This essay was written for the exhibition Speculation Nation: Making Utopia at Craft and Design Canberra from 18 May – 1 July 2023, curated by Penny Craswell.
The exhibition, Speculation Nation: Making Utopia, showcases craft practitioners who have engaged with some of the complex issues of a world in crisis. Curator Penny Craswell explores these issues with one eye on a bright future.
In the 21st century, more and more contemporary craft is engaging with the things that really matter to us – as individuals, as part of a society and as people on the planet. An idea for an exhibition exploring social, political and environmental issues in craft through the prism of time arose in response to a gut reaction I had to the news.
It’s October 2021 and they are announcing that Melbourne will finally come out of lockdown, it’s sixth, totalling 262 days since March 2020. A feeling of relief washes over me – a gentle lightening of the load on my shoulders, and I don’t even live in Melbourne. It was at this moment that I realised that major world events of recent years had been taking their toll on me, and probably on all of us.
Perhaps it started with Brexit or with Donald Trump becoming president in 2016. The smoke of the 2019–2020 bushfires were a daily reminder of the climate crisis. And COVID with so many lockdowns. And then there’s the other things – before and since – the threat of nuclear missiles, modern-day slavery, UN climate reports, the great pacific garbage patch, neo-Nazi rallies in Australia, the war in Ukraine, the list goes on and on.
I wanted to curate an exhibition that explores some of these issues. But it felt too depressing, too onerous. Then I realised: what if, instead of exploring them in the context of a negative present, I explore it in terms of a hypothetic future?
Not a heavy-shouldered, negative future, but a positive, bright future full of possibilities.
Enter Speculation Nation: Making Utopia.
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The boundaries between contemporary art and craft have never been blurrier. Increasingly, contemporary artists are making works with a variety of media, including the media of traditional crafts. The same goes the other way when it comes to subject matter with more and more contemporary craft practitioners exploring the complex social, cultural and environmental issues that were once only associated with art practice.
Craft practitioners are also in a unique position to explore ideas from design, such as the concept of ‘speculative design’. Sometimes called design fictions, this envisions design solutions, not for a known user in the here and now, but for a speculative future or parallel reality at a societal scale.
Initially coined by designers and academics Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, speculative design goes beyond the creation of an individual object for use, and into the realms of science fiction and imaginary future worlds, focusing on what Dunne and Raby call ‘wicked problems’.
“[Speculative design] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”
–Dunne And Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming.
Craft is well placed to explore some of the same issues, but from the perspective of making. The artists in Speculation Nation: Making Utopia have engaged with their own chosen wicked problems through the media of craft.
Sydney artist Dennis Golding explores First Nations identity and empowerment in his mixed-media works, including a series of superhero capes. A Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist from the north-west of NSW, he was born and raised in Sydney and grew up in The Block in Redfern. Recently, he returned to Alexandria Park Community School to run cape- making workshops for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
Imagination (2021) is one of Dennis’s capes, created using pale blue satin with bright orange glitter. The work references his own childhood with images of a fish, a lizard, a railway track and a child cutting his mother’s hair.
“Driven from childhood memories and interests in superhero comic books, [my] capes represent figures of place and country and inform identity through lived experiences and history.” –Dennis Golding
Melinda Young’s work is more focused on the environment. She is a jeweller who lives on the beach south of Sydney where she collects materials to use in her jewellery-making and craft practice. Endlessly curious, she has recently become fascinated by materials from the post-colonial age, including coal, brick and plastics, salvaging these items and remaking them into neck pieces.
Two of Melinda’s neckpieces The Intruders (Brickface & Coalface) are made from ocean-tumbled bricks and coal, while the other two Rope Burn (Shimmer & Char) are made from HDPE plastics from domestic cleaning products.
“[The work is] part of ongoing research into the narratives inherent in collected post-colonial debris … Coal dust trickles onto the wearer, the bricks hang heavy, salt and other ephemera leave traces on the body – the wearer then becomes part of and feels the weight of the history of these objects.” –Melinda Young
Melinda is not the only jeweller in this show interested in the environment and materials.
Kyoko Hashimoto is a jeweller who engages with place-based making, using materials from her local environment. Born in Japan and now based in Adelaide, her most recent work with oyster shells was actually made in the Sydney Basin, where she lived until recently.
Kyoko’s five works are made from oyster concrete, which is a 100% oyster shell cement she developed combined with local sand and ash. The works are made from this new material in combination with other materials, including linen, jute and an actual oyster.
“Roughly 500 billion tons of oysters are harvested globally each year. Their shells are typically discarded and sent to landfill. Made from calcium carbonate, they can be cooked and turned into a cement – a greener alternative to the industrial use of mined limestone.”
–Kyoko Hashimoto, artist
Also interested in transforming second-life materials, Emma Peters is a Sydney-based textile artist who works with textiles, and recently with waste bed linen, transforming them into new textile wearables. Transitions is a bed skirt and sheet which has been transformed and revitalised, showing the potential of these highly valuable materials.
“This piece reworks a discarded bed skirt and bed sheet with stitch to emphasise contrasts of expansion and contraction, colour, texture, volume and rhythm. The continuous loop allows for multiple ways to engage with the work, while exploring ideas of time and cycles, and encourages creative and playful engagement for both the maker and the audience.” –Emma Peters, artist
Canberra-based furniture maker Kim Johnston’s response to the climate crisis is more immediate and visceral. I know what we did that summer is a hanging cabinet made of fire- blackened timber that expresses the grief and rage that Johnston felt during the 2019–2020 Black Summer bushfires.
“18.6 million hectares burned. Three billion terrestrial vertebrates died or lost habitat… This cabinet is a memorial to that loss by fire, to those trees, to the forests that will never be again.”
–Kim Johnston, artist
‘I know what we did that summer’ is at its heart a reaction to a negative climactic event, but also hints at a possible positive: “It also asks the question that as loss and destruction have become our everyday currency, can something that bears the mark of that become precious?” says Kim.
Bic Tieu’s work explores society from the point of view of a multi-cultural Australia with continuous flows of migration and cultural intersections. She is a Sydney-based jewellery artist and object designer whose work draws on her Asian lineage. Moving Magnolia is the latest in a series of metal objects and vessels whose patterns are drawn from the shapes of flowers and plants.
She ruminates on the complexity of Australia’s societal and cultural make up, acknowledging First Nations people and those who came after: “settlers from the British colonies, people from war, exodus and voyages from economic change and resettlement.” Then she deconstructs the shape of the magnolia flower, creating a metaphor for this complexity through “collisions, layering and intersections”.
“By working with the identity of the magnolia flower, the image undergoes a series of adaptations, from graphic to lost wax casting, before returning to its new composition in metal. This transformation in design serves as a blueprint for how we envisage a Utopian Australia.”
–Bic Tieu
Soraya Abidin is a contemporary textile artist whose artworks explore the notion of interculturalism through craft traditions from both her Malay and Australian ancestry, including beading, embroidery, quilt crafts and wood carving. IBU is a mask made with some of these traditional materials and methods, including glass beads, embroidered rayon thread, raffia and hand-carved cedar wood.
The symbolism of the mask is rich, acting as a talisman for the artist in her role as a mother. The mask, named ‘Ibu’ which is Malay for ‘mother’, protects and guides her as she steers her children through the dangers of adolescence.
“IBU is the Talismanic mask I wear as a mother. Imbued with protective powers, ‘Ibu’ is a spiritual tool prescribed to cure the ailment of fear in parenting, opening of the subliminal consciousness that appears in our dreams.”
–Soraya Abidin, artist
Soraya’s work IBU as a Malay-style mask worn to protect the mother brings us full circle back to Dennis’s capes, worn to empower the next generation of First Nations people.
I approached each of the seven artists in Speculation Nation: Making Utopia to show an artwork that addresses the complex issues that our world is facing. And they have delivered. A First Nations superhero cape, jewellery and textiles that transform waste into something precious, timber blackened as an echo of devastating bushfires, and patterns and a talisman that celebrate multicultural heritage.
In the way that they have engaged with complex personal, societal and environmental issues with an eye to the future, these artists can be said to engaging in speculative craft.
Each work is engaging with the crises of today, but also envisioning an optimistic future. A future in which we have used all of our human ingenuity, all of our intelligence and all of our resources to make the world a better, healthier, fairer, happier place.
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