The 13th Biennial Conference of the JMGA (Jewellers and Metalsmiths Group of Australia), entitled Inside-Out, was held in Adelaide from 25-27 January 2008.

Inside-Out built on the momentum of previous JMGA conferences and explored jewellery and object making inside the Australia, Asia and Pacific regions and outside the conventions of mainstream practice.

The conference brought together practitioners, educators, collectors, critics and cultural theorists for three days of discussion, debate, interaction and the exchange of ideas.

Speakers included: Grace Cochrane, Julie Ewington, Marian Hosking, Professor Seung Hee Kim, Dr Kevin Murray, Dr Christine Nicholls, Robert Reason, Dr. Damian Skinner and more.

The accompanying exhibition program presented over 20 exhibitions across Adelaide and South Australia and showcased the work of local, national and international artists. Exhibition venues included the Art Gallery of South Australia, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design, South Australian Museum, Light Square Gallery – Adelaide Centre for the Arts, Flinders University Art Museum City Gallery, Zu Design, The National Wine Centre and many more. The exhibitions were a great success with attendance estimated at 11,870.

A series of workshops were held before and after the conference at the South Australian School of Art – University of South Australia, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design and TAFE SA Adelaide Centre for the Arts.

With lawn bowls, exhibition openings, a cocktail party, suitcase sale and performance art the conference was a packed and eventful program.

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conference overview

The Conference was held at the University of South Australia’s City West Campus in the Hawke Building at 55 North Terrace, Adelaide. Activities took place in Adelaide’s lively West End Arts precinct at the South Australian School of Art – University of South Australia, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design and TAFE SA Adelaide Centre for the Arts.

Themes for the conference papers and the supporting exhibition and workshop programs were:

* cross cultures exploring regional, ethnic and indigenous approaches to practice
* culture of the body looking at the body as a site and/or subject for representation
performance, fashion and movement
* cultural sites investigating personal, public and institutional perspectives on objects and practice
* techno culture engagements with technologies new and old

The conference brought together practitioners, educators, collectors, critics and cultural theorists for three days of discussion, debate, interaction and the exchange of ideas.

speakers

Dr Kevin Murray (Australia)
The Forest or the Bush? Sources of enchantment in contemporary Australian jewellery

Dr Kevin Murray is the former Director of Craft Victoria, a Melbourne-based organisation that champions contemporary craft. Murray has curated a number of exhibitions that have toured nationally, including Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions, How Say You, Turn the Soil: What if Australia had been colonised by someone else?, Water Medicine: Precious Works for an Arid Continent, Guild Unlimited: Ten jewellers make insignia for potential guilds. His recent publication Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious (Thames & Hudson, 2005) profiles Australian makers working in the field of ‘poor craft’.

Julie Ewington (Australia)
Gift/Gifting/Gifted: the contemporary life of jewellery

Julie Ewington—writer, curator and broadcaster—is currently Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery. She specialises in contemporary Australian art across all media and contemporary art from Southeast Asia.

Julie has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Canberra School of Art Gallery; for many years she taught art history in Australian universities and in 1999-2000 was Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University.

Dr Christine Nicholls (Australia)
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Australian Aboriginal bodily adornment, object making and jewellery, BC-AC

In this powerpoint presentation I will engage with the conference’s themes by focusing on aspects of object making and bodily adornment/modification practices in the Australian Aboriginal context, pre-and post-contact. The presentation will draw on my experiences during the 1980s and early 1990s when I lived for more than a decade at Lajamanu, a remote Warlpiri Aboriginal settlement in the Tanami Desert of Australia’s Northern Territory.

A number of recent initiatives in Indigenous jewellery-making will also be canvassed in this presentation.

The ensuing discussion will centre on issues and debates arising from the preceding subject matter. Included among these are questions about ‘art in the contact zone’; the translatability or otherwise of pre-contact Indigenous artistic practices with respect to the contemporary Australian visual arts scene; and how Indigenous objects and body adornment practices are represented and received in contemporary museological and other contexts. Finally, there will be brief consideration of the possible reasons why contemporary non-Indigenous jewellers tend to steer clear of incorporating explicit reference to Indigenous bodily adornment practices in their work.

Grace Cochrane (Australia)
Making it in metal: local/global collaborations

Grace Cochrane is the author of The Crafts Movement in Australia: a History (NSW University Press, 1992) and her PhD thesis was entitled Truth or Trap: the Crafts Movement’s pursuit of art ideals. She has written and spoken about ceramics, glass, textiles, jewellery, metalwork and furniture as well as issues of education, technology and manufacturing as they affect the crafts and design, and has a long record of judging awards, opening exhibitions and examining students. Following exhibition and collection research in SE Asia in 1994 she co-ordinated museum training workshops for ASEAN museum professionals in Malaysia in 1995. She received the Australia Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Board’s Emeritus medal in 2001.

Most recently she was the co-ordinating curator for the Powerhouse Museum’s new, collection-based permanent exhibition, Inspired! Design across time (2005), and worked freelance for the Museum on an exhibition, book and symposium, Smart works: design and the handmade, which opened in March 2007. In 2006 she was guest editor for Object magazine, published in Sydney.

Maureen Faye-Chauhan (Australia) and
Marian Hosking (Australia)
Shared spaces

This paper is a selective overview, from the perspective of an Australian pokies maker and educator Marian Hosking who has travelled and exhibited in the Asia region and a maker and MFA candidate Maureen Faye-Chauhan with an extended Indian family. Together we have written about the benefits of cross cultural exchange particularly as it relates to individual craft practitioners in the field of jewellery and silversmithing at a time when mass produced commodities are increasingly homogenised. The role of Education, exhibitions and funding bodies will be discussed.

Maureen Faye-Chauhan (presenter)
Maureen Faye-Chauhan is an emerging Australian jewellery maker, currently in the final stages of completing her Master of Fine Arts under the supervision of Marian Hosking. Half Indian by marriage, she has an interest in Asian culture and philosphy which is enhanced by the relationship with her family members and travels to Asian countries. The aspects gained through cross cultural exchange lend Maureen’s research and work a tangible coherence and bring manifold perspectives to the objects she creates in the pursuit of jewellery making.
In the past few years Maureen’s work has been included in exhibition in Australia and overseas including the Buda Contemporaru Australian Silver and Metalwork Award, Hobart City Art Prize, Toowoomba Contemporary Wearables and Sieraad new Traditional Jewellery, Amsterdam.

Marian Hosking
Marian Hosking is an active participant in the national and international contemporary jewellery field. Continually researching, refining and exploring motifs and imagery, she constructs small objects and jewellery in her preferred medium of silver. The importance and cultural relevance of jewellery and the hand crafted object is essential to her role as an educator and practioner. Currently heading the Metals and Jewellery Studio, within the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University, Melbourne, she has been an educator in the field for over thirty years. Recent exhibitions include Object Gallery, Sydney, 2007, Gana Art Centre, Seoul, Korea and Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, 2007.

Professor Seung Hee Kim (Korea)
The Past and Present of Korean Metal Works

Professor Seung Hee Kim is the Head of Metal and Jewelry Design at the Graduate school of Techno Design, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea.

Metal tableware has been commonly used in Korean everyday life. While Chinese was making ceramic spoons, Korean made metal spoons and chopsticks, and also used organo-metallic bowls for serving food, which were copper and tin alloy. One of the reasons why Korean people prefer metal tableware is sanitary one, because it can be conveniently boiled in hot water. Furthermore, the tradition of metal craft, which has been passing through from ancient to modern daily life in Korea, is the biggest reason for the use of metal tableware.

The significance of metal craft culture in Korea can be also traced in birth tales of ancient kings. For example, the King Kim, Sooro of Kaya, who ruled the kingdom of iron, was known to be born from a gold egg and also known as a reputable alchemist. Hence comes his surname “Kim”, meaning gold or thehivegallery.com.au iron in Korea. A large number of Buddhism goods were made in metal after the authorization of Buddhism in 528 AD in Silla dynasty. Other household goods were also largely made of metal, including tableware, personal adornments, cases for acupuncture needles, smoking pipes, and copper mirrors.

After the Second World War, western modernism and education system were firmly established in Korea. Through examples of my own artworks, I am going to present the development of contemporary Korean metal craft which embraces western modernism and traditional craftsmanship.

Cinnamon Lee (Australia)
reSkinning the body – the body as a site for technology

Cinnamon Lee is a Sydney-born jeweller and metalsmith. Now based in Canberra, she lectures in the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop at the ANU School of Art where she is also currently a candidate for a Master of Philosophy Degree. Her Masters research focuses on lighting objects and the impact that new technologies can have on the appearance of objects, with specific reference to solid-state electronic devices. Cinnamon specialises in using 3D computer modelling and rapid prototyping in conjunction with traditional gold and silversmithing techniques to produce work that explores the intersection between technology, the machine and the hand made. Cinnamon has exhibited nationally and internationally over the last ten years and has work in the National Gallery of Australia collection.

Anna Miles (New Zealand)
Not Like the Other : Recent New Zealand Jewellery as Art

This paper looks at the scenario in which applied art or craft associated activity operates in an art context. The focus is on recent work by New Zealand jewellers, that eschews the ‘wholesome’ aesthetic associated with ‘Bone Stone Shell’ jewellery. The use of non-precious, indigenous materials and reference to pacific body adornment traditions that characterised ‘Bone Stone Shell’ tends to be replaced in this work by an interest in the appearance of preciousness and references to multiple conventional western jewellery traditions. What is the significance of this shift and how might it be understood in relation to broader art discussions? Artists referred to include Renee Bevan, Sandra Bushby, Octavia Cook, Yasmin Dubrau, Warwick Freeman and Anna Ward.

Anna Miles established Anna Miles Gallery in 2003 and is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Auckland University of Technology.

Therese Minitong–Kemelfield (Solomon Islands / Australia)
Pacific Body Adornment

Body adornment in my society is more than jewellery worn for personal beautification. Jewellery for us is shared by the family and is worn on special occasions often to celebrate marriage, baptism, coming of age and to remember the passing away of loved ones. Often body adornment is often made by a special group of people in the community who have been taught special skills passed down through many generations. The jewellery is highly valued by individual families and the community and passed down through the female line. In my presentation, I will talk about how jewellery is made and way we use it our society.

Belinda Newick (Australia)
Exchanges

Belinda Newick is a studio based jeweller and designer living in Victoria with ten years professional experience. She exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally and is a sessional teacher of Jewellery and Product design at RMIT campuses at Greensborough and Fairfield.

Belinda has completed two international residencies in Asia. In 2001 she travelled to Kerala, India to explore traditional metal smithing techniques. In 2004 she completed a joint Asialink residency with Furniture designer Nico Kelly in Sri Lanka. Based at the Lunuganga Estate, Belinda researched her Dutch burgher ancestry (in Sri Lanka) and developed new work based on her personal responses to the environment of the residency site, based on studies of the spice trade, tropical flora and ancient texts.

Inspired by the experiences of her travels and studies of other cultures, Belinda explores aspects of language, which translate as details of surface texture on gold and silver jewellery. She combines handcrafting techniques with computer engraving processes. Her ongoing interest in linguistics and epigraphic collections informs the inclusion of text. Exploring cultural hybridity by tracing ancestry to another’s land through the study of ancient and contemporary jewellery practice in Sri Lanka.

Robert Reason (Australia)
The Rhianon Vernon-Roberts Memorial Collection of Contemporary Australian Jewellery

Robert Reason is the Curator of European and Australian Decorative Arts at the Art Gallery of South Australia, a position he has held since February 2002. He is also an Affiliate Lecturer in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide.

His past exhibitions for the Art Gallery of South Australia include the widely popular 20th Century Style: Furniture (2003), the Morgan Thomas Bequest Centenary Exhibition (2003) and The Most Delightful Thing on Earth: The Art of Gladys Reynell (2006). He coordinated the Morris & Co. exhibition of 2002 and oversaw its national tour (2005-06). Reason has also curated a number of in focus displays for the Gallery including Wagner’s Ring: An Artistic Vision (2004), Contemporary Australian Glass (2005), Contemporary Australian Ceramics (2006), and Figurines & Frippery (2007).

Reason has a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Auckland, and a post-graduate Diploma of Art Curatorship and Museum Management from the University of Melbourne. In 2004, he was awarded a prestigious Gordon Darling Foundation International Travel Grant to visit major decorative arts collections in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and the UK.

He is highly regarded among Australian decorative arts experts and has contributed essays and articles for numerous catalogues and art publications over the past decade including Australian Art Pottery 1900-1950 (Casuarina Press, 2004) and 21st Century Modern: 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (AGSA, 2006). Most recently he wrote the first comprehensive monograph on the Australian artist potter Gladys Reynell (AGSA, 2006).

Kate Rhodes (Australia)
Solutions for Better Living

Kate Rhodes is Curator at Craft Victoria and Cultural Program Manager at the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival. She was formerly Assistant Curator of Photography and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria. She is currently completing a Master of Arts by Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Fashion.

Dr Damian Skinner (New Zealand)
Antipodean Traffic: Schmuck in Münich and Aotearoa

Rigel Sorzano (New Zealand)
Telling Stories: Aspects of Narrative and Contemporary New Zealand Objectmaking

Rigel Sorzano is an object maker and writer based in Auckland. Born in the West Indies, she practised law before studying design at Unitec, Auckland, graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Design (3D). Rigel has written about art and design for various publications in New Zealand and Australia, including publications for Growing Up: 20 years of the Unitec Jewellery Studio (Objectspace, 2006) and Smart works: design and the handmade (Powerhouse Museum, 2007). She has recently co-curated ShowRoom, an exhibition of New Zealand contemporary furniture.

Bic Tieu (Australia)
Vietnamese and Japanese Lacquer Arts

Bic Tieu is an emerging Sydney-based designer-maker with a special interest in lacquer, a material comprised of the resin of the ‘lacquer tree’ which is exhaustively layered and sanded to produce a rich, highly lustrous finish. Tieu began her investigation with Vietnamese lacquer and has lately sought to expand her understanding and skill through investigating Japanese lacquering and metalworking methods, which is now her primary focus. Her research has included travel to both countries to learn from highly respected lacquer masters. Her work reinterprets these esoteric and ancient crafts within the language of contemporary jewellery, wearables and small objects.

Renee Ugazio (Australia)
Finding the Body

Renee Ugazio has been involved in the production of comtemporary jewellery objects since 1998. She is current Master of Fine Art candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her work centres around the relationship between object and site, and more recently between the body and the jewellery object. These current works are constructed with materials and equiptment used specifically in the production of jewellery in an atempt to find new diologues between the maker and object.

Wendy Walker (Australia)
The Rosary: From a Rose Garden to the iRosary

Wendy Walker is an author, art critic and occasional curator. A regular contributor to Contemporary, Art & Australia and The Australian newspaper, she writes about a broad range of contemporary Australian art. Throughout 2006 she was the inaugural Samstag writer-in-residence at the University of South Australia and is continuing to research the lives of Anne and Gordon Samstag for an upcoming publication. In 2006 she curated Australian Contemporary for Co[ ]ect at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Alice Whish (Australia)
Taking The Time

Alice Whish is an established and respected jeweller. In addition to being a maker of delicate and intricate works, she is involved in a number of community art projects. Currently, she is working with women from North-eastern Arnhem Land to raise the profile of Aboriginal women’s craft and their shell and seed necklaces, through exhibitions, exchanges and conferences.She has presented solo exhibitions throughout Australia and New Zealand and has been an active participant in group exhibitions, nationally and internationally since 1984. Exhibitions include, Transformations: the language of craft, National Gallery of Australia, and Sighting the Past, Macleay Museum, Sydney University in 2005–2006, City of Hobart Art Prize in 2006 and 50 Brooches in 2007. Alice currently has work showing at Object in Sydney in Exchange with Rose Mamuniny and Mavis Ganambarr till March 2008.

In 2006 Alice established Definite Style with her partner Rod Jacka, Definite Style retailsContemporary Jewellery nationally and internationally www.definitestyle.com. Alice has work in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.Alice holds a Bachelor of Visual Art from Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University, a Master of Art in Gold and Silversmithing from RMIT and a Master of Higher Education from the University of New South Wales.

exhibition program

A program of exhibitions showcased the work of artists from Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia Pacific Region.

Venues included the Art Gallery of South Australia, Flinders University City Gallery, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design, Light Square Gallery, Migration Museum, The National Wine Centre, soda and rhyme | jewellery design studio and Zu Design. The exhibitions were a great success with attendance estimated at 11,870.
Graduate Metal XI – emerging ideas in jewellery & objects is an award exhibition held in conjunction with the National Biennial JMGA Conferences.
This year marked the eleventh show of its kind and surveyed a selection of work by 60 recent Jewellery and Metal smithing graduates from Australia. In spirit of the theme of the conference, 32 international students from Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Thailand were invited to exhibit for the first time.

The exhibition ran from Friday 25 January – Thursday 14 February 2008 in the Light Square Gallery at Adelaide Centre for the Arts.

Three awards were presented as part of the exhibition. The Judges were:
Julie Blyfield – Contemporary Jeweller of International acclaim, and co-founder of the Gray Street Jewellery Workshop.
Robert Reason – Curator of European and Australian Decorative Arts at the Art Gallery of South Australia and affiliate lecturer of Politics at the University of Adelaide.
Julie Ewington – writer, curator and broadcaster – is currently Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery.

Congratulations to our prize winners – Sandra Marker, Tomoka Kaizu and Jimin Kim and to all makers selected to take part in Graduate Metal XI. The wonderful diversity and skill shown in the selected works ensures the strength and originality of future Contemporary Jewellery in the Australia, Asia and Pacific regions.