Fresh! - Craft Victoria
As I enter the singular room of Craft Victoria and grab an exhibition sheet under the white spotlights, my first instinct is to look at the artworks poking out of the ground. The annual show Fresh!, which has been running for 33 years, opened on Valentine’s Day at Craft Victoria. Like a geographical map, many of the works are spread out on the ground. I keep my head down; I’m an explorer that needs to make my way through the jungle of metal and glass. The artworks are either directly on the floor or lay on rustic wooden tables, and the one-dimensional works are attached without framing onto the wall. They are all interacting with the space given to them, directly in contact with either the floor or the wall. I feel like the curation strongly mirrors the common conveyed ideas of the eight graduates in the exhibition. The works are all revolving around connection; either between different materials, or within family, traditions, and queer communities.
In Madelyn McKenzie’s work for example The Shields of Protection, she connects ceramics to sharp and resistive metals. You might recognize her work from a previous review on Lowbrow of the RMIT grad show. Whirlpools of tubes closing in on each other, the glazed works are pierced by a sharp metal spear, and cut in two by a metal square. Allying beauty and brutality, the intentional soft and regular movements of the coloured ceramic are disturbed and shaken. Mckenzie structures the piece by contrasting these two materials, one carefully crafted by hand, the other industrial - found rather than created.
Behind McKenzie’s works, other metal squares are held up by high legs of metal tubes. In Conduit pipework by Emma Salmon, the metal works are scraped with etchings and scribbles. I can almost feel my ears hurting imagining the screech of mark making. Facing the works on the walls are 3 pieces of paper, containing the drawings of the metal printed through a high-pressure press. From the VCA, she would have found the pieces of metal around the studios. Creating a sort of contour map of the industrial materials she works with, it seems like a study of form, trace making, and the kissing of two materials opposed in their rigidity.
Another series of work that have the same setup - with the sculptures on the floor and the flat paper works on the wall - is honours graduate from Monash, Meg Kelso. Here, blown glass works are delicately placed on the floor, and the fragments of colour scattered along the artworks merge into the cracks of the cement. The works are deformed by their making process and Kelso seems to push the material to its limit. Some seem to be at the mercy of time, fragile and dressed in crackles. Above this series of abnormal rocks of glass, five paper works composed of ash and a collection of mark making are displayed on the wall. Void of any shadows or symbols, it painfully reminds me of all the pictures I have ever taken with an analog camera in first year of art school. Results leaving a bitter taste, nothing left but an undeveloped picture filled with only dark bits of exposure, and a bad grade about to come.
All very material based, the works are connected to each other by their relation to the ground, anchoring their presence at shoe-level, emerging from below us and taking the risk of being tripped on with a false move. The artists themselves also center around connecting to the materials and its craft, and leaving in that making process a bit of their identity, memories, and stories.
Camille Ferguson expresses, through her meddle of glass, a queer vision and a criticism of embedded histories. So happy to recognize her work from my monash grad show, she occupied the mada gallery space for her honours graduation. Stunning hues of colours on circles of glass structured by metal wraps, the same metal suspending some from the ceiling. Ferguson’s work is next to Erica Wells, a First Nation textile artist that exhibits a traditional dress, its hem falling on the ground in a vibrant blue. An exchange of colours between two practices that act as portals to new questions, one through traditional clothing that references a loss of memory and history, and the other to queer lived experience and representation.
The two artists whose works caught me off guard, Lou Wheeler and Siobhan Murphy, are also speaking to a lived struggle of gender expression, representation, and determination of one’s freedom. Tension, a bra sewn and knitted with silver and Heirlooms a set of silver buttplugs laying on red felt paper. Both of these artworks, done in precious materials, are representing objects of intimacy, objects that you’d only find at the back of a drawer, yet their presentation on a simple wood table makes them almost consumable objects. Next to Heirlooms, a necklace is participating in the red carpet show, a coke spoon hanging at its end. Laying those two on the same table is perfect queer humour, making us wonder if they all act as practical jewellery, objects to proudly wear and exhibit as part of one’s fashion. To be honest in Fitzroy’s street, seeing a coke spoon necklace and a metal bra wouldn’t be so surprising.
Finally, the two series of works by Flynn Parker-Greer, Beyond the surface and Black as Night, are made up of metal origamis creating each different shape, with an opening at the top. Thank you to the lovely lady of the gallery who said she saw me taking notes and told me to lay my eyes almost against the artwork’s entrance. It’s always tricky to pop the personal bubble of an artwork by getting closer and touching it, it's a type of fourth wall that we’re breaking by becoming active viewers. In the works of Parker-Greer, I was offered in those metal origamis a captured world of colours bouncing off each other in a kaleidoscope that was replicating my eye. Making the visitors interact with this piece made it even more intimate, it seems like Parker-Greer makes us discover a secret shining gem as a reward for being curious enough.
In Fresh!, everything is telling me something unique, trying to break codes and boundaries and to surprise us by their remastering of materials. I don’t think I've ever seen so many groundbreaking works in one singular room. Maybe because, to me, metal is such a cold and hostile medium, I found it a bit difficult to engage in the works for their beauty, rather my time in the show was spent with admiration of the risk the works were taking, and their unpredictability. There’s lots of potential in these graduates, they need all the support they can get. Now is the time for them to leave the nest of studies and take the scary leap into professional practice.
Fresh! is on at Craft Victoria until March 28th.