Tag: Australia

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Where North meets South

Notes for the keynote – ‘Where North Meets South:  The Promise of Transnational Law as a Platform for Creative Collaborations’ University of Melbourne South of International Law symposium, July 2010 (2010)

In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator created his first world map. This ‘double cordiform’ is a romantic design arranging the northern and southern hemispheres in matching heart-shaped frames. These shapes reflect the distortion that occurs when transforming a sphere into a flat plane. Unfortunately, the ‘double cordiform’ was not successful in its time as navigators found it difficult to trace continuous journeys. However, his projection thirty years later found much greater success, as it made sense of the broader trade and military routes unfolding at that time. Fatefully, it placed Europe towards the top centre.

There are two halves to the world.

The question is how they connect to each other.

North-South relations

Developmentalism

The dominant paradigm in the modern era is developmentalism. At one end, this entails the North lending assistance to the South so that it might raise it up to the North’s standards. From the other end, the South aspires to gain recognition by the North. While going down the line are missionaries, consultants, importers to assist the building of capacity in the South, moving up is a heady mixture of cargo cult, consumerism and talent drain. For every third world banana republic there is a ‘Paris of the South’.

This paradigm roughly constitutes what we call regional studies. Here core disciplines based in transatlantic centres direct their attention to the foibles of non-western parts of the world.

Primitivism

Any attempt to create a hierarchy leaves open the possibility of its reversal. One hermeneutic strategy of reversal entails the revealing of a hidden debt to the South in the North. This is the nature of Martin Bernal’s book Black Athena,[1] which points the influence on classic Greek thought of its African antecedents. A more modest move in this direction can be found in the school of New Southern Studies, which focused on the multicultural influences on the southern literature of the United States. Keith Cartwright’s Reading Africa into American Literature[2] identified the influence of Senegambian culture on the development of American modernism, particularly the culture of the jazz era.

While lacking the dialectical framework of other critical hermeneutic frameworks, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism, this approach offers the academic strategy of undermining the north-south hierarchy by revealing the indebtedness of the North to the South.

In the cultural realm, reversal appears in two different forms. In a carnivalesque manner, what is low becomes high. So the movement of abajismo, or ‘lowism’, in Chile celebrates all the qualities that consign it to a lesser country. This is particularly so of the ‘poor’ arts that use found materials, such as Pablo Neruda Elementary Odes.

The alternative movement comes from the other Atlantic side of South America in Brazil and Argentina, who have at different times conceived themselves as inheriting cultural leadership from Europe. The concept of anthropophagi in Brazil celebrates the cannibalisation of Western culture and the emergence of a new ‘tropical man’. This has emerged recently with the work of cultural theorist Antônio Cícero who has argued for a neo-Cartesianism. Alternatively, the history of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina is related to the journal Sur, which was

Sur would never be greatly interested in the specific problems of the continent, for the patrimony of Argentina was, in Borges’ later phrase, that of the universe.[3]

Separatism

More recently, there have been attempts to conceive of a South that is independent of the North, neither follower nor leader. In critical theory, this is evident in Indigenous Studies .The Latin American concept of indigenismo is celebrated by writers like Walter Mignolo, [4] along with other Southern mentalities such as creolism and hybridity. The Lusophone sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos[5] outlines an ‘epistemology of the south’ which reflected a grounded knowledge that seeks to account for its political implications. In the terms outlined by Amartya Sen in his Idea of Justice, the South proposes a consequential or nyaya ideal of justice, as opposed to the Northern deontic ideal, or niti.

Horizontalismo…

Closer to home, the work by sociologist Raewyn Connell in his book Southern Theory[6]argues on the basis of the geopolitics of knowledge for an alternative to the centripetal reduction of theory to the transatlantic centres. For Connell, this alternative can be found in the lateral connections between countries on the periphery. As she writes:

It is possible to reshape the circuits through which social-scientific knowledge moves, to modify — since we cannot quickly end — the metropolitan focus. The intellectuals of rich peripheral countries such as Australia, and of the privileged classes in countries like Mexico, Chile, India, South Africa and Brazil, have significant resources for intellectual work and the circulation of knowledge. Because of their location in the post-colonial world, they have — or can have — perspectives which overlap with those of subaltern majorities.[7]

For Connell, what separates the South from the North it its sense of compassion… Franz Fanon the ‘wretched of the earth.’

Collaboration

The territory that we have covered so far will seem familiar. Now we move into less chartered waters, when we consider the framework in which North and South might be seen to co-exist.

This would follow a concept of the world like Goethe’s that global differences form part of a dynamic whole rather than an unevenness.

If I were not driven by my German mentality and a desire to learn and do, rather than to enjoy, I would linger somewhat longer in this school of light and merry living and try to profit from it more…

And now, after all this pleasure and hundreds of others, the Sirens are luring me across the sea, and, if the wind is favorable, I shall leave at the same time as this letter, it to the north, and I to the south. The human mind balks at limits, and I, especially, have great need of the wide world. (22/03/1787)[8]

Globalisation in the modern era can be seen to entail a division of the world between the modern Northern nations forging ahead into the future and the traditional Southern societies maintaining their cultural heritage. So the cultural arm of UNESCO concerns itself with helping to preserve Southern traditions as a part of humanity’s heritage. In very broad terms, this division of labour separates the economic from the cultural.

Some might claim this as a scam to make the South feel comfortable about its economic disenfranchisement.

Professor Ali Mazrui in a 1998 speech in Cape Town, when he said of the 1994 compromise: ‘You wear the crown, we’ll keep the jewels.’

But is the alternative to reduce everything to economic terms?

Might it be possible to come up with an agreement between North and South about this arrangement?

How could such an arrangement avoid exploitation?

Transnational law

As is well recognised in this setting, transnational law has played a significant role in the globalisation process. For the development of international corporations that can spread their supply chains over great distances, it has been necessary to creative private legal instruments that ensure consistency and trust from Southern mines to Northern shops.

Ethical consumerism

One genre of international law has responded to the emergence of what is called ‘ethical consumerism’. Here there is recognition that raising standards is not only a matter of meeting demands of workers but also responding to concerns of consumers as well. The fate of the fur coat stands as an exemplary case of how an entire industry can be wiped out due to consumer concerns. The issue of blood diamonds is the cause of much anxiety in the jewellery industry for similar reasons. The challenge is to create a transparency across the supply chain so that the customer in Tiffany’s can know how the diamond on their engagement ring was sourced.

Arguably the most visible manifestation of transnational law has been Fair Trade. Their certification process attempts to verify that certain standards in production have been adhered to, particularly those of the ILO.

When you buy a block Fair Trade chocolate, there is an implied solidarity between North and South.

Many other more commercial standards are evolving now. For example, World of Good…

While these do offer solidarity, they do reproduce a power relationship between producer and consumer nations.

Creative Collaborations

There are interesting developments occurring in the area of product design. While the handmade has usually been associated with the local, manual craft processes are increasingly being outsourced.

Two examples in Australia, with Koskela and Better World Arts.

This reflects a changing strategy from bodies such as UNESCO, which attempt to promote heritage through what they term ‘creative industries’ such as design and fashion. This relies on market forces to encourage innovation in traditional cultures to assist their economic sustainability.

The Designers Meet Artisans publication.

Here is a potential partnership between North and South. But how to ensure that it is reciprocal?

The Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations is an attempt to work with major stakeholders to develop a common set of standards. Part of this involves navigating through quite complex terrain of laws, particularly in intellectual property.

The balance is going to be towards the consumer in terms of setting standards. Like the ‘good print’, the attempt is going to be to provide consumers with information. Rather than just checking boxes, this is going to enable individual stories to travel with the object.

This considers ethics not just a constraint on creative freedom but as a framework for storied value.

But on its own, this arrangement produces the producer/consumer divide. One area to explore is the creation of a covenant in which the consumer will agree to particular conditions in the way they use the product.

This is very much a project and we welcome participation from those interested in being part.

[1] Martin Bernal Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization London: Free Association, 1987

[2] Keith Cartwright Reading Africa Into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 2004

[3] John King Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931-1970 New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986

[4] Walter Mignolo The Idea of Latin America Oxford: Blackwell, 2005

[5] Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2006 Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-santos-en.html

[6] Raewyn Connell Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2007

[7] Raewyn Connell Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2007, p. 228

[8] J.W. Goethe Italian Journey (trans. Robert R. Heitner) New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig. 1786), p. 177

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Craft Unbound introduction

CRAFT UNBOUND: MAKE THE COMMON PRECIOUS

(Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2005)

By Kevin Murray

Introduction

There was once a familiar order to things. On one side was the supermarket and on the other was the art gallery. There was the world of common things to be used up and discarded, and the realm of precious objects to be appreciated into the future. The meaningless cycle of consumption was counterbalanced by the collection of treasured objects. But this cultural economy has become stagnant as art becomes increasingly insular and detached from everyday life. Consumption continues to accelerate while art risks being locked into the fashion cycle.

A generation of radical Australian makers is challenging this arrangement by bringing the profane world of consumption into the sacred halls of art. Theirs is not merely a conceptual exercise. There is no Duchamp-like cleverness about their use of found objects. These craftspersons express a renewal in the elemental energy of creation, reaching back to the mysteries of material transformation in alchemy. They are breaking through.

This is a distinctly Australian phenomenon, and we need to gather these makers together to appreciate their work, learn about its origins, and understand its meaning. What is the relationship between beauty and rarity that their work confronts? Let’s begin to examine this question with the broad brush.

The lay of the land

To make the common precious is to work against the grain. The identification of value and rarity is self-evident. It governs the way we see the world and how we transact with it. According to Gestalt psychology, we perceive the world by dividing it into figure and ground: the lone object stands out before the common background. By taking the common for granted, we can focus our attention on the singular.

In the English language rarity is almost always expressed using words that carry a positive connotation—words such as ‘extraordinary’, ‘special’, ‘rare’, ‘incomparable’ and ‘noble’. Whereas what is common is valued negatively, as in ‘ordinary’, ‘average’, ‘mundane’, ‘usual’, ‘pedestrian’ or ‘plebeian’. Accordingly, we will pay more for something that is exclusive, one-off or editioned than we would for goods that are mass-marketed.

This asymmetry is especially prevalent in the world of art. It seems obvious that the beautiful is necessarily exceptional. After all, art history is peopled by rare geniuses who produce rare masterpieces. Craft plays its own part in this story. In the decorative arts treasures such as the Fabergé Eggs are valued for their rarity as much as their craftsmanship. The value of an object is conditioned more by its supply than its simple use value.

But there are ways in which this natural order of things can be questioned. In a radical move the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that rarity is not the accident of beauty, but rather its cause.[i] We enjoy a masterpiece because it is rare. According to Bourdieu, art enforces a hierarchical society, in which value must be seen as limited to the few.

This view has its shortcomings. While providing a powerful critique of aestheticism, such arguments do not suggest ways of creating beauty that are alternative to the existing economy. To find these, we need to go beyond academic theory and explore the popular values that shadow elitism. The different manifestations of elitism provide us with alternative ways of understanding what Australian craftspersons are achieving today.

Throughout the history of Christianity, the gospels have often been used to support the Church’s responsibility to the broad mass of people—‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ In contrast to the hierarchy of the Vatican orders such as the Franciscans make humility a life-long vocation. And, most radically, during the Reformation anti-elitist movements celebrated daily labour and the common tongue. A similar tension is present in Islam, in the opposition between the priestly Shiite and popularist Sunni versions of the religion. Beyond religion, popularism was given its most powerful expression in the revolutionary movements that culminated in Marxism. Given the declining significance of theology and ideology in the third millennium, where might an aesthetics of commonness reside today?

In Western society, there is alongside the mainstream economy of beauty a black market of artistic production.[ii] The value of rarity is reversed when it is seen to be tightly controlled by a particular group. Thus there are negative terms associated with those who police rarity, such as ‘elites’, ‘priesthoods’, ‘snobs’ and ‘cabals’.

The craft movement

Throughout modernity, craft has provided an alternative set of values to the positivist dream of technological advancement. At its most basic, craft is the transformation of common materials into precious works. Potters dig up mud which they shape and bake in the fire to make vessels for eating and drinking. The history of modern craft is characterised by a search for these elemental roots.

It was during industrialisation in the nineteenth century that craft emerged as a foil to modern capitalism. Reflecting a Protestant spirit, the English Arts and Craft movement of this period championed labour and decried bourgeois decadence.

Rarity was a significant issue for the movement’s champion, John Ruskin. He admitted that certain kinds of rarity, such as a fine sunset, were legitimate as ‘Nature’s way of stimulating your attention’. However, if rarity became a matter of possession, then it was idolatry: there was no reason to value pearls above glass beads. So Ruskin wrote, ‘If only the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all.’[iii] At the time, the craft spirit was identified as a northern phenomenon, with its origins reaching back to the historical struggle of egalitarian Anglo-Saxons against their Norman overlords.

In the twentieth century Western craft turned to the East. The English potter Edmund Leach introduced the values associated with Mingei, a Japanese movement of folk ceramics. These values emerged from a strain of Zen Buddhism that sought enlightenment in the here and now. A key text for Mingei practitioners was The Unknown Craftsman written by Soetsu Yanagi in 1931, which stated ‘Why should beauty emerge from the world of the ordinary? The answer is, ultimately, because the world is natural.’[iv] Yanagi’s values were epitomised in the Kizaemon tea bowl. This sixteenth-century bowl was celebrated as one of Japan’s most significant treasures. According to legend, the bowl was found in a Korean workshop, and produced by a regular worker in a moment of complete unselfconsciousness.

The roles were reversed in the late twentieth century. Crafts practitioners reacted against the earnestness associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, and with Japanese ceramics. Post-modern flamboyance and conceptualism, such as that inspired by the Italian designers Memphis, removed craft from its demotic base.

Meanwhile industrialisation entered the information era, which altered the basic economy of production. Today, the greater the number of people who possess a particular piece of software, the more valuable it is. As Pierre Lévy writes, ‘Everything that flows from top to bottom in theological discourse should be viewed, within the technosocial system, as flowing from bottom to top.’[v] What was vertical has become horizontal—networks replace silos. While technological change has proceeded largely independent of the arts, it does alter the mindset in which the arts are perceived. Craft is just beginning to enjoy this new ground.

Poor cousins in the arts

Modesty of means is not exclusive to the contemporary crafts movement. The ‘Poor Theatre’ of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski evolved in the 1960s as a rejection of theatrical excess, such as lush sets and lavish costumes. It used austerity to bring the focus back on the unadorned actor. This process was extended into cinema with Dogma 95, the Danish movement led by Lars von Trier, which precluded sound tracks and editing in order to bring acting to the fore. For von Trier and other like-minded directors, to work with whatever is at hand promises to be a more transparent means for creative expression.

In the late 1960s Grotowski’s Poor Theatre inspired an Italian art movement known as ‘Arte Povera’. Influenced by American minimalism, a group of sculptors reacted against what they saw as a commodification of art, and created works that materialised a raw creative energy. Their process involved both found materials and spaces outside galleries.

For its main spokesperson, Germano Celant, Arte Povera was a distinctly European movement which contrasted with the futuristic and industrialised scene in America. As Celant writes, European progress ‘is made up of elements astonishingly cobbled together, of deteriorated, ancient materials, excavated from the past and recycled according to intuitive, illogical visions.’[vi] Arte Povera embodied the primitivism of Poor Theatre while articulating a specific message about the heterogeneity of European history. And it embraced the enigmatic.

The antipodean future

At first, there seems no place for a country such as Australia in Celant’s scheme. On the one hand, our thin past does not reflect the rich palimpsest of European history. Australian history seems like a crust of colonialism built over a seemingly timeless continuity of Aboriginal occupation. And on the other hand, Australia is not gripped by the positivism of its American cousins. The cultural dynamic is more colonial in character. It is within the colonial story that we might find the ground for a distinctly Australian craft.

According to the colonial mindset, Europe is the rightful home of preciousness. In his book The Australian Ugliness, Robin Boyd holds up the north as a model: ‘Yet in England, unlike America and Australia, there is always something of genuine beauty around the corner, a medieval church or a glimpse of field, hedge and honest stonework.’[vii] This Europe is studded with the precious jewels of its grand pasts.

Such ‘colonial cringe’ naturally evokes a republican response. There have been many strains of irreverent nationalism. In the 1990s the Sydney designers Mambo celebrated suburban values, typified in local wisdom such as ‘The grass is always greener around the tap.’[viii] Films such as Muriel’s Wedding associate suburbanism with a free spirit and the sense of community; they foster a boisterous pride in being ordinary.

Australian folk craft reflects this popularism. Bush furniture celebrated the make-do practices of farmers who were isolated by the great distances of the outback. A kerosene tin became a chest of drawers. Likewise, the isolation of Aboriginal communities has encouraged an ingenuity of means. The 2001 television series Bush Mechanics celebrated the almost magical ability of the Walpiri people to keep cars going without the backup of tools and supplies. Australian popular applied arts have been forged by isolation.

Australia shares this celebration of the common with other ex-colonies, particularly in the south. Consider the most influential poet in South America, Pablo Neruda. He was ideologically committed to ordinariness. His Elementary Odes are rhapsodic verses in praise of ordinary things. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Neruda claimed that ‘The best poet is he who prepares our daily bread.’[ix] The popularism of Liberation theology and leftist revolutions aims to continue the struggle first established against Spanish imperialism into the factories.

Parallel sentiments are being expressed across the Indian Ocean, where the African Renaissance upholds the value of collective tribalism against capitalist individualism. The post-apartheid generation of South African intellectuals is keen to turn the freedom struggle beyond the spectacle of mass riots to the matters of ordinary life. The author Njabulo Ndebele writes about the ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ as the focus for political action: ‘If it is a new society we seek to bring about in South Africa then that newness will be based on a direct concern with the way people actually live.’[x] Cultural energy in the new South Africa stems from township life, particularly music and craft.

There are clear differences between a majority White country such as Australia, and the racial profiles of nations in Africa and South America. Craft in Australia is located in galleries, where it is partly removed from its value in the market. Yet despite differences in culture and economy, all southern nations share the condition of seeming to live in the ‘shadow’ of the north, where the common things of our world are outshone by the precious imports from afar.

Eventually corrupted by modernity, the modest spirit of craft in the West seeks renewal from outside. In the past Western makers looked to the Viking north and pre-modern East. Now it is from the south that emerges a fresh energy.

‘Poor craft’

The nineteen makers profiled in this book have chosen to work with materials which might otherwise be considered worthless. They have gathered remnants, packaging and rubbish that have no place in the economic system: they turn to whatever is at hand. This ‘poor craft’ is a particularly rich source of creative expression.

To speak of a ‘poor craft’ is to suggest a movement that is bound by common experience and ideas. But it would be premature to christen a new movement. As products of relatively modest backgrounds, the makers in this book share similar sensibilities, though their ideas about preciousness sometimes diverge.

These artists share a common story. They are like the last fruit of a native Australian tree that only grows in the wild. Their childhoods were spent in relatively free open spaces—if not gazing upon the open horizons of the bush then roaming the wilds of the outer suburbs. They grew up before television had absorbed recreational time, and so faced the rare challenge of learning how to create time themselves and to make virtue of necessity.

Relatively few of the makers moved in a straight line. While institutional training has been a critical part of their development as a craftsperson, most have gained ideas on their own. There are certainly common themes that emerge through the work of these artists; they share a spirit of invention and an interest in the alchemic transformation of materials, and many are engaged in a critique of consumerism. Together, they all seek forms of creative energy that are not bound by commodification. Better to have something roughly made from common materials than a slickly produced object that fits snugly into its niche market. While the artists gathered in this book share a use of common materials, their differences are also important. There are two opposed aims. One is the goal of overturning hierarchy, whereby common becomes precious—lead replaces gold. The other is the abolition of hierarchy itself, to make the precious common—gold is reduced to lead. The former tends to be more strategic in orientation, making a mountain out of a molehill. The latter is more modernist in approach. One overturns the pyramid; the other transforms it into a cube. There are reformists, and there are revolutionaries.

The differences between the artists in this book prompt much debate and questioning. I have grouped the artists according to their method of approaching the ordinary. Each chapter deals with a particular group of makers. Gatherers draw from the Australian land to produce work, while Fossickers discover materials in manufactured environments. Gleaners use what gets left behind, such as packaging, and Alchemists look to the physical transformation of materials. Dissectors expose beauty through the act of destruction, but Liberators take the precious out of the gallery and onto the street. While representing a fresh, critical edge in Australian culture, each maker also demonstrates a growing inventiveness in the field of craft.

Like their cousins in Poor Theatre, these makers of ‘poor craft’ seek modesty of means as a way of renewing creative expression. As in the reality television program Survivor, makers are thrown back on their own craft to make works of beauty from what is at hand. And, as in the Arte Povera movement, found materials offer resistance to the dominant economic system, and allow for the spontaneous expression of identity. Ironically, both Poor Theatre and Arte Povera were inward focused and relatively unpopular art movements. ‘Poor craft’ seems different. In its reference to everyday life it seems possible that ‘poor craft’ will enjoy a broad audience, untutored in art theory. This is a rare moment for the art of the ordinary.

Notes

[i] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984 (orig. 1974)

[ii] While the celebration of the common occurs in many different cultures and histories, we need not assume that it is linked to a universal meaning. The championing of ordinary seems a reaction against authority that emerges within a specific context.

[iii] John Ruskin, Arata Pentelici: Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture, George Allen, London, 1890, p. 23.

[iv] Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, trans. Bernard Leach, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1989 (orig. 1931), p. 101.

[v] Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Plenum Press, New York, 1997 (orig. 1995), p. 100.

[vi] Germano Celant, Arte Povera: Art from Italy, 1967–2002, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002, p. 23.

[vii] Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1960, p. 16.

[viii] Mambo: Still Life with Franchise, Mambo Graphics, Sydney, 1998, p. 115.

[ix] Alan Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, New York, 2004, p. 379.

[x] Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994, p. 57. The phrase was echoed in the opening of a speech made by Mbulelo Mzamane in 2004 at a gathering of artists and writers from the southern hemisphere (see www.southproject.org).

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From Gold to Grey: Flora for the 21st century–exhibition by Marian Hosking

By the stream the mimosa was all gold, great gold bushes full of spring fire rising over your head, and the scent of the Australian spring, and the most ethereal of all golden bloom, the plumy, many-balled wattle, and the utter loneliness, the manlessness, the untouched blue sky overhead, the gaunt, lightless gum-trees rearing a little way off…

D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo.

Installation from Marian Hosking Beyond Flora

Over more than forty years of practice, Marian Hosking has continually found new ways to distil into ornament the ‘wide brown land’ on which she lives. As a contemporary Australian jeweller, she inherited a decorative arts tradition that celebrated the graphic images of local flora, particularly in textiles and ceramics. The particular challenge of jewellery is to give this seasonal organic life a timeless sense of preciousness when cast in metal. One of Hosking’s significant achievements is to forge a link between the showy nationalism at the birth of Australian federation and the fractured connection to the land sustained into the 21st century. At a time of heightened urbanisation and increasing remoteness from nature, Hosking helps us re-connect where we are with where we have come from.

Early in the 20th century, Australian jewellers such as Rhoda Wager borrowed the English style of foliation to celebrate verdancy in nature. This lens identified aspects of Australian nature that were familiar to the English eye, particularly green ivy-like forms. Rather than reproducing traditional styles, Hosking has been able to create her own language of place through individualised techniques of drilling, sawing and casting silver. She has forged a style appropriate to the dry southern continent.

In her career, Hosking has been able to apply this technique to extreme ends of the scale of representation. With the Tall Tree Project, she celebrated the epic scale of Australian bush. The monumental silver ring for the Errinunga Shining Gum travelled Australia with her Living Treasure touring exhibition. With the works in Beyond Flora, Hosking zooms in to the opposite limit of representation in the fine detail of our world.

For this exhibition, Hosking draws on her recent expeditions, ranging from the far horizons of Ormiston Gorge in Alice Springs to the world at hand in generic suburban scrub. Despite these wide distances, Hosking settles on a humble ecology that is common to both coast and desert—heath. While characterised by poor soil and stunted growth, the variety of plants in heathland often lend a distinctive identity to their nation. We think of the moors in northern England, or the delicate fynbos of the Western Cape in South Africa. Not suitable for agriculture, these spaces are often preserved from development.

The dominant material, as always, is silver. Silver seems a particularly appropriate material for heath. Not only does it reflect the grey colour of its vegetation, it also occupies a secondary status to the more mercantile gold in the hierarchy of metals. Hosking’s silver works for Beyond Flora include a cast brooch, embossed rings, and her signature kinetic brooches. But this time she has also included stones in her work. She has combined cast silver with complementary stones in necklaces—ruby with boronia, black cubic zirconia with wattle, and carnelian with gum nuts and leaves.

Beyond Flora does something quite particular to our understanding of wattle as the national emblem. In Australian decorative arts, particularly the period inspired by Art Nouveau, the dominant feature of wattle has been its bright yellow blossom. This is particularly the case in the graphic designs on ceramics and textiles. Jewellery also attempted to capture the brilliant colour of wattle, such as the enamelled works of Deakin and Francis, Birmingham, produced for the Australian market in 1910.

Hosking takes a contrary approach to illustrative history of wattle decoration. Rather than reflect its distinct golden blossom, she renders the flower into grey metal. Avoidance of colour releases other dimensions of the blossom, particularly its delicate outline. To achieve this, Hosking has developed a method almost photographic in its capture of form. She impresses the specimen in silicon from which a wax form is cast. The wax impression is then sent to the casting foundry, Len Rose, in order to produce the silver form. By this means, Hosking has been able to produce an exceptionally precise silver version of the wattle flower.

This casting process has opened up a new dimension in Hosking’s work. The flower provides a motif that can be repeated, like the cotton baubles sometimes found on the base of curtains. Previously, Hosking has worked mostly with unique forms. By turning the blossom into a motif that can be reproduced, Hosking connects her work to the decorative art tradition, transforming nature into ornament.

The wattle was originally taken up in the late nineteenth century as a symbol of the native-born Australian. Previously, the bush had been a source of dismay, reflecting Adam Lindsay Gordon’s view of Australia as a land of ‘scentless blossoms’ and ‘songless birds’. Wattle became the focus for a new pride in the young nation. The value of the wattle as a national flora was buoyed by the dramatic events at the start of the twentieth century – Federation, the granting of Dominion Status and the First and Second World War. Wattle as a national emblem provided Australia with a proud motif in its coat of arms, and a symbol of its distinct identity alongside its commonwealth cousins, including the South African protea, the Canadian maple and the New Zealand silver fern.

But it was more than just an official emblem. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, wattle clubs were formed in all the state capitals. Since 1908, the first day of spring has been celebrated as national wattle day, as city folk venture forth into the countryside to enjoy the ‘golden-haired September.’ In 1912, the first ‘wattle train’ took 980 passengers from Melbourne to Hurstbridge to admire and often souvenir the bloom, sometimes to the chagrin of farmers.

Though the wattle lost popularity after the Second World War, there have been recent attempts to use it at times of national importance. In 1999, the Governor General Sir William Deane cast sprigs of wattle into the waters of the Swiss river gorge in memory of Australians who had lost their lives there in a recent accident.

The wattle has shown resilience in the face of globalisation. But in the turbulent waters of rapidly changing culture, it is critical that we find fresh ways of honouring the wattle. This is one of Hosking’s great achievements in Beyond Flora. Previous incarnations of wattle seem locked in nostalgia for naïve nationalism. Hosking’s more scientific method connects wattle to our time. In honouring our flora, we create a language to respect the lives that are spent here.

This is a catalogue essay for the exhibition by Marian Hosking Beyond Flora at Workshop Bilk, 2010

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Contemporary jewellery in Australia and New Zealand

Contemporary Jewellery in Australia and New Zealand is a book project with New Zealand writer Damian Skinner

Jewellery has a unique role to play in representing place. With the heritage of craft techniques and their own individual imaginations, jewellers are able to transform the world around them into wearable ornament. Thanks to their jewellers, it is possible for Australians and New Zealanders to display a complex and engaged relationship to place.

The aim of this book is to both provide an archive of information about recent history in facts and images, and engage jewellery in a broader argument about sense of place.

This book will recount the development of the contemporary jewellery scene in Australia and New Zealand from the 1960s. The two scenes run alongside each other, at times parallel, other times crossing and sometimes divergent. Both scenes can be read as attempts to make sense of what it is to live on the other side of the world to the cultural centres. In this quest, they have both been influenced by German modernism, particularly with visits from Hermann Junger and Otto Künzli. While in New Zealand the language of local materials has been much contested as a means of Pakeha expression, in Australia there has been a divergent tension between the immediacy of found materials and the excess of ornament.

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Sangam – Australia-India Design Platform

1. A Platform for Creative Partnership

The Australia-India Design Platform is a three-year program of parallel forums, workshops and pilot study. It aims to build a common understanding between Australia and India about how designers and artisans might work productively together. This platform is a step towards the development of a Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations, which will create new opportunities for designers and craftspersons by supporting the ethical and storied value of cultural products.

This Platform will be built on mutual respect, frank discussion, creative play and a focus on long-term outcomes for both designers and artisans.

2. Aims: Sharing ideas and skills

  • To create new opportunities for designers and artisans
  • To consolidate existing experience about Australia-India partnerships
  • To develop innovative strategies for cultural sustainability
  • To find a contemporary understanding between Australia and India, village and city
  • To contribute to the development of the Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations

3. Program

a. Map a consensus through the life-cycle of product development

b. Pilot study

To test out the consensus with a particular traditional craft:

  • Residency for Australian designer
  • ARC Linkage research evaluating its progress

c. Case studies

To share knowledge gained by those who have experience working in both countries:

  • Online profiles
  • Online discussion forum

4. Partnerships

  • Academic partner: Ethical Design Laboratory
  • Industry partners: Australian Craft and Design Centres, including Craft Australia and Craft Victoria; National Association of the Visual Arts; Arts Law
  • International partners: Icograda, World Craft Council
  • Indian Partners: Craft Revival Trust, Jindal Global Law School, National Institute of Design, Craft Council of India, Delhi Arts Residency
  • The Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations will be administered by the New Traditions Foundation

This project is currently open to partnerships with organisations that are engaged with product development. There is also interest in potential partners who are interested in providing venues for discussion, both real and online.

For more information, please visit www.sangamproject.net. For a philosophical context for this, please visit www.thetwohandsproject.net.