Clearing the table

Table Manners at Pan Gallery came to a close yesterday - we hope you managed to catch it before it was over!

Either way, here's a peek at the exhibition. More images can be viewed here.

Vanessa Lucas

Robyn Hosking

From front to back: Jane Walton, Naoko Coghlan, Zoe Baker

2010 winner Nutz Luk Mei Fei's work

Zoe Baker

Jo Quirk

Thank you to Ray, Paul and Sophie at Pan for allowing us this opportunity!

Photography: Kim Brockett

Opening night: Table Manners

Last Wednesday evening was the opening of the second annual Pan Gallery Ceramic Art Award, the title of which was 'Table Manners'. Guest judge and speaker Kris Coad also announced this year's winner who is none other than Nutz Luk Mei Fei! Yay congratulations Nutz!

Nutz's winning work

Here are some images from the opening night:

Thanks to all who came and also to Sophie, Paul and Ray at Pan Gallery/Northcote Pottery Supplies for involving in this show.

Table Manners is on from now till 27 October.

Opening this Wednesday >>> Pan Gallery Ceramic Art Award: Table Manners

Nutz Luk Mei Fei

The Pan Gallery Ceramic Art Award is upon us again and opens this Wednesday at 6pm! Table Manners features 15 works by a range of emerging and established ceramic artists including quite a few COUNTER stockists!

As the title suggests, this year's award called on artists to locate the relevance of etiquette in today's world through the form of cup and saucer. Here's a sneak peek at some of the contributions from our COUNTER folk:

Zoe Baker


Keiko Matsui



Tara Shackell



Sandra Bowkett

Table Manners is presented in association with Craft Victoria and is co-curated by Kim Brockett and Anita Cummins (Craft Victoria). The exhibition opens this Wednesday from 6-8pm, where guest judge Kris Coad will be announcing the winner of the $1,500 prize.

Pan Gallery is located at Northcote Pottery Supplies, 142-144 Weston Street, Brunswick East. To get there catch the 1 or 8 tram towards Brunswick East, alighting at the Weston Street stop which is after Brunswick Road.

PAN Gallery Ceramic Art Award: now accepting applications!

It's back!

Currently in its second year, the panGALLERY Ceramic Art Award is an annual award show that recognises exceptional talent within contemporary ceramics. This year's theme is Table Manners, and ceramic artists are invited to submit a cup and saucer set for consideration.

Here is some information about Table Manners.

Traditionally, afternoon tea has called for the very finest: your best china, polished silverware and impeccable manners. Attitudes toward decorum and the rules of social etiquette in contemporary society have since relaxed, leading one to question whether table manners have lost their relevance in today’s world.

panGALLERY, in association with Craft Victoria, calls on ceramic artists to submit an original artwork that embraces the dining table’s most iconic representation of good manners: the cup and saucer. How does this usually inseparable pair address the issue of etiquette, or lack thereof, in today’s social settings? Is there still a place at the table for the cup and saucer, and why should knowing which way to drink your tea and place your cup affect this inherently convivial ritual?

Selected works will be included in an exhibition at panGALLERY entitled Table Manners with a final award winner selected from exhibited works and awarded $1500. Work submitted must be new work and not previously exhibited.


The Award will be curated by Kim Brockett & Anita Cummins of Craft Victoria and judged by esteemed ceramacist and COUNTER favourite, Kris Coad.

Click here to for more information about the Award, and click here to download the exhibition brief and application form.

Last year's winner Katie Jacobs took home the $1,500 prize as well as many, many finger snaps for her hard work, and we expect this year's ante to be upped! Applications are due Monday 16 August, so you better get cracking!

Anita Cummins in Inside Out magazine!

The latest edition of Inside Out (with a glorious cover by UK paper-based artist Rob Ryan) features some delightful pom poms by one very lovely Anita Cummins! Anita is assistant retail manager here at CVHQ, and her work is stocked right here at COUNTER.

If you'd like to get your paws on you can get order in one (or two, or five) of her pom pom necklaces. Just make sure you give us a call first! We also hear that Anita's autumn-perfect machine-knitted scarves will be reappearing at COUNTER very soon, so make sure you keep an eye out.

Opening tonight: PAN Gallery Award!

Tonight is the opening of the inaugural PAN Gallery Award, presented in proud association with Craft Victoria and curated by CV's Anita Cummins & Kim Brockett. We're very excited about this exhibition, it being the first PAN Gallery Award and the first show curated by Kim and Anita. The first of many more to come we say!

The exhibition opens tonight at 6pm at PAN Gallery/Northcote Pottery Supplies and features speeches by the show's judge Jane Sawyer and guest speaker Joanne Ely (former curator at Shepparton Art Gallery). Jane will also be annoucing the winner of the show this evening who will be taking home the grand prize of $1,500.

This group show, themed 'Bottled', features the work from 18 ceramacists across Australia, including Craft Victoria members Zoë Baker, Leah Jackson, Katie Jacobs, Heather May, Robyn Phelan, Christopher Plumridge and Ingrid Tufts.

PAN Gallery is located on 142-144 Weston Street in Brunswick East. See you in a few hours!

Pom Pom making with Anita Cummins

Fresh from her exhibition at Mailbox 141 Pantone Pom Pom, textile artist and CVHQ Retail Ass.Man (hmm, we might have to rethink that abbreviation) Anita Cummins is now poised to revolutionise the world, one fluffy pom pom at a time!

In conjunction with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, Anita will be facilitating a half-day workshop on the art of pom pom-making. The class will take place on Monday 21 September at VTW and bookings are now open.

Some information on the workshop:

In this half day workshop Anita will unlock the secrets of pom pom making. Using recycle cardboard and the gorgeous VTW yarn, Anita will guide people through making a pom pom pattern and provide inspiration for the many possible uses for these little cuties.

Pom pom makers will have the opportunity to utilise the VTW's 366 yarn colour range, and each person will have the opportunity to make at least two pom poms in the class.

And most importantly, here are the hard details:

What: Pom Pom Making with Anita Cummins
Where: Victorian Tapestry Workshop, 262-266 Park Street, South Melbourne
When: Monday 21 September, 1.30pm to 4.30pm
How much: $30 (!!!)
What do I do to book: Call Lily Fraser on 03 9699 7885 for enquiries, or fill out the form (pictured below)

PAN Gallery award show

Coming up later this year, PAN Gallery will be holding their inaugural award show, to be organised in association with Craft Victoria and Northcote Pottery Supplies. The theme of this year's competition is 'Bottled' and as the title suggests, the exhibition is centred around the shape of a bottle.

Ceramic art requires patience, considered decisions and attention to detail. This emphasis on technique raises an important question: Is ceramic art capable of embodying sentiment? BOTTLED seeks to explore the ability of the ceramic object, in this case in the form of the bottle, to express emotion.

The bottle is a practical object: its primary purpose is to function as a vessel that contains the tangible. What happens then, when this tangibility is replaced with the impalpable – such as emotion? Is the bottle able to contain the fleeting intensity of anger, the all-encompassing feeling of euphoria or the continuous simmering of long term grief? Can a ceramic artist bottle emotion?

This upcoming exhibition will be co-curated by CVHQ ladies Anita Cummins and Kim Brockett (hurrah!), and it's a very exciting curatorial debut for the both of us. Entries for the exhibition must be new work and not previously exhibited, and the deadline for entries is FRIDAY 18 SEPTEMBER.

To sweeten the deal (as if you needed more incentive!) the most outstanding ceramic work will receive a $1500 prize.

For more information including entry details and the registration form, click here.

PANTONE POM POM update

Have you seen Anita's updated pom pom installation at Mailbox 141? The new palette takes a turn towards creams, browns, greys and muted colours. Fabulous!

Because of the narrow format of Blogger, make sure you click the image below to be wow-ed by a panoramic view of Anita's installation.

If you haven't already, do have a read of a recent interview with Anita, and click here to view more images of Pantone Pom Pom. Anita will also be taking part at the upcoming Craft Hatch @ Melbourne Writers Festival market on Sunday 30 August, where she will have her scarves for sale with the option to embroider your initials on it. Kickin' it old school style!

Pantone Pom Pom by numbers...

You've seen the show and read the interview, so today CLOG is super proud to present Pantone Pom Pom-by-numbers... after all, the numbers don't lie!



760 pom poms

250+ hours

152 balls of wool

38 colours

15 metres of yarn per pom pom

13.68 kilometres of yarn

6 cracked and blistered fingers

a larger portion of the dvd’s at my local video store than I care to admit…

and of course,

countless puzzled expressions when forfeiting a night out to stay home and make pom poms…

Introducing... Anita Cummins

With Anita Cummins' exhibition Pantone Pom Pom almost at the half way mark now, there's never been a better time to shine the light on the life and work of fabulous lady herself.

We all know that Anita is one of the loveliest staff members here at CVHQ, but did you know that prior to her textile-based artistic practice, Anita worked as a freelance stylist? This totally explains her amazing wardrobe and keen eye!

Anita, who many of you will also know as CVHQ's ever-capable Assistant Retail Manager, is a budding textile artist who is particularly skilled in the art of the pom pom. For her exhibition Pantone Pom Pom (which is on at Mailbox 141 until 22 August), Anita has painstakingly wrapped, wound and trimmed over 700 pom poms in a myriad of colours and tones.

If you haven't already, take a peek at previous entries on Anita which includes photo documentation of Pantone Pom Pom.

Happy Friday everyone, see you at the launch of Craft Cubed tonight (from 6pm!)

About Pantone Pom Pom…
I started making pom poms years ago for a university exhibition. I tried to make as many as I could in the university semester, which ended up being about 350. Back then they were all white with a few red ones. Making pom-poms developed into a bit of an obsession, and it became a sort of meditation for me.

Pantone Pom Pom was a natural progression for me. I have always been in awe of artists who use explosions of colour, but never had the guts to do it myself. I had started making pom poms in every colour I could find and then it dawned on me that I could really play with colour by referencing the pantone colour chart in response to the Craft Cubed theme of CITYCOUNTRY. I chose two colour palettes, a really bright, fluoro scale for city, followed by a really earthy, natural scale for country. That is not to say that these particular colours cannot appear in both urban and rural environments, but for the purpose of this project I wanted to celebrate colour gradations. A simplified response to the word city is bright lights and neon, while I think of the words neutral and natural in relation to country.

About the process…
It was pretty hard to find the colours I wanted, in the yarn that I wanted. Different types of yarn produced very different results, so I had to choose my colours according to what was available in the yarn that I like. I wanted to use only natural fibres, but there were some colours such as the fluoro green and orange that you can only get in acrylic fibre, so I did have to make a few exceptions. My Gran thinks it is a shame to waste all that beautiful wool on making pom poms, but wool really does produce the best results. It would also be great to dye my own colours, but I have no experience in dyeing, so perhaps that’s something I need to try in the future.

I would often take my stuff to my mum’s and make pom poms in her lounge room. On a number of occasions her wayward dog Louis stole a pom pom that had rolled onto the floor, snuck under the couch with it and proceeded to ‘kill’ it. It was funny but annoying…

Five years’ ago I was…
I was studying Creative Arts and Arts at The University of Melbourne. I drank a lot of coffee, smoked a lot of cigarettes and wrote some very unworthy essays. I dabbled in all of the creative arts, my favourites being life drawing and photography, mainly because of my lecturer Barb. I majored in Italian, which was by far my worst subject but I scraped through and even ended up living in Italy for a semester. I saved up my pennies and travelled in South East Asia over summer.

…and in five years’ time I hope to be…
I don’t like to think too far into the future. I am not a career-focused person. I just want to keep doing things that I love and be open to any opportunities that may arise as a result of that.

A selection of Anita's scarves available at COUNTER

About making the move from being a stylist to textiles as an artistic practice…
I love fashion and photography, so styling seemed perfect for me. I should have known that nothing is as it seems. I really enjoyed working with all these creative people who were beginning to forge their careers as photographers and make-up artists and models, but a lot of these jobs were unpaid. The jobs that paid well were really boring, less about being creative and much more about being super-organized and getting everything done as fast as possible. I also stopped getting excited about putting outfits together, which is a bit of a disaster if you want to be a stylist. So I stopped.

Now I have time to say yes to opportunities that arise and put my own artistic practice as a priority. I get so much enjoyment from ‘creating’ and since making the decision to focus on my own stuff everything is just falling into place. And I am starting to get excited about fashion again…

My dream collaboration would involve…
I think Yoko Ono is a brilliant artist. I saw one of her exhibitions in Barcelona about 5 years ago and I have never forgotten it. The gallery was massive with about twenty rooms and in each room was an instruction. She orchestrated it so that her audience was a vital ingredient in the creation of the work. It gave even the most unlikely candidate a chance at being creative. She is so whimsical and particularly generous with her audience – allowing them to participate in her artworks. I think I would find it really hard to give over control to someone else but I would love to learn from someone like Yoko.

Having said that, I don’t really think about collaborating. It’s something that just seems to happen when two artists are inspired by each other and living in the same city.

I’m really looking forward to…
The Victorian Tapestry Workshop has asked me to share my love of the humble pom pom with others by giving classes. It is something anyone can do for not much money.

Tune in to SYN FM on Sunday for their Arts Mitten program from 3 to 4pm to hear Anita and Joe Pascoe (CVHQ Chief) talk about Craft Cubed and the exhibitions involved! Exciting stuff. We can't wait!

Pom poms fit for the Pompidou*

Following on from the last post we did of the installation of Anita Cummins' exhibition Pantone Pom Pom, here are some shots of the finished exhibition as well as some happy snaps from the opening night.

Pantone Pom Pom consists of two colour palettes: an exuberantly bright one and a more sombre, tonal palette. The changeover to the muted palette will take place from 1 August onwards, with the exhibition coming to a close on 22 August.

Click here to view more images of Anita's exhibition.

*Today's pun-tastic title is courtesy of CVHQ's official photographer Alexia Skok. Thanks Alexia! Skilled and funny! What a package.

Pantone Pom Pom - a show with 'Pom-ise'

Last Monday, we wrote about CVHQ's beloved Assistant Retail Manager #2 Anita Cummins' first solo exhibition at Mailbox 141 entitled Pantone Pom Pom. The exhibition opened in the stairwell of 141 Flinders Lane with much fanfare and hoorah, to the amusement of a few passers-by. It's amazing the number of people you can fit in there!

We'll have some shots of Anita's show on the blog very soon, but in the meantime have a peek at the installation process (which was assisted by yours truly!)

Surprise installation

Anita's exhibition opened on Tuesday 30 June and will run until Saturday 22 August. Pantone Pom Pom is one of two satellite exhibitions taking place as part of our inaugural festival and cultural program, Craft Cubed. The first half of the exhibition will see a spectrum of colours in each of the 19 mailboxes. Midway through the show, Anita will be changing over the palette to a more tonal colour scheme - stay tuned for that!

In other news, keen-eyed readers may have noticed Michi Girl's snappy writeup on Anita's exhibition. Thanks for the love Michi!

(click to enlarge)

Hoorah indeed!