buddha. The Shakya name comes from the members of the ruling aristocratic oligarchy that gave birth to Siddhartha Gautama. Rabindra learned his skills in small cramped rooms on the ground floor of the family home where his father and brothers worked and their fathers and brothers before them. In my journeys around Kathmandu, I had discovered many of these small workshops, shutters opened to the street, workers sitting on the floor crouched over and tapping into metal sheets. Stacks of copper lined the walls, black pitch in well-worn kettles smoked on gas burners. On cooler winter days they would sit outside on the street in the bright sun, fingerless woollen gloves keeping their hands warm, working until the light faded. Electricity was always in short supply in Kathmandu when I first arrived but these days hydropower provides the country with enough energy to sell to neighbouring countries. These days the lights are on and hammers are tapping until late in the evening. There are always younger boys standing around, engaged in conversation, laughing, learning: watching the hammer and pointed tools pick out the details, line by line. Apprentices often work from home. They have a chance to prove themselves on the smaller works before they can get a place in a studio like Image Atelier.

Rabindra's business has been handed down from one generation to the next creating both Buddhist and Hindu sculptures for temples and monasteries as well as for private customers. They practise the traditional craft of Thodya (embossing in metal sheet) Majha (giving complete form) as it is called in Newari or repoussé as it is called here in the West. In Thodya Majha larger metal sheet is worked from the front and back against formers, and for the smaller details the chasing method is used from the front of the object supported by a hardened pitch mould.

But things in the Shakya family tradition are changing rapidly. Covid has taken the life of a close family member and his elder son, a son who traditionally would have inherited the craft, is at University in Queens, New York. The young are leaving Nepal at an alarming rate of roughly 800,000 a year. Many are leaving for higher education in Australia, North America and Europe. The 20-35-year-olds are abandoning the land of their birth and the traditions that have been in place for millennia, for opportunities abroad. Most of the graduates relinquish their citizenship with no intention to ever return. Others, the less economically fortunate and poorly educated, leave their wives and children in their villages to work as construction labourers or hotel staff in the Middle East. Nepal's brain drain has already had a drastic impact on the development of the country and along with the loss of skilled craftsmen and women, the country will increasingly rely on the revenues of tourism and the single immovable feature that draws millions of tourists a year: the Himalayas.

Rabindra's reputation is such that, unlike many of the highly skilled artisans in Kathmandu, he has been able to travel abroad and grow his business, making statues for Buddhist monasteries around the world. A few years ago I curated an exhibition in Finland featuring the works of several craft legends from the valley, and when the museum sent letters of invitation to each of the craftsmen and women featured in the exhibition, Rabindra was the only one out of seven that was granted a visa for the opening ceremony.

Inside Image Atelier, set back from the road, the rhythmic tapping of hammers echoes against the high white painted brick walls. On each of my frequent visits there were new things to see: the large copper statue in the corner, unfinished on my first visit, had been sitting here for more than a year and was now covered in a soft white cloth protecting the immaculate gold-plated surface. I asked Rabindra where this magnificent sculpture was going and he smiled and said that the client had ordered and paid for it two years earlier but had never come to pick it up!

Everything they make starts with a drawing.

In the office stacks of drawings are rolled up in a corner behind a sofa. Everything they make starts with a drawing. Rabindra tells me that to make good work, the drawing should be excellent. The complex forms follow strict geometric rules and yet when the work is complete one barely notices the matrix of triangles, circles and rectangles that are the foundations of the statue. It's all about symmetry and balance. As for most of the Nepali craftsmen I met engaged in the making of statues, it is the face that reflects the deepest meaning in the work.

Above the workshop there is a small kitchen where the family have their lunch and tea is made for visitors. Next to that, further along the raised walkway, is his private studio where smaller sculptures take shape away from the busy workshop below.

Cross-legged behind a small wooden table he starts his day here, sitting on the floor under the window while the sun is bright. A row of metal formers is neatly arranged beside him on a solid wooden block. Today he is working on the face of one of the bodhisattvas, which I imagine will be Vajrapani with his third eye, though I can't be sure. He works intently as I watch, constantly turning the head and hammering the bright metal in quick sharp taps as the mouth takes shape. It seems that everything he does follows a direct path from his head to his hands. The shapes grow stroke by stroke as if a vacuum formed out of the image in his mind.

Rabindra employs more than twenty people these days: some working in the workshop and some at home. Each has their own areas of expertise from paper drawings and sheet cutting, to carvers, wax workers, embossers and polishers. He has enough work for years to come, working only to commission these days with orders from around the world. Out in the workshop, I spent time watching the craftsmen at work. There are no women here. It seems to be a craft exclusively reserved for men in Nepal, though Rabindra has taught one American artist the technique, a rare opportunity for anyone from the West to learn from one of Nepal's most highly respected masters of the art.

Taking a break from his hammering, Rabindra heads down the spiral stairs to the workshop floor and I'm left alone for a while as he inspects the face of a Buddha soon to be attached to the body of a large standing form. As he holds up the head where it will join to the body, inspecting the fit of the neck to the shoulders, I notice how similar the facial features are to his, the mirror image of a man, a direct descendant of Gautama, who seems deeply satisfied with his life's work.

Buddhism | copper | G33 | Gary Wornell | Nepal | sculpture

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Rabindra Shakya ✿ Gleaming Nepali repoussé

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Gary Wornell discovers Rabindra Shakya's workshop of gleaming copper sculptures and appreciates its success in a country abandoned by its youth.

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Yarrila Arts and Museum, Gordon Street, Coffs Harbour NSW

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Mother's touch: An interview with ceramicist Richilde Flavell

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Mother's touch: An interview with ceramicist Richilde Flavell

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https://garlandmag.com/article/richilde-flavell/

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Yasmin Masri

Yasmin Masri writes about Richilde Flavell's use of ceramics to explore the transformational experience of becoming a mother.

The first piece Richilde Flavell made after having her oldest child, Caleb, was a terracotta basket. A vessel that fits in the palm of her hand. "It was so small," Richilde tells me, "really simple and you [could] see all the ... pinch marks of my fingers." The work was made in 10 minutes while sitting on her back verandah one evening.

Although quick, this act of making "felt like such a relief." As Richilde explains, "I just [wanted] to touch the clay. I just [had] to make something, anything, it [didn't] matter."

Ceramics is Richilde's creative practice. It is how she understands and engages with the world and the way she makes a living. But underneath all of that, at its most fundamental level, ceramics is a kind of emotional regulator. The physicality of the medium-hands on clay-grounds her. As Richilde explains, "Ceramics for me is the thing. It calms me. It's like [a] meditation ... In the moment [of making], and at the moment, I am using [ceramics] more as a therapy."

The terracotta basket made after Caleb's birth marked the start of a new body of work for Richilde exploring the transformational experience of becoming a parent. "This little basket was holding my hopes and dreams and desires to get back in the studio." Made over the last two years, this collection will be presented in an upcoming solo exhibition - Ok! Motherhood at Yarrila Arts and Museum.

When we speak, Richilde is six weeks postpartum with her second child, Luca. She tells me that lately "the only way I can do any work is if he is on me, [if I'm] carrying him." Her physical contact stabilises, comforts and connects.

Blurring boundaries: fingerprints and stardust

Richilde has been working as a professional ceramicist since graduating from the Australian National University School of Art in 2015. During that time, she has mostly made work on the wheel, producing smooth curving forms, often designed for eating and drinking.

Making work as a new mother required a shift in practice. Objects in progress needed to be able to be left and returned to: to be picked up and put down.

"Unlike most of my previous work, the majority of this exhibition is handbuilt," Richilde explains. "I have less time in the studio so I really needed to be able to stop and start and hand-building lends itself to that, it's super practical."

But beyond practicality, Richilde likes the way that this technique records the marks and movements of her hand. This is most clear in her series of large pots. "All of the fingerprints of my life were on the pots," Richilde tells me. "They are all visible, I haven't smoothed them away."

As Richilde reflects, "Having a toddler and being pregnant I really wanted to capture the feeling of having my body being touched so much ... the thousands of times little hands have grabbed at my body, have been gentle and rough and playful and all of the things that [you experience] when you're sharing everything with a small person."

The large ceramic forms are "an embodiment of the different trimesters and how I was feeling in those times." They mirror Richilde's changing body, "I was getting more and more pregnant and ... these pots were getting bigger and bigger as well."

For Richilde, there was a transcendent quality to pregnancy. Although the experience can be "exhausting, filled with hormonal rage, anxiety and never-ending appointments," pregnancy can also "take you out of yourself and the minutiae of life, it slows you down and makes you take pause."

Richilde began to think "about work and labour and parenthood and growing a person within the macrocosmic." That we are all made up of stardust. That we are "[connected] with all of time and space." And so, the pots are both self-portraits, and representations of celestial bodies. Personal and universal. Small and colossal.

Small touches, small moments, small acts of service cumulate

Since becoming a mother, Richilde's time has become more fractured. Divided up into short windows rather than long stretches. Sometimes even working on handbuilt pieces was not possible. "I wanted to capture that moment in my practice where I couldn't make a whole vessel or anything, [but still] wanted to touch clay," she reflects.

So, Richilde began making simple, flat clay discs. These were forms that could be made easily and quickly (or slowly). "I take out a pinch of clay and roll it in my hand to [the size of a] walnut," Richilde explains, "and then I begin pressing and rotating the clay out from the centre." The results are thin, wafer-like medallions.

Richilde works with whatever clay is around her. Sometimes the clay is coarse, making "edges [that] crack and sort of open up." Other times, the clay is fine and "[responds] really well to a gentle touch and lots of small pressure ... lots of repetition." Colours shift with the material: off-whites, soft browns, fleshy pinks and oranges.

Some discs, made quickly, can be "quite ragged." Others have "fine finger marks" or are "quite pinched and pressed." The making responds to the constraints of the moment. As (right-handed) Richilde explains, "Sometimes I made [discs] just with my left hand because [I was] nursing with my right ... those ones are really quite skew-whiff."

For Richilde, the variation in the discs echoes the experience of motherhood, "sometimes you are doing quite well as a parent and sometimes you're really not at all." But the discs are treated with a kind of evenhandedness. All efforts counting and contributing to something bigger.

For Richilde, the discs represent "all of the acts of service that we do for our children ... all of the tears wiped, nappies changed, the questions answered, the meals prepared, the cuddles, the stories read."

"Each disc is like a giving," Richilde tells me, "in a day, there would be hundreds of these little acts of giving. I see these as [something] that builds up a person ... and helps them grow into someone who is a kind, caring, gentle human."

The discs can be stacked up in towers. They act "like carns when you're hiking and they lead the way, for safe passage."

Richilde invited friends to make discs too. She is hoping to create opportunities for audiences to make or move the discs as part of the exhibition program as well. "Hopefully they get some of the ... calm that I feel when making the work," Richilde explains. She wants these interactions to enable parents, and people, to "take a moment for themselves as well."

Grasp and release, control and surrender

The final series in the exhibition is a collection of vessels. They "are about the ideas that we carry into parenthood," Richilde tells me. "I've made pieces that are for sifting through ideas, carrying ideas, pouring out [ideas]." These are objects for undertaking "the mental work that we do ... how we think through and respond to our responsibility as parents."

In life, we bring tools but sometimes we need to let them go. We find different ways of moving, working, and responding.

In this exhibition, Richilde explores new mediums. Inspired by the wax crayons that Caleb would draw with, she began to experiment with encaustic painting: applying colour with hot, liquid wax.

As Richilde reflected, "[I had to] think about whether I was comfortable making something I wasn't an expert in." Unhappy with the initial results, Richilde asked a painter friend for advice. "[She told me] the thing you need to do is slow down," Richilde remembered. "I'm used to working quite quickly and I know what I am doing and apply glaze in a particular way." But wax is a different medium.

Slowing down allowed Richilde to engage with making from a different place. "It was actually really beautiful and joyful," Richilde tells me, "I was able to be gentle and soft and - almost loving and caring with my pots." The wax needed a different kind of touch.

The allowance of uncertainty in this work has been important for Richilde. "It's quite scary actually just changing and letting go ... but also, [it's] really great."

Caleb, now a toddler, wants to be a part of whatever Richilde is working on, "he wants to draw on my art diary, my diary, my everything." Rather than fight this, Richilde opened up space for collaboration with her son. Once painted, she "[invited] Caleb to come to the studio and scribble all over the pots."

"There's this real parallel [between] ceramics and parenthood where you set everything up and you make the routines and you follow the recipes and you do it all ... so it's very organised, but then you also have to ... let what happens happen."

"I feel like my practice has been great training for parenthood, you set it up as best you can and then you let go."

✿

Richilde's solo show Ok! Motherhood at Yarrila Arts and Museum (YAM) runs from February 8 - March 24 2024. YAM is a regional gallery on Gumbaynggirr Country along the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Australia.

About Yasmin Masri

Yasmin Masri likes working at the intersection of creativity, community and place. She has started and run festivals, developed and delivered cultural strategy, facilitated community engagement, and produced countless exhibitions, events, pop-ups and creative projects. She also has an independent art practice, which you can see at www.yasminmasri.com.

Canberra | ceramics | exhibition | G33 | Yasmin Masri

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Mother's touch: An interview with ceramicist Richilde Flavell

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Yasmin Masri writes about Richilde Flavell's use of ceramics to explore the transformational experience of becoming a mother.