Exhibition Insight... Straight from the Heart
Central Craft is a not-for-profit organisation based in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) that supports and promotes traditional and contemporary craft and design practice in Central Australia. During 2021-2022, four previous and continuing JamFactory Associates from its glass, ceramics, and jewellery and metal studios journeyed to the heart of Australia to each undertake a four-week residency at Central Craft.
Straight from the Heart is showing at JamFactory Adelaide from 9 December 2022 - 5 February 2023
Words by Rebecca Freezer
Straight from the Heart showcases the outcomes of these residencies. Each practitioner was informed by the formidable landscape and local stories in their creation of bold new bodies of works. A slower pace of life afforded time for experimentation with new materials, forms and techniques. The Central Craft residencies have inspired a new way of working in their chosen craft and for some, has dramatically shaped the course of their careers.
International residencies are coveted opportunities offered throughout the year to JamFactory’s continuing Studio Associates. They are supported, in-part, by a group of educated patrons of JamFactory known as the Medici Collective. Prior to 2020, JamFactory Associates would travel as far as Corning Museum of Glass and Pilchuck Glass School in the United States; Studio Oni in Japan and Domaine de Boisbuchet in France–the galvanising consequences of the latter are displayed alongside Straight from the Heart in Gallery One. However, with the onset of the pandemic years and overseas travel at a stand-still–so necessitated a focus inland. The promotion of domestic tourism not only renewed our appreciation for our country’s awe-inspiring natural wonders but also increased our engagement with communities closer to home.
Over the last two years, JamFactory has pivoted its residency opportunities towards the beating heart of Australia’s red centre – Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Situated within Mparntwe’s Araluen Cultural Precinct, Central Craft was established in 1974 (just a year after the JamFactory studios opened in 1973). For the JamFactory cohort visiting Central Craft in 2021–2022, it was in many ways like a home away from home. Like JamFactory, Central Craft contains a gallery, retail shop and specialised studio facilities. Its well-equipped studio spaces support emerging practitioners and established artisans working in disciplines familiar to the JamFactory community: ceramics, jewellery making and woodwork. The facilities also extend to a printing press, screen-printing facilities, leather crafting tools, weaving looms, a dye lab, sewing machines and a lapidary/gem club.
While offering art materials and technical support for its members, Central Craft strengthens the local community by providing space for a chat. It facilitates community participation and inclusion through craft while building cross-cultural partnerships (Aboriginal Australians make up almost 19% of the town’s population). JamFactory residents became deeply connected with the centre’s members through shared experience.
The first of the four practitioners to visit Central Craft was Xanthe Murphy, a ceramic artist and object designer who was a JamFactory Ceramics Studio Associate from 2019–2020. Xanthe continues to tenant a studio at JamFactory where she is also a regular instructor of its ceramics studio short courses. Prior to travelling to Mparntwe, she and fellow residency recipient Sarra Tzijan had travelled to Ernabella Arts to work closely with Pukatja community potters. Xanthe acknowledges the profound impact her time at Central Craft had not only on her ceramic practice–particularly the landscapes surrounding Mparntwe–but also in her growing career as a tutor and studio manager working closely with First Nations artists.
The silhouette of the ranges and the many rich colours of the land are directly referenced in this new body of work. The connections that I made on my month-long residency have led to another two trips to Alice, where I helped to facilitate workshops with Tangentyere Artists. This in turn has allowed me to take on a new and rewarding role working as Studio Manager at Iwiri Arts in Port Adelaide.
Similarly, Jewellery and Metal Studio Alumna Sarra Tzijan (2018-2019) has maintained a strong engagement with Aboriginal art centres since first travelling to Pukatja with Xanthe Murphy in 2019. In-between continuing her practice from her studio at JamFactory in Tartanya (Adelaide), Sarra has worked temporarily as a Studio Manager at Bula’Bula Arts in Ramingining (2021) and Ernabella Arts in Pukatja (since 2020) where she will relocate to take on the position permanently in early-2023. Yet, it was during her time at Central Craft that Sarra steadily shifted her focus towards beading, which she describes as “a universal language that precedes colonisation. It’s an adornment that is a true expression of place, culture and identity, and an indicator of economic and social history.”
Each neckpiece consists of beads that are made of readily available materials from Sarra’s immediate surroundings. “Collecting was a kind of check-in with the environment, connecting your physical body to the place you’re located,” she says. In Mparntwe, Sarra used clays sourced from the Central Craft studio, and embedded them with either coloured slip or her own brass and stainless steel shavings before firing the ceramic beads in the studio’s kiln, sometimes including local saltbush to adjust the alchemy during firing. The beads are strung together with electrical conduit sourced from a nearby rubbish dump. This discovery sparked a new way of working for Sarra–who painstakingly, cuts small, precise fragments of the conduit’s plastic coating to create each tiny bead, before threading it along its interior metal fibres.
Sarra likened her experience of sourcing and preparing the conduit to that of the Bula’Bula Arts based artists preparing pandanus, “as both processes contain many labour intensive steps performed in a ritualistic way, with much care and attention.”
Katherine Grocott is a contemporary jeweller and educator who was an Associate in the Jewellery and Metal Studio between 2019-2020. Katherine’s jewellery acts as a memory keeper, story teller and commentator on the world. She describes her time in Mpartntwe as “seeing a different way of living in Australia and the benefits and hardships of that.” Katherine’s series of pendants, earrings and rings refer to the cultural complexities of Mparntwe through the symbolism of the fence. Upon arriving in Alice Springs Katherine was struck by the ubiquity of fortress-like fencing in the town. Their origins can be attributed to the establishment of the US satellite surveillance base Pine Gap in 1970, but conversations with the locals suggest that you can read the cultural tensions of the town through people’s front fences–the edge of interaction. A building with fortress like terracing removes itself from the street and as such reduces its capacity to engage with its surroundings.
During her 4-week stay, Katherine became obsessed with the fences and edges of Alice Springs. Images of fence details appear throughout Katherine’s photo reel documenting her time away. The fence designs reappear throughout her series of layered titanium jewellery and in doing so Katherine seeks to find “the spaces in between”–the beauty within the ugliness. Through the processes of sandblasting, the material is transformed from matte to polished. Mission brown turns into rose gold.
For Alexandra Hirst, the most recent Central Craft residency recipient, the studio confines shifted her out of her regular routine of glass blowing. After completing the Associate training program in the Glass Studio in 2022, Alexandra will continue her practice from a JamFactory studio in 2023. Her Central Craft experience is described in her own words:
I got to absorb my surroundings hiking the stark landscape that almost didn’t feel real. Stretches of land that were so flat when approaching a rock formation it seemed far out of place. The vast sky was broken up with wisps of clouds that broke up the intensity of the blue.
The contrast of the intense blue of the Mparntwe sky and the vivid orange rock formations of Tjoritja (West MacDonnell National Park) is deftly captured in this new series titled Finding lines. Each blown and hand-etched glass form is a study of stratus and strata. Alexandra’s description of this new body of work speaks for all of the exhibitors in Straight from the Heart. “(This series of works) weaves together a picture of my memory and journey in and around Mparntwe, to which I instantly felt a connection.”
