CANBERRA.- The National Gallery of Australia presents the exhibit The crafted object 60s–80s. The crafted object 60s–80s brings together a wide range of Australian craft works from the national collection, many of which were acquired early in the Gallery’s history and have not been displayed for over a decade. This exhibition focuses on the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, whena revival of studio craft practices opened up new possibilities for expression in the visual arts in Australia.

The international revival of studio craft grew from a number of influences and traditions which had survived into the postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s. These centred on the celebration of the handmade and the unique object in the face of dwindling craft training and the increased availability of higher-quality manufactured goods; the successful integration of designers and crafts practitioners with the industrial process of applied arts manufacture in Scandinavia; a closer connection between the work of sculptors and designers in the expression of organic modernism; and the exposure of craft practice as a lifestyle choice through popular and professional architecture and design journals promoted through craft organisations and societies and museum and commercial art gallery exhibitions. A major influence in ceramics was the philosophy and practice of the British potter Bernard Leach who, with Japanese potter Shoji Hamada, promoted the appreciation of an Anglo–Japanese vernacular approach to form and technique.

A younger generation of Australian artists, craft practitioners and designers began to engage with these streams from the late 1950s, establishing craft organisations that would shape agendas for the integration of craft training, scholarship, marketing and innovation with the mainstream of the visual arts and design industries. It was an area of practice increasingly promoted and nurtured by the national craft organisation, the Crafts Council of Australia (later, Craft Australia) and its affiliated crafts councils in each Australian state, and supported with the funding and advocacy of the Australia Council through its Crafts Board, which was established in 1973.

This Board represented the Australian government’s first formal recognition of the crafts and operated a number of programs to support the professional development of this nascent industry. It developed its own contemporary craft collection and mounted exhibitions of this work. It also assisted artists through the purchase of their work and encouraged and supported state and regional art galleries to acquire and exhibit Australian craft. The Board’s programs were a positive response to the large number of exhibitions of contemporary craft coming into Australia from overseas in the early 1970s, allowing Australian audiences to make connections with new Australian work.

As a result of the Crafts Board’s activities during the 1970s this substantial collection of contemporary Australian craft in all media was acquired for inclusion in nine travelling exhibitions of ceramics, jewellery and textiles (mounted in the period 1975–83 within Australia and overseas) that were a central part of its program to expose and promote Australian craft overseas.The works in these exhibitions were selected by a number of institutional and independent curators and experienced craft practitioners, resulting in collections of objects that demonstrated a rich and representative cross-section of contemporary Australian practice.

In 1980 the Crafts Board of the Australia Council Collection, by that time comprising 898 works, was given to the National Gallery of Australia, substantially boosting its nascent decorative arts collection and providing a strong foundation for the subsequent acquisition of contemporary Australian craft. The Crafts Board Collection remains a rich expression of the most significant period in the development of Australian craft practice and contains important early work by most of Australia’s now senior craft practitioners. As a collection, it is striking evidence of how a group of interconnected art forms flourished through government support and patronage, giving visibility and authority to practices that had previously been excluded from the lexicon of the fine arts.

The ceramics, glass, metalwork, jewellery, woodwork, textiles and leatherwork included in this exhibition have been drawn extensively from both the Crafts Board Collection and the National Gallery of Australia’s own early acquisitions from the mid-1970s to the mid 1980s. They are displayed in thematic groupings to reflect some of the influences that impacted on the field during a period of two decades characterised by enormous social change, design experimentation and the search for alternative means of visual expression in the production of functional and sculptural objects.

While this search for a direct expression of material and form that characterised the craft revival of the early 1960s had antecedents in the British and American Arts and Crafts Movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its late twentieth century manifestations owed less to a rejection of industry than to the exposure of a younger generation of designers and makers to myriad influences on the nature of object-making.

With increased opportunities from the mid-1960s for Australians to travel abroad, allowing a maturing, and design-educated post-World War Two generation of makers first-hand access to the richness and diversity of the material cultures of Asia, Europe and the ‘third world’, a broadened dimension of expression through craft media and techniques entered the repertoire of Australian craft practice. Traditional modes of training, skill development and apprenticeship were encountered and adopted by a number of Australians willing to subject themselves to such rigours.

These experiences gave many makers a foundation for their own studio practice and were revealed through hybrid work (particularly in the area of ceramics) that explored and combined the qualities of both foreign and Australian materials, techniques and design motifs. The enduring ceramic traditions of Japan dominated studio ceramics, allowing Australians to engage with its material culture though locally-produced objects interpreting the complexities and subtleties of traditional Japanese firing and glazing techniques.

The intrinsic uniqueness and material qualities of the hand-crafted object existed as a counterpoint to the wider world of art and design from the mid-1960s, from pop and op art and minimalism to the new design forms and use of plastics and other synthetics in furniture, industrial design and fashion. The postmodernist fervour of architecture and object design from the late 1970s also encouraged a new appreciation of other design and craft traditions, such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century porcelain, Venetian and Bohemian glass, Victorian jewellery, art nouveau and art deco design, and those more broadly determined examples of kitsch and popular culture. Such traditional modes of expression found new proponents among Australian craft practitioners who would expand the stylistic and technical vocabulary of the crafts through work that offered witty, intellectually engaging and technically accomplished interpretations of these styles.

These influences ran parallel to that of Scandinavian design, which reached its peak of marketing exposure in Australia during this time. Offering models of rational production and astute marketing through eloquent expressions of natural and indigenous materials, the Scandinavian approach to design (which combined craft and functionalist traditions with modernist ideals) provided models for the curricula of Australia’s newly-developing tertiary craft and design courses.