Australian Crafters: Want to exhibit your work?

Home is where the Craft is

24th September -October 3rd
Melbourne Fringe Festival
161 Albion St Brunswick

I'm curating an exhibition for the 2010 Melbourne Fringe Festival. The purpose of this exhibition to explore the role of women's crafting as part of and related to one’s home. The items crafted may have a functional purpose at home as opposed to being simply created for artistic or creative purposes.

Crafting is usually carried out in the home, often in a communal area or shared environment such as a kitchen table, living room couch or spare room. The creative process often intersects with other tasks of home life such as watching telly, waiting for the washing machine to finish etc.

Craft as a practice has gotten ridiculously big in Melbourne over the last few years, evidenced by the 60 craft markets for retailers to sell their wares and loads of zines, magazines and newspapers all devoting slabs of column to crafty industries.

Craft's function as a creative practice is somewhat obscured by it's residential location as it is primarily not done in art spaces, studios or collectives. This can mean that it is not held in a high regard as other creative mediums such as graphic design, painting and sculpture.

There are of course a whole load of contemporary about women and home crafting. These include (in no particular order) women’s empowerment in home crafting, crafting and it’s presence in cyberspace. Women as creative directors of small businesses from home, women becoming one woman sweat shops, women underselling their work, it being seen as a poor cousin to graphic and fashion design etc

What Can I exhibit?
Here is an opportunity to expose your home crafted goods in their glory. They can be of any theme related to the mission statement and of any medium. Mediums may include:

• Embroidery/needlework
• Sewing (hand or machine)
• Wool work
• Gocco
• Felting
• Quilting


Works can be for sale or simply for exhibition.

To quote from the site:
Fringe shows are inspiring, shocking, disgusting, surprising, entertaining, challenging, provoking. All of the above and none of the above!

I'm keeping it reasonably small so it's manageable but do have some more space left. Preference and definite priority will be given to work which has been designed and created within the home in a 'traditional' sense. The theme and materials can be quite diverse but preference will be given to work created without use of industrial materials such as industrial screen printers or laser cutters. Paintings and illustrations will not necessarily be considered.

People will be coming to my house to view the work and admire your crafty greatness. There'll also be an opening night and two pop up Sunday markets in my backyard!

Are you interested? Send me an email cate@polkadotrabbit.com and I'll send you the details...
thanks
Cate