Bronwen and Chipper

Today Bronwen popped over as we assessed where we are at with the project.

Just a quick recap for anyone who is just finding out about the knitting and blogging project.

We are co-curating a project titled Knit1 Blog1 for Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre to coincide with the Festival of Contemporary Art herein Canberra Australia. The Festival which is co-hosted by Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre, Canberra Contemporary Art Space and the Australian National University School of Art, its aim is to celebrate contemporary art and craft in Canberra. The festival will focus on the theme IN PUBLIC and present a series of major exhibitions, temporary public art, public events, an education program, and other fun happenings. The festival will occur from 13 July to 19 August 2007.
We are fascinated with the renewed popularity of knitting and how its revival has coincided with the latest accessible, communication trend, blogs. We are developing a project which is inspired by all you wonderful bloggers and blog sites and happenings such as virtual knitalongs, and the 2006 Knitting Olympics. We think knitting is more in the public realm than ever before.
We hope our project will string together a web of creations from around the world to come together in our gallery space in Canberra and be seen in the physical, and virtual, public worlds. Our aim is that you will share your blogging and knitting worlds with us. We think the world of knitting blogs is amazing and we want to bring this phenomenon to a new audience through this project.

It seems that many of you out there agree. I was chatting to a friend of mine who wondered whether knitting blogs were all that extraordinary and when I showed her the tip of the ice berg of knitting blogs she was amazed.

Anyway back to Bronwen, we have made a list of all we have invited so far and there is more to do to invite other wonderful knitting bloggers to the show. During the period of the festival we will also be hosting some workshops. We want to run a beginners workshop and an advanced and there may also be another special workshop, but that is still in the planning stage. The form with all the details is almost complete and will be sent out as soon as possible.

Looking forward to more responses.

About Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre

I am starting to receive more responses to my invitation to exhibit with us which is fantastic and has made me keen to get on and do a new post.

I've been thinking that I need to do a profile of Craft ACT mainly through images, so have gathered a few together to post. This is to reassure everyone that we really are a contemporary craft and design gallery in the small city of Canberra, Australia.

Craft ACT (and the ACT stands for Australian Capital Territory) is a membership based organisation that has been running for over 30 years.

This is an image of Craft ACT Member Jennifer Robertson holding a piece of her triple layered weaving, with an image of Australia's Parliament House in the background.

The first image above is a work by Itzell Tazzyman titled The World's Imaginary Corners from the exhibition 2 Materials, an exhibition of Craft ACT Accredited Professional Members. The second is an image from the exhibition Geometry Rhythm Light, curated by David Sequira and the image features the work of Deb Jones in the fore ground with the work of Maureen Williams at the back in our gallery.

This is the work of Bev Hogg from our exhibition Dimensions Variable. These figures are all hand built in clay, glazed and fired.

We represent approximately 200 members and a range of medias including textiles, glass, ceramics, jewellery, furniture design, metal and other areas that have a discourse about objects. Each year we exhibit between 150 to 200 artists in our galleries in the heart of the city of Canberra. We also host events which constitute a public program including off site exhibitions, artists talks, forums, debates, festivals, education projects, professional development seminars and more!

Left: Chora, a public art work created by Canadian artist Penelope Stewart as part of the project 24:7 Dwell a series of public interventions; middle: Craft ACT member Imogen Keen launches her new handbag - the Bocket with a joint fashion parade with local fashion retailer The Department of the Exterior; right: Christmas decoration nade by me for the Craft ACT Christmas exhibition.

Craft ACT is a funded organisation by our local government, ACT Government and the Australia Council an arm of the Federal Government. I'll have to post their logo's to this blog as it is important to recognise their support. In Australia we are very fortunate to have Governments who are responsive to the arts and provide public funding for the development of local culture and support to Australian artists. I know this isn't the case in many other countries. We raise a proportion of our annual funds and the rest comes through various grants. A lot of my time is spent writing these grants to secure our future.

Below are some images of our home - Canberra and the front of our building where we are located.

Left: View of Canberra from Mt Ainslie; Centre: The sign to Craft ACT; Right: A view of the National Museum of Australia on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin taken from a hot air balloon.

Well I hope this gives everyone a bit of an insight into Craft ACT. Will blog again soon.

Cheers

Barb

Hi Knitting and Blogging world,

Time has flown by and creeping up to our exhibition.



Life has been hectic, in the time since my last post I have been to Singapore travelling with an Australian contemporary ceramic exhibition developed by Asialink. It was shown at the Arthouse Gallery in Singapore. The exhibition The Secret Life of Blue and White was a wonderful exhibition exploring a contemporary take on this extraordinary phenomena of mass produced ceramic ware. The crew at the Arthouse and Charmaine from the Australian High Comission were fantastic to work with and Singapore has a fantaastic art scene, lots and lots happening.

Since my return I have been busy house painting for the past 3 weekends and I'm so so glad its all done now. And of course Alby, my labrador pooch needs some attention or else she might end up looking like Chipper. (note the comfy spot she has taken over for herself on the couch!)






I am getting very excited about the exhibition and have been emailing various knitting bloggers. If any of you visit this site, we are very serious and want to show your work here in Canberra and provide our audiences with terminals so they can comment on your sites directly.

I think Bronwen and I love doing the research more than anything else. There is so much to read and take in. For such a novice as I, I am completely taken with the wonderful world of socks, something we need here as we hit our very first cold night for the year. Thankfully this change in weather has come with rain as our drought situation is getting more and more serious.

But I digress. To all you wonderful knitting bloggers, I hope you are keen to be a part of our exhibition - a chance to have the physical results of your wonderful craft in our gallery,but to talk to you via your blogs - it all adds to the weird and wonderful world of the internet and blogging.

Will post another blog soon - after our new exhibitions open at Craft ACT - contemporary jeweller in the Cicely and Colin Rigg Design Award, and Decades and Diversity an exhibition celebrating the weaving of one of Canberra's and Australia's important weavers - Solvig Baas Becking, and after the Friday night opening of the new Canberra Glasswoks, the new glass facility a big party about to happen and after our Saturday planning day session as we begin our new 3 yr business plan for funding. Yep sometime after that I will post again.

barb - the hopeless knitter