Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
News, Writings
Jo Higgins
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published
Writings
Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: 'Air' at QAGOMA
ABC Arts: 'Air' at QAGOMA
Writings
Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: Megan Cope is building a living, ...
ABC Arts: Megan Cope is building a living, breathing artwork on Minjerribah
Writings, Events
Jo Higgins
Art Collector: Pull Focus interview with Abdul ...
Art Collector: Pull Focus interview with Abdul Abdullah & Abdul-Rahman Abdullah

Conference

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Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and some Art, Art, Art....

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Writing the grant acquittals for my Berlin conference has been a valuable opportunity (and a useful deadline) to really sit down and make concrete what I learned and gained from the opportunity to attend and present at the Connected Audiences Conference back in May. There’s been some immediate benefits - new contacts and conversations underway with colleagues in the US and UK - and so many new examples of best practice youth engagement within a museum and evaluation context. I’ve written more about the conference here but honestly, the thing that really makes these kinds of trips so special is the opportunity to experience some phenomenal exhibitions that, by virtue of geography and ambition, you just don’t get to see everyday in Australia. Some of the absolute standouts?

Alfredo Jaar: The End of the World at KINDL - Centre for Contemporary Art. An audacious use of scale and architecture to highlight the insidious relationship between ‘critical minerals’, climate change and colonialism.

Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry at Sprüth Magers. A dizzying, dazzling, occasionally visceral stereoscopic film installation that traverses layers of German history, social spaces, urban landscapes and the squalid interiors of a glass recycling bin...

Mark Bradford. Keep Walking at the Hamburger Bahnhof - political, poetic, vulnerable and wondrously tactile (his video work Deimos, 2015 was just one highlight) - as well as the group exhibition Museum is Motion with works by Elmgreen & Dragset and Jeremy Shaw, whose audacious multi-screen installation Phase Shifting Index just blew me away.

Fujiko Nakaya’s latest site-specific fog installation, Cult of Mist at the Neue Nationalgalerie - the full bodied, physiological sense of delight-as-fog that literally envelopes you is something I’ll remember for a long time.

Neue Nationalgalerie was also where we also encountered and got completely obsessed with artist Sarah Wenzinger’s Mediation Ex Machina. A loose parts machine with cranks and wheels that offers a lottery of postcard prompts for critical and curious looking through the gallery. It was so sophisticated, so playful, the prompts were * chefs kiss * - singular, thoughtful, specific, accessible for anyone (not least because they were bi-lingual.) That encounter alone made the trip to Berlin worthwhile.

Other highlights included Janet Laurence: The Burnt Sea at Alfred Ehrhardt Siftung, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Gropius Bau, Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds at the ifa Gallery Berlin, Olafur Eliasson: the lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities at neugerriemschneider and It's Just a Matter of Time at the Palais Populaire, with a group show drawn from the Deutsche Bank collection including works by Julian Irlinger, Heidi Bucher and Shilpa Gupta.

And then there’s just Berlin itself - the architecture, the surface level history, the graffiti and street art, the small wine bars and green parks. This trip would have been a lot more stringent and stressful without the space to really be present and opportunistic in the best, most creative, most professional way so I’m really grateful, again to Create NSW and Creative Australia for the support to undertake this trip.

OTHER POSTS

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Craft Council UK – Make:Shift conference, Manchester, 10-11 Nov, 2016

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Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Craft Council UK’s biennial Make:Shift conference in Manchester, as part of my work with the Australian Design Centre.

The focus, as Creative Director Annie Warburton noted, was to “showcase an extraordinary array of disruptive innovation taking place throughout craft but also interrogating, to what end?”

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The keynote addresses, panel discussions, presentations and conversations were focused around the impact of craft innovation in three spheres: social innovation, environmental sustainability and wellbeing. They joined makers and designers with scientists, technologists and academics because, as Warbuton noted in her opening address, “community, connection and collaboration is what brings breakthrough” and it is vital to locate craft practice within 21st century innovations. “Traditional skills are just a different kind of technology and as important as high-end technology. Makers have always worked with new materials, transforming production processes along the way.”

Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at University College London, gave the opening keynote address. It was a lively and fascinating discussion of materials in relation to the culture of making. He noted the creative tension and slight distrust between art and science, which he argued can be useful in helping to identify different views, outcomes and processes and cited his hilarious experience on the BBC4 show Chef v. Science as an example of this conflict. In the words of chef Marcus Wearing, “At the end of the day [making anything] is about love, care and understanding.” It’s not about scientifically recreating mashed potato just because you can.

Miodownik also unpacked some of our easy assumptions about new technology being better technology – citing the fact that despite its increasing prevalence, carbon is not a recyclable material and that solar cells, while allowing us to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, have nevertheless been designed with little care – they are objects stuck on roofs and not integrated into our lives. Miodownik argued that animate materials are in fact the future and cited the example of self-healing concrete roads, which was a provocative and exciting thought. Miodownik concluded by saying that, “the act of making is about growing our humanity” and that social consciousness through making will enable us to solve some of the problems facing us today.

In the afternoon, there was an engaging discussion on the use of digital technologies in craft education with Drummond Masterton, Head of Sustainable Product Design at Falmouth University and jeweller Sarah O’Hana.

O’Hana works with titanium and steel and was invited to undertake a PhD at Manchester University as part of the engineering department, exploring the use of lasers and titanium.

The experience led to a new body of work that sought to explain new research to new audiences through wearable objects. O’Hana talked about the creative disruption her presence brought to the engineering department and cited a failed experiment that left the engineer despondent and O’Hana excited, because its effect on the titanium offered new aesthetic and creative possibilities.

Masterton talked about the importance of language, particularly in a learning environment, and its ability empower or inhibit. For instance, an engineer does things precisely, using materials in the ways they are intended, but if you call them a craftsperson they suddenly have permission to take more risks, experiment with technology and uncover news ways of using machines and applying knowledge. He noted than even when teaching students today about 3D printing and other available technologies, there remains a persistent desire to still learn and understand ‘traditional’ ways of making. He argued that when it comes to technology (as both a tool and an industry) there needs to be a model with the use of technology that enables risk-taking and that this isn’t currently the case. His point – “technology won’t solve problems, people will.”

In discussing the crisis in craft education in the UK (and arguably everywhere) O’Hana reitered Masterton’s point, and argued that while it was important to have specialisms, the craft education sector must invite other cultures, such as architecture and IT communication, into our own culture to help understand and communicate need and value. Craft, she said, is bad at articulating its value to other sectors.

Highlights of the second day include the conversation between Daniel Charny, founder of creative cultural consultancy From Now Own and curator of the 2011 V&A exhibition The Power of Making and Hannah Fox, Silk Mill Project Director at Derby Museums.

The conversation was centred around the research Charny had undertaken for his report on the cultural role of maker spaces, which set out to articulate the differences between engagement with or engagement through making and what these means in terms of local communities but also crafts-based skills development. Makerspaces were discussed in the context of other making spaces – residencies, project labs and museums, and while the conversation made no fast conclusions about the future of maker spaces, there was a general agreement that the popularity of makerspaces was a reflection on a perceived lack of other spaces in which to informally make and learn and that, in the context of the work undertaken at the Silk Mill in Derby, it is vital that museums expand their perspective around what they can be and what they do.

OTHER POSTS

I acknowledge the Gadigal and Bidjigal peoples of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the unceded land on which I live and work and I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.