Jacqueline Millner, art writer in conversation with Christopher Dean and the artists Elizabeth Day, Judith Duquemin, Kate Mackay, Fiona MacDonald, Elizabeth Pulie, Jacqueline Rose and Justin Trendall
Saturday 27th November, 4 PM

Jacqueline Millner discusses the range of visual experiments that connect craft techniques to the practices of conceptual art, painting, photography, drawing and sculpture represented in Christopher Dean’s Conceptual Crochet. These artists harness critical forces as well as the heightened levels of aesthetic and formal innovation often found in crafts. Have craft, camp and feminist historical lineages overcome disenfranchisement? Is a new a new direction in contemporary art rising from these experiments?

Jacqueline Millner is an art writer with an interest in aesthetics and theories of beauty. She teaches at School of Communication, Design and Media, University of Western Sydney.

Publication
Conceptual Crotchet exhibition catalogue with essay by Christopher Dean, The Cross Art Projects, 2004. (B&W, A4, 2pp.)
Available at Cross Books: enquiries@crossbooks.com.au. www.crossbooks.com.au

Conceptual Crochet answers the curious question: Why are so many contemporary artists interested in craft techniques? The artists in the exhibition are trained in the Conceptual Art tradition. Their work, however, harnesses critical forces as well as the heightened levels of aesthetic and formal innovation often found in crafts such as knitting, quilting and crochet.

Out of these experiments a new direction in contemporary art has emerged. Applying ideological commentary to art forms labelled as manual rather than intellectual activities reveals enormous scope for innovation. This reconciliation helps to overcome Conceptual Art’s reluctance to embrace formal or aesthetic concerns.

From a historical perspective Conceptual Crochet builds on a breakthrough project of the women’s art movement, the D’oyley Show, held at Watters Gallery in 1979. The artists and theorists of the Domestic Needle Work Collective appropriated the analytical techniques of Conceptual Art to successfully stress the importance of women’s domestic crafts and critique a male dominated sacred cow.

Of course, over twenty-five years little has shifted. Concerns about the marginalisation of the unfashionable and disenfranchisement of camp and feminist work are valid today. But unlike the D’oyley Show the emphasis of Conceptual Crochet is not about collective activities or gender specificity. Conceptual Crochet shifts the parameters towards placing greater importance on the formal experiments of individual artists.

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Christopher Dean, Curator

Projects by Christopher Dean discuss issues in contemporary art with an emphasis on the historical and theoretical debates surrounding abstraction. His research-based exhibitions for Casula Powerhouse, Liverpool, and Penrith Regional Gallery have innovatively replayed aspects of Australian abstraction. Dean always injects a characteristic air of good humour to serious topics. He delights in the curious intersection of avant-garde, camp and kitsch.