Wayfaring
Wayfaring 26 March - 9 May 2020 Bella Dower | Sara Lindsay | Sarah Stubbs | Zoë Veness Wayfaring means to travel by foot and is an ideal metaphor to describe the pace of a long-term project by four artists comprising three exhibitions in three years (2019-2021). Zoë Veness, Sarah Stubbs, Bella Dower and Sara Lindsay met as lecturers and students in 2016 at the School of Creative Arts and Media, UTAS in Hobart and in 2019 decided to create new work for an exhibition in Hobart in 2021. Since Zoë now lives in Sydney, a developmental approach was devised with the aim to produce a cohesive body of work over an extended period of time with key exhibitions as important signposts throughout the process to meet and reflect on the synergies and potentialities in each individual practice and collectively as a group. The first installment took place in Melbourne at Radiant Pavilion in September 2019. The second iteration, Wayfaring at Craft ACT in Canberra, builds on the Melbourne show with new work developed by each artist to test different materials and processes, modes of seriality, combinations of objects and display configurations with the view to explore and refine curatorial methods for the final exhibition in 2021.
Wayfaring
26 March - 9 May 2020
Bella Dower | Sara Lindsay | Sarah Stubbs | Zoë Veness
Wayfaring means to travel by foot and is an ideal metaphor to describe the pace of a long-term project by four artists comprising three exhibitions in three years (2019-2021). Zoë Veness, Sarah Stubbs, Bella Dower and Sara Lindsay met as lecturers and students in 2016 at the School of Creative Arts and Media, UTAS in Hobart and in 2019 decided to create new work for an exhibition in Hobart in 2021. Since Zoë now lives in Sydney, a developmental approach was devised with the aim to produce a cohesive body of work over an extended period of time with key exhibitions as important signposts throughout the process to meet and reflect on the synergies and potentialities in each individual practice and collectively as a group. The first installment took place in Melbourne at Radiant Pavilion in September 2019. The second iteration, Wayfaring at Craft ACT in Canberra, builds on the Melbourne show with new work developed by each artist to test different materials and processes, modes of seriality, combinations of objects and display configurations with the view to explore and refine curatorial methods for the final exhibition in 2021.
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WAYFARING
BELLA DOWER | SARA LINDSAY | SARAH STUBBS | ZOË VENESS
Craft ACT Craft + Design Centre
26 March - 9 May 2020
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre is supported by the
ACT Government, the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy –
an initiative of the Australian State and Territory
Governments, and the Australia Council for the Arts – the
Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body.
CRAFT ACT CRAFT + DESIGN CENTRE
Tues–Fri 10am–5pm
Saturdays 12–4pm
Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit,
Canberra ACT Australia
+61 2 6262 9333
www.craftact.org.au
Cover: Zoë Veness, Wayfaring vessel #15, 2020,
copper, patinated. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Page 4-5: Wayfaring, 2020, installation view, Craft ACT:
Craft + Design Centre. Photo: 5 Foot Photography
WAYFARING
BELLA DOWER | SARA LINDSAY
SARAH STUBBS | ZOË VENESS
Craft ACT Craft + Design Centre
26 March - 9 May 2020
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Wayfaring
Exhibition statement
Wayfaring means to travel by foot and is an ideal metaphor to describe the pace
of a long-term project by four artists comprising three exhibitions in three years
(2019-2021). Zoë Veness, Sarah Stubbs, Bella Dower and Sara Lindsay met as
lecturers and students in 2016 at the School of Creative Arts and Media, UTAS
in Hobart and in 2019 decided to create new work for an exhibition in Hobart in
2021. Since Zoë now lives in Sydney, a developmental approach was devised
with the aim to produce a cohesive body of work over an extended period of
time with key exhibitions as important signposts throughout the process to
meet and reflect on the synergies and potentialities in each individual practice
and collectively as a group.
The first installment took place in Melbourne at Radiant Pavilion in September
2019. The second iteration, Wayfaring at Craft ACT in Canberra, builds on
the Melbourne show with new work developed by each artist to test different
materials and processes, modes of seriality, combinations of objects and
display configurations with the view to explore and refine curatorial methods for
the final exhibition in 2021.
Opposite: Bella Dower, Peripheral series #8,
2020, silk, sterling silver wire, cotton thread.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
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Exhibition essay
catalogue essay: Jan Hogan
In the exhibitions Terra Celestial and Wayfaring, matter and memory are caught
in a looping exchange of meaning. The objects and images reveal a tender and
playful transformation of materials by artists exploring the world of the senses
and imagination. The works gathered together hold traces of the travels and
explorations of artists taking time to reflect on what it means for a body to
be in place and in time. The Terra Celestial artists paused for a time whilst
undertaking artist-residencies at the Gudgenby Ready-Cut cottage in Namadgi
National Park in 2019. The 50th anniversary of the moon landing framed their
contemplations and haunted their making. They used their precious seclusion
to dream of the stars and to question and reconfigure the science and materials
that achieved this extraordinary event. The Wayfaring artists are connected
by their time in Tasmania where they began to explore their entanglement with
matter and how it absorbs and releases meaning.
Wayfinding, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, involves ‘a skilled
performance in which the traveller whose powers of perception and action
have been fine-tuned through previous experience’ finds their way along paths
and tracks in the world. It involves a constant adjusting of decisions and
movements in response to material conditions and surrounding atmospheres.
In these exhibitions, this process is intrinsic to the creative approaches where
the artists have played and tested materials making sense of both matter and
place.
Making is a slowing down of time and the senses. Matter of all kinds can
capture the imagination, allowing the body to remember other times, other
places. Whilst in varying techniques and approaches, the works all stem out
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of the sensual body; the touching and gathering, walking and balancing body,
situated in place and time. Metals are pressed onto paper, objects into moulds,
slides into cylinders, traces made, memories ignited. In the creation of work,
the body remembers, it uses the knowledge and experience gained in touching
the world allowing an empathetic identification to imbue the materials with
meaning. Objects bring intimacy, remind us that we are not disconnected
minds but are corporeal, thick with sensorial information, living in a palpable,
tangible world.
These works tell stories, they niggle at our mind, one thought takes hold only
to be challenged by a conflicting one, ambiguity and multiple possibilities
reign. Did the artists turned “gudgenauts” really take flight, did they achieve
weightlessness for a moment? Reflecting in Gudgenby cottage or walking
the tracks of Tasmania, the limits of the self are sought in order to peer past
the everyday boundaries, to make dreams manifest from the detritus that
surrounds us. Found objects, from shells to measuring tapes are made into
category-bending forms that bely their apparent insignificance. Containers,
books, jewellery, and photographs are poised with possibilities and references,
becoming animate through interaction with the human body. The resulting
works question whether makers think through the body or does the world think
through them?
Re-locating and re-working matter in places enable a reimagining of their
histories and meanings. Memory is part of this world, to be found and triggered
in the material transformations by artists into objects that resonate with our
senses, remind us of the specifics of our body on earth but also our dreams of
the stars. The tools of science; telescopes and sonars, microscopes and rulers,
are all part of humanity’s attempt to hear the language of the world. Objects
made by artists remind us of the body as the conscious subject of experience.
With nods to the imagination of the sciences, makers bring transcendence to
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us on our daily experience, achieved through responding to the imaginative
transformation, re-arrangement, and re-presentation of matter.
The investigations by these artists makes us pause and wonder again at the
earth we live on, our relationship to the stars and moon, to the objects we touch
and in return touch us. This time to pause and think, reveals to us again the
beauty of our world and the universe that we are spinning through. As we gaze
at the moon, we ‘bathe’ in its glow, yearn for its return, our emotions ebb and
flow with the tides. There is a constant emotional pull that we often forget in
our urban dwellings, but which opportunities of wayfaring and celestial gazing
remind us of; the world thinking itself through us.
Jan Hogan
Head of Discipline - Art,
University of Tasmania
i Ingold, T 2000, The Perception of the Environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill,
Routledge, p. 220
Opposite: Zoë Veness, Wayfaring vessels #10-12,
2020. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
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Bella Dower
Biography
Bella Dower is an emerging multidisciplinary
artist and designer
based in Hobart, Tasmania. By
drawing on a variety of materials
and processes her work aims to
visualise elusive subjects, focusing
on memory and temporality. She
received a Bachelor of Fine Arts
with First Class Honours in 2018
from the University of Tasmania,
School of Creative Arts and Media,
and awards including the Cultural
Environments and Heritage Honours
Scholarship in 2018, the UTAS
Dean’s Honour Role in 2017. Dower
was recently awarded the FIND
Contemporary Jewellery x Arts TAS
collective bursary grant, exhibiting
in the FIND Contemporary Jewellery
space whilst starting an Artist in
Residence position at the University
of Tasmania, School of Creative Arts
and Media in 2019.
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Artist statement
Peripheral, 2020
Peripheral lingers on the indexical
and the amalgamation of memory.
The indexical speaks of the physical
and meta-physical traces of life;
it is not an extension of reality
but instead imbued with traces of
reality. Using excerpts of analogue
photography from my personal and
found archive, the images oscillate
with varying degrees of ambiguous
and recognisable detail. Transferred
to sheer fabric and thin ceramic
decals, there is a diaristic quality to
Peripheral.
I describe my work as synecdochal,
pieces of a larger whole. In this
sense, the every-day passing of
time is seen in fragments. The
materials hold an artefact quality:
photography, porcelain, and fabric
speak fluidly of the passing and
perpetuity of time. Using processes
which are imbued with the past,
such as analogue photography
which chemically records the
temperature and light at the time
of capture, it becomes a statement
on the amalgamation of memory.
Peripheral meditates on both the
‘memory image’, and the history
of jewellery as a commemorative
device. It is a contemplation on the
process of remembrance and the
materials which prompt us.
Opposite: Bella Dower, Peripheral series #10,
2020, silk, sterling silver wire, cotton thread.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Page 14-15: Bella Dower, Peripheral series #12
and #13, 2020, silk, sterling silver wire, cotton
thread. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
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Sara Lindsay
Biography
Artist statement
Sara Lindsay is an emerging
Hobart-based artist, designer and
object maker. Her work has been
selected for exhibitions including
the Clarence Prize for Excellence
in Furniture Design in 2017 and the
Hobart City Council Design Award
in 2016. She received the Jim
Bacon Memorial Scholarship and
the Jonathan Holmes Scholarship,
both from UTAS, in 2015. Sara is
currently a Master of Fine Arts
candidate at UTAS, School of
Creative Arts and Media where she
graduated with a Bachelor of Fine
Arts (Honours) in 2015.
Right and page 18-19: Sara Lindsay, Progenitor
series, 2020, paper, DLA, stainless steel.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Sara Lindsay
Progenitor series.
Paper, PLA, Stainless Steel
Dimensions variable.
2020
In 1892 Walt Whitman wrote “Every
atom belonging to me as good as
belongs to you”.
In this world where the
technological is embedded in the
everyday, the path of our lives is as
much forged by the movement of
our physical bodies through space
as it is through our imagination
travelling the ether. This work tracks
back a step in the evolution of 3D
printing technology to its precursor,
when people first imagined the
accumulation of the print on paper,
and speculates on the intersections
of technology, the human made
object and the body.
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Sarah Stubbs
Biography
Artist statement
Sarah Stubbs is a contemporary
jeweller interested in intersections
between design and visual arts. She
has worked within the visual arts
for the past twenty years both as a
collaborative and solo artist. Sarah
has had her work represented in
numerous exhibitions locally and
overseas including the Tasmanian
Museum and Art Gallery, the
Queen Victoria Museum and Art
Gallery, West Space, Para/Site
Art Space Hong Kong, Annandale
Galleries, Centre for Contemporary
Photography, the Ian Potter Gallery,
RMIT, and Monash University’s
Switchback and Faculty Gallery.
Sarah is currently Lecturer at the
School of Creative Arts and Media,
UTAS in Hobart.
Opposite: Sarah Stubbs, Nest and Wayfaring still
life 7 (detail), 2020, ice porcelain.
Page 22-23: Sarah Stubbs, Wayfaring still life 6, 1
and 4, 2020. Photos: 5 Foot Photography
TRACES
Collecting through Wayfaring
Revisiting traces of earlier ideas and
actions
Casting and the unexpected
Clay and memory
Collecting Traces
Wayfaring presents a framework
and mode operands to produce
work which is exploratory and
material-led. Central to this is the
exploration of narrative jewellery
and the relationship between
objects and memory. I propose
strategies to examine and draw into
relief the material and poetic traces
of place, re-imagining past lives and
practices.
My methodology is cross
disciplinary, bringing together
placed based visual memory
practice, phenomenology, and
object design.
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Zoë Veness
Biography
Zoë Veness is a contemporary
jeweller and object maker. Her work
has been exhibited in Australia, New
Zealand, Japan, Korea, Singapore,
London, Scotland, and Germany,
and is held in public collections at
the National Gallery of Australia and
the Art Gallery of South Australia.
She was a recipient of an Australian
Postgraduate Award for PhD
research at UNSW Art & Design
in Sydney in 2011 and Australia
Council Visual Arts Grants in 2002,
2006 and 2017. Currently a lecturer
at UNSW Art & Design, Zoë was
previously Studio oordinator of 3D
Design at the School of Creative
Arts and Media, UTAS in Hobart.
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Artist statement
Wayfaring is an evolving series of
lidded containers for an exhibition
project with the same title, that are
hand-fabricated from brass, copper
and sterling silver. Each can be
held within the palm of one’s hand
and are intended to store small
precious things. Nine were first
created for Wayfaring in Melbourne
at Radiant Pavilion in 2019 and
over the summer of 2019/2020
while a bushfire was burning not
far from my home on the South
Coast of NSW, I made another nine
containers for Wayfaring at Craft
ACT in 2020. Ironically, while fire
ravaged the landscape around me it
was harnessed in my studio to form
these works. Simple parameters
were set for the project of cylindrical
hollow forms with lids to focus on
variations of surface detail. Each
container or vessel as I also like to
refer to them, is likened to a footstep
that slowly shifts my practice
towards a greater understanding of
how to connect with a sense of time
and place via objects. Assembled
as a series of cylindrical forms they
evoke a landscape of earthly tones
and blackened surfaces. Imbued in
the work is also a passion for craft
skill, for the simple and ongoing
challenge of making things well, of
executing the perfect solder join, of
finding the ideal balance between
form, surface texture and utility,
and of seeking simplicity through
the alchemical complexity of
metalsmithing.
Opposite: Zoë Veness, Wayfaring vessel #10,
2020, brass. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Page 24-25: Zoë Veness, Wayfaring vessel
complete set, 2020, brass. Photo courtesy of
the artist.
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Wayfaring, installation view, 2020, Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre. Photo: 5 Foot Photography
List of works
Bella Dower
1 Peripheral #1, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$425
6 Peripheral #6, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$220
2 Peripheral #2, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$350
7 Peripheral #7, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$175
3 Peripheral #3, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$180
8 Peripheral #8, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$380
4 Peripheral #4, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$290
9 Peripheral #9, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$380
5 Peripheral #5, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$290
10 Peripheral #10, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$380
11 Peripheral #11, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$350
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List of works
12 Peripheral #12, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$350
17 Progenitor series #2,
2020, dimensions variable,
paper, PLA, stainless steel
$250 each
13 Peripheral #13, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$380
18 Progenitor series #3,
2020, dimensions variable,
paper, PLA, stainless steel
$250 each
14 Peripheral #14, 2020,
silk, silver, cotton thread
$290
19 Progenitor series #4,
2020, dimensions variable,
paper, PLA, stainless steel
$250 each
15 Peripheral #15, 2020,
southern ice porcelain decal,
silver
$250
20 Progenitor series #5,
2020, dimensions variable,
paper, PLA, stainless steel
$250 each
Sara Lindsay
16 Progenitor series #1,
2020, dimensions variable,
paper, PLA, stainless steel
$250 each
21 Progenitor series #5,
2020, dimensions variable,
paper, PLA, stainless steel
$250 each
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List of works
Sarah Stubbs
27 Still life 6 (Bath street),
2020, ice porcelain
$400
22 Still life 1 (Metal room),
2020, ice porcelain
$450
28 Still life 7 (Hunter street),
2020, ice porcelain
$400
23 Still life 2 (Plaster Room),
2020, ice porcelain
$800
Zoë Veness
24 Nest, 2020
ice porcelain
$600
29 Wayfaring Vessel #10,
2020, brass
$420
25 Still life 4 (Sarah’s walk),
2020, ice porcelain
$400
30 Wayfaring Vessel #11,
2020, brass
$380
26 Still life 5 (Hunter Street at
night), 2020, ice porcelain
$400
31 Wayfaring Vessel #12,
2020, brass
$320
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List of works
32 Wayfaring Vessel #13,
2020, brass, copper, gilding
metal
$660
37 Wayfaring Vessel #18,
2020, copper
$580
33 Wayfaring Vessel #14,
2020, brass, copper
$660
38 Wayfaring Vessels
complete set #10-18, 2020
$4,860
34 Wayfaring Vessel #15,
2020, copper
$660
35 Wayfaring Vessel #16,
2020, brass
$560
36 Wayfaring Vessel #17,
2020, brass
$620
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