Ro Cook

Life is Grate

Enraptured by grates, grills, vents and the often overlooked or dismissed as entrapments of industrial necessity, these are the starting points for this suite of works. When Ro travelled to India her appetite for these details was activated by the abundance of grate beauties. Her Instagram posts – India is Grate - were a sensation.

Ro Cook had planted the seeds of a new suite of works that play with her established visual lexicon. Soon pavements and walls from Sydney, Thailand, and her imagination called for her attention.

Life is grate is printed on handwoven hemp cloth sourced from women in communities in Nth Thailand and tea towels of Indian cotton. Colour is all important just as in life! As well as a hand honed texture – nothing is perfect but perfectly weathered.

“Life is Grate – keep an eye out”

Romana Toson

Using found objects and exploring natural dye techniques on paper and fabric, is a way of describing and connecting a piece in time and place. Working with paper allows Romana to introduce a lightness and translucence to her work. It opens new ways to explore the way light moves through sheer elements. It makes new relationships with shape and scale. Paper, in its lightness may seem fragile but is in fact resilient and strong.

This Dissolution and Nimbus Brooches represent a threshold in space and time that is made when something important ends and life’s new form has not yet been created.  Dissolution is the process of dissolving. These brooches have at their centre a space, an aperture. This emptiness symbolises the creative potential of having everything taken away, of being in dissolution. It is simultaneously a place of nothing and everything.  Paper has revealed itself to be at once, sheer, ethereal and yet strong, flexible, resilient. What seems solid is ephemeral. Paper represents the ephemeral nature of our being.

Lorri Evans

Ruffled Feathers

Returning to the use of remnants from her baby shoe manufacturing, Lorri has once again used small discs of leather, twisted into the small dashes of a paint brush. After searching for a soft edged frame for her art works, a visit to her sister’s property in the Mallee turned up a wonderful solution.

The discarded pieces of rusty wire, and the sight of the colourful Rose Breasted Cockatoos on mass, have inspired this collection.

Gill Brooks

Flights of Fancy

Gill's 'Handmade Life' consists primarily of one of a kind and small production runs for galleries and artisan markets, so this exhibition is a lovely opportunity to step outside the box and dabble in all things 'uncommercially viable'.

In this body of work Gill is combining her love of textiles in all its forms with the extraordinary ability of wool fibres to integrate through other textiles and fibres and fuse together into a brilliant hybrid of colour, pattern and texture.

Returning time and time again to the meditative quality of knitting, Gill, incorporates this soulful craft into her felting practise, creating unique patterned and textured surfaces and a lifetime of possibilities yet to come.

Kim Davies

The Shape of Things

This work has come as a response to a year spent studying plant morphology, pondering on the extensive scientific language of botany, with meanings and references frozen in old languages from another hemisphere. I have also been aware of what I haven’t been learning, the words sometimes vanished and meanings widely unknown, of the plant names of this continent, belonging to ancient Culture.

The pieces do not refer to specific species, but are purposely ambiguous and typical at the same time, their veins pulsing in multi-coloured potential for meaning and reference.

Meryl Blundell

Murray Darling

The smell in the air before the first drop of rain, beautifully formed droplets on leaves, the feeling of water running over your body, the quenching of thirst.

Questioning what is precious with the current drought and the state of the Murray Darling Basin, where Meryl grew up, was the catalyst behind these pieces of jewellery.

Meryl has focused on the form of a single drop, how it would feel if it was solid and also the fluidity of water running through your fingers.

Designing with chain mail has been an experience Meryl has really enjoyed. Traditionally chain mail was used for protective armour which made it feel like the right medium to reinforce the idea of protecting our waterways. The ‘slink’ of the chain mail was also perfect for capturing the fluidity of flowing water. The thread was stitched through the links to represent repair – the repair our great river system would benefit from, readying them for future generations. This has been inspired by the Japanese boro stitch which is used to mend garments so they can be handed down to the next generation.

Is there a possibility that wearing ‘water’ as jewellery might bring even more of an awareness to our daily use and appreciation of this precious life force? Not unlike a piece of string around your finger?