Congratulations to Craft Talk member Brian Parkes who will be the next Director of the JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design. Brian has proven himself a leading Australian curator of craft and design as Associate Director at Object Galleries, with many significant touring shows such as Freestyle and lately Menagerie.

Brian will follow Stephen Bowers, an Adelaide ceramicist who has combined his considera… Continue

Australian Volunteers Abroad have just posted a notice for a Heritage Arts Advisor to work in Fiji for 24 months. Here's a chance to become immersed in a rich and living, traditional and modern, Pacific culture.

The current online issue of… Continue

Expressionist painter Guy Benfield is preparing for an exhibition that attempts to radicalise ceramics by focussing on its most conservative element - the brown bot. Here is a description:
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Guy Benfield is open for business at Fremantle Arts Centre. Expanded Ceramithéque Drug Time Present… Continue

It has been a while since September's Plymouth Making Futures crafts conference, giving me some time to digest my experience there. If I were to make a broad assessment of what appeared to be the dominant current(s), I would say it was a drift in focus from the finely crafted object and the more recently dominant cult of 'design' toward a more diffuse, collective and socially engaged understanding of the crafts. At times presenters sailed dangerously close, in my opinion, to disregarding the obj… Continue