Deirdre Feeney 'seventh eve'

To get you through the weekend without your daily dose of CLOG (teehee), here are a couple of links to read more about our current exhibition in Gallery 2: Deirdre Feeney's seventh eve.

There's an accompanying exhibition catalogue containing an essay by Ray Edgar. You can download it here, or visit us to pick up a (free!) copy for yourself next time you visit us.

Deirdre's exhibition was also opened by Dr Wendy Haslem, a lecturer on cinema studies at the University of Melbourne. To read her opening speech, click here.

Happy Friday everyone!


Photography credit: Lily Feng

A Peculiar Geometry

A Peculiar Geometry


“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick


Space and time are perhaps the most familiar features of lived experience. They are also the most beguiling. Space and time appear as eternally fixed essences, fundamental to the character of reality, unyielding to the vagaries of conduct and perception. Yet for all the familiarity of space and time, the appearance of stability remains a mysterious illusion. The everyday experience of space rarely accords with a classical geometry of planes and fixed distances. For space is always experienced as a process of movement and rest, of travel, communication and associations. The earth is never still and distances are never fixed.

Kant was the first to perceive this ‘enfolding’ of space and time in the movements of a thinking, feeling body. Space and time exhibit for Kant, the properties of pure intuition. We experience space and time as subjective points of perspective and movement. Space and time are meaningful only in relation to our experience of this perspective, such that any notion of an objective, geometrical space must remain an abstraction, perhaps even an illusion. The world might be mapped, its contours measured and its expanses navigated, but the space of maps is never the space of the living body. No map has ever captured the experience of place; the living, affective, cognitive and emotional experience of being in the world. To chart the disjunctive spaces and jarring temporalities of this life-world requires a different kind of map, more sensitive to affective rhythms of embodiment and place.

Andrea Eckersley and Dell Stewart’s work explores the spaces and temporalities of embodiment and place. Each artist works between the geometrical space of surfaces and distance and the subjective life-world of experience and movement. Each artist creates work that addresses the body directly, taking the fixed spaces of the canvas, the silk-screen, the dress-maker’s pattern and the ornament, warping and moulding these spaces to accommodate the body’s peculiar geometry. The triangle provides an ideal example of the abstract surfaces of geometrical space and the ways these surfaces must be continuously distorted to fit the living body. Scales lift off
the surface of the canvas only to land in the imbricated folds of the adjacent garment.

To wrap the body in the abstract geometry of the triangle is to be reminded of the intensity of lived place and the inhuman flatness of extensive space. It is to force the living, feeling, thinking body back into space. It is to introduce the body’s sinuous folds into the flat abstractions of geometrical surfaces. Space and time are undeniable constraints – few bodies escape gravity and few bodies elude time. Yet to regard space and time as fundamental and immutable essences is to refuse the affective and corporeal potential that space and time present. All spaces are lived spaces; all time is experienced. Eckersley and Stewart remind us of the lived, felt, affective and relational dimensions of space and our desire to recover a place for the body, for experience itself.



Cameron Duff

Sites and Signals

Here is the first of two catalogue essays accompanying Dell Stewart & Andrea Eckersley's current exhibition Triangle in Gallery 2.

Triangle is on until 12 June.

Sites and Signals

Dress by Andrea Eckersley

Imagine you are in a forest clearing, where the only sign of civilisation is the faint track left by a long ago car doing donuts in the mud. The sun creates spots of light on the ground and friendly neon hand knitted snakes lie patiently at your feet. You sling one on as a scarf over your faux wood grain shift dress. A campfire smolders slowly in the corner and the smell of charcoal hangs in the smoke-skinned air. You’ve been out here alone for five days and you’re happy, there’s no reason to go back, but a voice tells you that you must.

You find cotton screen-printed flags and criss-cross them. These are not signals of distress; they are markers, used to safely convey visitors through your world and protect you from harm. They belong to a heritage of homemade craft technique passed down through the generations. The neon coral intensity suggests that earthy tones of brown and soft beige may not be enough in themselves. There may indeed be such a thing as too much brown.

Perhaps you crave fruit bowls, the electricity grid, footpaths that hiss clouds of smoke, conversations with a woman who wears a shade of lipstick called flamenco moon. You think about your plants in their ceramic loglike pots back home, surrounded by endless plains of impervious concrete, and wonder what the simulacrum would look like out here amongst nature. Is their smell more distilled, more heightened, in the city? Would they be overwhelmed by the immensity of vegetation here? If they were left to their own devices they might walk
off during the night and never return – a strategy for survival in a world that requires living forms to constantly evolve.

Your clothes hang breezily on the makeshift line. The simple tunic dress whose orchids resemble underwater anemones . Burnished gold triangles undistortable as the pyramids of Giza. The way the design leverages geometrical shapes draws the eye in and reminds one of things both ancient and futuristic – arrow heads, snake scales, black triangles flying silently overhead on their way to a parallel world. You expand a pleated silk black scarf into a frill-necked collar, its flash of gold a python’s tooth gleaming in the darkness.

Time to rest awhile. That wood grain quilted picnic blanket is surely up to the task of making your tired body feel like a warm waffle. The ceramic teapot is imperfectly hand hewn, but the tea that is poured from it somehow tastes purer as a result. Its qualities of groundedness and generosity spill over into the life of those things around it. The milk jug also contains moments of private reverie. These handmade creations possess an intimacy and richness that machines can’t comprehend.




Alternate realities lie beyond deceptively simple designs. Interpretation has the capacity to be infinite, like white light refracting through a prism. You turn and see the duck egg blue triangular horizons of Andrea’s painting and the origami mysteries of her kimono confections. You’re reminded how the triangle was formed and its boundaries seem limitless. Everything here is embedded with a sense of process and purpose. Fine art becomes fashion and fashion becomes fine art once more.

You hear footsteps crunching over leaves and voices through the trees. The view outside the window of Craft Victoria reminds you where you are in time and space. Geometry may not be for everyone but there’s something special about Triangle.




Anna Sutton

Things to pick up, things to read

In conjunction with their current exhibitions, Kate James (Gallery 2) and Limedrop (enCOUNTER) have each provided us with a lovely catalogue for visitors to take home.

Kate's features a most eloquent essay authored by Damian Smith. By the way, Kate is also currently exhibiting at Maroondah Art Gallery - make sure you check it out if you're in that neck of the woods!

Letting Go is on until 10 April and is concerned with similar themes to The Work of Worry is Never Done, which is at Gallery 2 in Craft Victoria until 24 April.



Limedrop's fold-up poster is a collection of images featuring their latest collection, Silver Lining. Pick up a copy and pick out your favourite outfit...




Make sure you get your copy next time you come by!

Read all about it: Shoe Show

The Shoe Show catalogues are finally here in all of their double sided, black-and-white + one pantone, 80gsm, A2 glory. And they look GREAT!

The catalogue features excerpts of interviews by assistant curator Kim Brockett with each of the six Shoe Show exhibitors (Emma Greenwood, Phong Chi Lai, April Phillips, James Roberts, Emma Shirgwin, and Tim Tropp).

The fantastic layout is by our good buddy Guy Dollman, with photography by Richard Brockett. Thanks guys!

You can pick up a copy of the catalogue from Craft Victoria, or if you like you can download it by clicking here (ps. it weighs in at a hefty 3MB).

I'll be your plastic toy

I’ll be your plastic toy [1]

And I looked
At my big ball of string,
And I said,
NOW I will find
A thing of some kind
Some GOOD kind of thing

To Do with my string! [2]

When Marion Holland wrote my favourite children’s book, A Big Ball of String, she created a character (not surprisingly) obsessed with making the biggest ball of string he possibly could. He began to do everything a child could do with an incredibly long piece of string – fly balloons into the sun, construct a machine out of a bike, a trike and a toy jeep – until he was bedridden. Then he discovered he could do even more – he could rig up the entire contents of his room and continue playing without needing to leave his bed at all, all with one ginormous piece of string. But if only he had some pink wax and a few pearls…

In her self-assigned project Take a ball of thread… Melinda Young has set herself three fundamental rules: Make from the industrial spool of pink thread until completely used. Only materials already in her studio can be sourced. Every item mad emust be wearable. These simple rules are reminiscent of Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More [3] project, such simple beginnings for pieces that ultimately represent very intimate concepts and experiences.

The works themselves pose questions about our notions of wearability/function (through use of materials) to wearability/classification of beauty (through the creation of alluringly grotesque forms). The curious bubbling piles look like chewed candy, or a discarded sun-melted plastic Barbie accessory, somehow finding its way into a gallery (or onto a lapel). The pieces harbour uncomfortable yet familiar feelings – candy pinks at once seduce and sweetly sicken, reminding us of childhood toys. Simultaneously, the works have a visceral quality, mimicking the body’s interiors. Linking them with our exterior, we are prompted to contemplate cultural attitude and ideas about the abject and the female body.

Debbie Pryor

[1] Just Like Honey, Jim Reid (Jesus and Mary Chain), 1985
[2] Marion Holland, A Big Ball of String, Random House Inc., 1958
[3] http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/

'Pink... You Stink'

Melinda Young's beautiful catalogues have all been snapped up (as expected) - gorgeously printed (free) catalogues don't last long here at CVHQ! In case you weren't one of the lucky few, here is the first of 2 essays that may be found in Mel's accompanying exhibition catalogue.

Pink… You Stink

My dad thinks he’s pretty funny, and in fact he is, in a slightly absurd way. And so I spent my childhood subjected to his abstract humour, one manifestation of which was putting on a silly voice and saying ‘Pink. You stink’ whenever the colour was mentioned. What the hell did this mean? Pink is the colour of roses and bubble gum. It’s a girl’s colour. How could it ever smell bad? As well as being annoying, my father’s catch phrase made no sense. How could something sweet and lovely be pungent and unpleasant? How could something be beautiful and ugly?

I had forgotten all about dad’s weird saying until I was introduced to Melinda Young’s collection of pink objects. Pulsing, visceral conglomerations, they are at once arresting in their beauty and just a little bit icky. Like strange sea creatures or disembodied organs, Young’s creations are dangerously ‘alive’ – living, growing, and feeding on themselves. Rubies and pearls are swallowed by globs of wax, crystals push out of the surface and delicate fringes sprout from the edges… and all of them pink, pink, pink.

The incongruity of these beautiful/ugly works is echoed in their materials and production. Precious gems are coupled with inexpensive casting wax; and while the pieces appear roughly clumped together, closer inspection reveals them to be meticulously constructed, the products of a long process of collection and collation. Dichotomous to the last, each piece doubles as both artwork and wearable – functioning as rather pretty sculptures and, at the same time, somewhat ‘out there’ pieces of jewellery.

The titles of Young’s pieces point to a longstanding fascination with notions of abjection, referencing artists such as Louise Bourgeois, who is famous for works that both seduce and repel. So too, Young’s blog reveals a more personal inspiration for her pink series – photographs of the artist’s insides, taken for medical tests. Entries entitled ‘Innards’ and ‘Gut Instinct’ further explain the bodily connotations, but it’s one image that says it best – an unidentified organ, bright pink and studded with droplets of blood. It’s luminous and gorgeous and horrible too. Suddenly ‘Pink. You Stink’ makes perfect sense.

- Amber McCulloch