How VACS funding helps Craftsouth expand ideas about and audiences for craft, design and visual art

Article by Barbara Coddington

When South Australian glass artist Deb Jones first contemplated working with a tradesperson, she turned to Craftsouth for help. Craftsouth extended this idea to create Trades, a 2008 project teaming craftspeople, designers and visual artists with experienced tradespeople. ‘I love working with tradespeople and I consider myself a tradesperson as well’, Deb said.

Many tradespeople, however, saw no such connection. As Craftsouth projects manager Niki Vouis began cold-calling to find tradespeople to join the project late in 2006, she encountered a curious reaction: ‘They thought I was either mad, having a go at them, or lying.’

For Craftsouth this disconnect became a prime motivator, indicating a need for a practical link between the arts and trade sectors. An exchange of skills and ideas between the two would bridge the gap by broadening artists’ skills and leading them to develop new works, and by fostering a better understanding of art and creativity outside the arts. In this way, Trades could also expand the market for contemporary craft, design and visual art, and go some way towards underscoring the critical importance of skills and skilled workers to the future of Australia.

With these goals in mind, Craftsouth directed Visual Arts & Craft Strategy (VACS) funding towards developing the innovative and highly successful Trades project, now seen as the inspiration for similar projects nationwide. Craftsouth matched eight artists with eight tradespeople, in pairings as diverse as sculptor/plumber; textile artist/electrician; ceramicist/pastry chef; and furniture designer-maker/tattooist, among others.

A partnership between Deb Jones and Adelaide panel beater Hugh Gooden led to a highly creative cross-pollination of ideas. Initially, they searched for vintage car panels as raw material. Finding these in short supply, they turned instead to refining the ready-made shapes of wrecked panels retrieved from salvage yards. Hugh added a further twist to their collaboration, suggesting they also degrade and strip back new car panels. ‘It’s the total opposite to what you’d normally do with a panel?the total opposite, so it’s interesting’, he said.

Trades resulted in more than 20 new works and a month-long public exhibition at Adelaide’s JamFactory in November 2008 which was widely attended by audiences outside the gallery’s traditional demographic. Equally well-received were a VACS-funded catalogue featuring thoughtful essays on the nature of craft and the art/trade divide, and an accompanying DVD documenting both the process and the product of Trades. The DVD struck a particularly strong chord with school groups viewing the exhibit, thus helping instil in a younger audience the value of highly developed skills to art and trade alike.

As curator and Trades catalogue essayist Kevin Murray suggests, the importance of craft is at the heart of all working practices—not just those practiced as an art form.^[i] By enabling Craftsouth to reach outside the arts sector to develop opportunities for artists, the Visual Arts & Craft Strategy has fostered strength within it.

Image caption: (From left) furniture designer Adrian Potter and tattooist Amy Duncan at work. Image: Courtesy of Craftsouth: Centre for Contemporary Craft and Design, Adelaide.

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