Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre, one of Australia’s longest running visual arts membership associations, will present two new exhibitions online from 15 May to 27 June featuring emerging and mid-career artists from Canberra, the NSW South Coast and Adelaide who have openly exchanged knowledge of their respective materials and explored how these materials connect us as humans.

Craft ACT CEO and Artistic Director Rachael Coghlan said, “Craft ACT is delighted to present the work of four talented women artists who demonstrate the great advantage we have when we work together. These new exhibitions celebrate the long tradition of collaboration, mentorship and exchange within the craft community; traditions that will serve designers and makers well as we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis.”

Transference is a collaborative exhibition by ceramic and glass artist Robyn Campbell (ACT) and ceramicist Jo Victoria (NSW) that expresses their shared fascination with light and surface, and the potential of glass and porcelain to convey fragility and transience. By exchanging deep knowledge of their respective materials, through a supportive process of learning, teaching, experimentation and play, the artists have developed a new body of work in which the intangible elements of light, shadow and reflection are significant, changing the pieces as natural light and perspectives shift.

A Common Thread by emerging makers Sam Gold (SA) and Harriet McKay (ACT) is a multidisciplinary collaboration encompassing textile painting, ceramic sculpture and installation. Concerned with the concept of connection – connection to a material and in turn the way this connects us as humans – this exhibition seeks to explore how time and space inform the artist’s behaviour with material, and lament on the almost ritualistic process of repetitious acts during the creation process.

IMAGE: Sam Gold, Stillness Votive Vessels, 2020. Photo Sam Roberts