2023 Emerging Contemporaries Catalogue

EMERGING
CONTEMPORARIES
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre

Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre is partially supported by the ACT
Government, the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy – an initiative of
the Australian State and Territory Governments, and the Australia
Council for the Arts – the Australian Government’s arts funding and
advisory body.
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre acknowledges the Ngunnawal
people as the traditional custodians of the ACT and surrounding
areas. We honour and respect their ongoing cultural and spiritual
connections to this country and the contribution they make to the
life of this city and this region. We aim to respect cultural heritage,
customs and beliefs of all Indigenous people.
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre
Tues–Fri 10am–5pm
Saturdays 12–4pm
Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit,
Canberra ACT Australia
+61 2 6262 9333
www.craftact.org.au
Cover image: Matthew Freeman, Reactive Armour, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography.
Page 4-5: Sabina Moore, Fragmented Memory, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography.

Emerging Contemporaries
Adelina La Vita | Dianne Bourke | Dominic Gowans | Elliane Boulton |
Finnan Solomon Walker | Gabriela Renee | Juniper Maffescioni | Matthew
Freeman | Molly Desmond | Nathan Nhan |Richard Caines | Ross
Wortham | Sabina Moore | William Armstrong Guy
Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre
2 February – 18 March 2023

Thought begins, again, anew.
EXHIBITION ESSAY | Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh + Christian Sirois
In What is Philosophy?, first
published in English in 1994,
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
conceptualise the work of art as
a ‘bloc of sensation’ - genuinely
capable of creating something new
by means of generating the feel or
sensation of something different.
And this something different might,
just might, open up other ways
of thinking, living, speaking, and
acting. As Simon O’Sullivan writes,
art “can be the seed of something
genuinely new. In an increasingly
homogenised and homogenising
neoliberal present that offers only
more of the same - a present that
overcomes all options - these
points of difference can become
politically charged” (2016 p.82).
This chance for sensation takes
place at the surface: it exists in
the very material of the artwork,
from “the material itself, the smile
of oil, the gesture of fired clay,
the thrust of metal, the crouch
of Romanesque stone, and the
ascent of Gothic stone” (Deleuze
& Guattari 1994 p.166). The surface
is where the maker and the
audience meet and exchange via
the medium of the work of art itself,
made possible through the skill and
style of the artist. Intermediary yet
immediate.
Emerging Contemporaries opens a
window onto this intimate process
which takes place between the
artist and their craft, their intentions
and their material, the sides of
these terms becoming increasingly
blurred and increasingly connected.
From this, a fluency emerges - a
style or consistency, a process,
of which the artists shown
here are just at the beginning
of. The exhibition is brimming
with potential, for the artists and
spectators alike.
Art inspires thought, and thought
begins, again, anew. Traditional
conceptions of ‘thought’ and
‘knowledge’ restrict these to some
pre-existing ‘pool’ of which we
are tasked with accessing and
extracting from. Whilst noble, this
limits the world to what already
exists, uncovered or not. But
when the world is re-viewed
instead as being radically open
and constructed, as taking place
in process and in place, thinking
instead becomes capable of
creating genuine novelty and
change. Art becomes tasked with
the germination of such radical
opportunity, and politically the
current state of affairs begins to
look a little less impenetrable.
That encounter with the new, that
fresh and excitable feeling when
an idea pops into your head (how
could it ever have not been there?)
is a rare treat: there is no way of
telling where such moments will
spring from, what will trigger them,
where we will be, what time of day,
or in whose company. And there
is no telling just where the idea
will go - written down perhaps, or
carried into conversation, across
dinner tables and groups of
friends, changing the tone of your
morning coffee or from finding
new pleasure in sitting in front of
your favourite vista. That Emerging
Contemporaries might provide
such a micro-rupture speaks to
the intimate relationship between
the artist and their material,
that malleable surface tension
which might provide a different
configuration of the present - the
shimmer of a beginning, again,
anew.
Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh is a current cultural geography PhD student at UNSW Canberra and assistant manager of Blonde Concept in Braddon, Canberra.
Her research engages the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Édouard Glissant to explore how the arts can generate politically and ethically
significant change in individual thinking and wider world processes. She has previously written on these capacities in cinema, and her current PhD project is
thinking this through fashion and style.
Christian Sirois is a curator, artist, and cultural geography PhD candidate at UNSW Canberra, as well as the gallery and exhibition manager at Craft ACT:
Craft and Design Centre. His research is centered around curation, affect, and cultural conservation through creative and multisensory fieldwork methods,
exploring the types of knowledge that can be produced when we engage with sensory networks as epistemological systems.
Image: Adeline La Vita, Trunk Tower, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography
Page 6-7: Richard Caines, BioPod Series, 2022. Photo: Time Bean Photography

Adelina La Vita
Canberra Potters Society
Adelina is an illustrative ceramic artist based in
Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country (Canberra). She
utilises clay to create playful sculptures, and vibrant
decorative functional objects inspired by contrastive
landscapes, flora and fauna.
Combined with sgraffito techniques on underglaze
colours, Adelina’s vibrant palette is reminiscent of
coastal seascapes and mountain ranges. Featuring
royal blue and azure backgrounds, aqua, apple green
and chartreuse hues, they combine and harmonise
together to create an expressive and distinctly vivid
artwork.
Her functional ceramic vessels are designed with
smooth surface areas, creating a canvas of clay on
which to decoratively depict highly stylised scenes
of whimsical landscapes and furtive green flora
compositions.
Challenging notions of scale and proportion, reality
and imagination, her sculptural forms are tactile and
colourful, fantastical and surreal. They transport the
viewer on a playful nostalgic journey into childhood,
evoking emotions of glee, fun and fantasy, freeing the
child within. Her sculptures invite tactile participation
in an active exchange with the artwork.
Adeline’s series of sculptures, Trunk Tower and
Cactus Tower have been inspired by a playful
abstraction of flora which arouse exploration and
interplay through the interchangeable stackable
sculptural forms. The viewer is invited to create their
own artworks by engaging in ‘play’.
Image: Adeline La Vita, Interchangeable Cactus, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography

Dianne Bourke
Canberra Institute of Technology
Dianne is an artist based on the land of the
Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. The natural world,
discarded objects, and social issues inspire her
practice. Her explorations use a wide range of media
and techniques, contemplating protection of our
natural world and living a good life in a fair and caring
way. Her work is based in storytelling, and engages
with our obligations, reactions, and concerns of
contemporary issues in a quirky and gentle manner.
Since retiring from full-time work, Dianne has studied
part-time at CIT, completing a Certificate 4 as well as
a Diploma of Visual Arts.
An important evolution of this installation was to
photograph arrangements of the objects, nests, and
branches into various compositions. This body of
work represents unfinished business for me as my
family situation continues to evolve.
An important evolution of this installation was to
photograph arrangements of the objects, nests, and
branches into various compositions. This body of
work represents unfinished business for me as my
family situation continues to evolve.
Contemplation on Nesting
My interest in backyard birds led to this exploration of
nesting and the human endeavour of nurturing and
domesticity. The resulting installation follows a year of
supporting my elderly mother to downsize and move
to Canberra, and my children to stay in the nest as
they try to save for a home.
A nest is a bird’s best effort to protect their next
generation. They appear hauntingly delicate and
fragile. Doilies reflect the handcrafts of an earlier
generation of women. The plates and thread reflect
day to day acts of domesticity. The objects I’ve
brought together are symbols of the effort and love
we put into home and family. They are precariously
perched because things can easily fall apart.
I experimented with plaster, discarded domestic
objects such as plates and doilies, and remnant
eucalyptus branches from recent storms. I loved
experimenting with the contrast of the smooth white
of the plaster, the intricate lacework, and the subtle
colour and texture of the fallen eucalypt branches.
Image: Dianne Bourke, Contemplation on Nesting, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography

Dom Gowans
Australian National University
Dominic Gowans’ holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts
(Honours) in the Australian National University
School of Art. His art practice centres on the
potential for art to challenge failures and harms in
the current social order arising from the conflicting
priorities of economic progress and community
well-being and cohesion. His work uses satire and
humour to present incongruous representations of
concepts or attitudes, using these disconnections to
provoke discussion and consideration of alternative
approaches to the norm.
The current project is a subversive response to our
value systems, intended to question the ways in
which our attitudes are formed, the premises we
accept. It uses the iconography and messaging
of the dominant paradigm, with its associations
upended to challenge this outcome. He suggests a
range of potential meanings in his work from which a
viewer is encouraged to find theirs.
Image: Dom Gowan, Vanden, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography

Elliane Boulton
Canberra Institute of Technology
Elliane Boulton’s art is about finding the beauty in
the natural world, and how we co-exist within our
environment. The way we treat our environment is
important, and with this collection, Boulton wants to
highlight just how much it can give. She also wants
the audience to be aware of the environmental
impacts of the fashion and synthetic dye industries,
they are the third most pollutive industry in 2022.
In her practice, Boulton uses found objects, such as
bark and leaves, using them to create works that
highlight the natural beauty of the found pieces. For
this body of work, she has stepped into the world
of eco-printing, using native leaves to create pattern
and silk to create form. These silks are accompanied
by the steel pipes that they were dyed on, which
have also been printed by the leaves.
Image: Elliane Boulton, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

Finnan Solomon Walker
Sturt School of Wood
Finnan is a designer maker from Ngurra country
(Blue Mountains) who has a deep appreciation
and connection to the natural world. He began his
carpentry apprenticeship at the age of seventeen.
During this time Finnan’s interest in design
was reinforced through his experiences in the
construction of unique, architecturally designed
builds that were aesthetically sympathetic to their
location in the natural environment. Through his love
of skateboarding and rock climbing comes an eye
for lines and movement through space which is
reflected in his dynamic forms.
Finnan recently completed a year of study at
The Sturt School for Wood where he enjoyed the
opportunity to explore his own design concepts.
Aligned with his core values of conservation, Finnan
seeks to create elegant and original works through
careful selection of timber that honours the materials
whilst aiming to minimise waste. Finnan continues to
refine his skills of Designing and Making, favouring
the use of traditional hand tools to develop, fit and
shape his pieces.
Image: Finnan Solomon Walker, Elevation Low Table, 2022. Photo: Ashley Mackevicius.

Gabriela Renee
Australian National University
Balik Kampung, Going Home… explores my cultural
identity and heritage as a mixed-race woman by
reconfiguring and re-contextualising photos from
family archives. Embedding and layering these
images within textiles that evoke the clothing made
and worn by my ancestors around the world, I
navigate a complex set of histories and challenge
the documentary purpose of photography. Ethnically,
I am of Sinhalese, Malayali, English, Shetlander,
German and Irish descent. As an Australian
Malaysian, the journey of uncovering this hybridity
has been a deeply personal investigation of images,
objects, and materials. Fabric – embroidered saris,
handmade lace, and tartan – has interwoven the
sensory and visual of the embodied here and now
with fragments of family history. Rather than defining
a fixed past or finding something that has been lost,
a new set of connections to identity has been made
and a future narrative discovered.
Image: Gabriela Renee, Balik Lampung, Going Home, 2022. Photo: Irina Agaronyan

Juniper Maffescioni
Australian National University
Juniper Maffescioni is an emerging glass artist
and recent Honours graduate of the ANU SOA&D
Glass Workshop, working across themes of vision,
perception, colour, and light, through the lens of the
postdigital.
Driven by insatiable curiosity, Maffescioni investigates
the function and behaviour of physical materials,
mathematical constructs, and the relationships
between them. She works to comprehend things by
seeing, questioning, and making. Maffescioni uses
these methods to manifest objects she wishes to
see exist.
Her current body of work connects representations
of visual information, human perception, and
colourful glass. This work questions philosophical
implications of the transformation of subjective visual
pleasure through an objective analytical process.
It also considers discrepancies in data loss and
approximation due to algorithmic processes.
In her current investigation of light, colour, and vision,
Maffescioni has created a method of form finding to
mathematically describe the experience of seeing
existing glass art. This is accomplished through
cross-disciplinary practices moving amidst virtual and
physical realms to manifest data objects in glass.
Through her work, Maffescioni wants people to
observe and understand the world as she does.
Analogous to performing scientific studies and
publishing results, Maffescioni searches for profundity
and detail in complex concepts and presents
aesthetic objects as proof.
Maffescioni appreciates the intricate pattern and
intense colour of glass art and finds comfort through
the experience of seeing and creating complex
compositions in glass. A long-standing grasp of
complex mathematical constructs has become the
language by which Maffescioni now synthesizes and
fulfills these personal connections to glassmaking.
Image: Juniper Maffescioni, Subset Study 1 - Schwarzrock, 2022. Photo: David Lindesay

Nathan Nhan
Australian National University
Nathan Nhan is a ceramicist whose practice uses
experimental making and the ceramic process as
a tool to create, investigate and manifest identities
within his work. Responding to the inherent
materiality and cultural significance of ceramics,
Nhan reflects upon concepts of place, community,
and identity from an Asian Australian perspective.
He often employs traditional vessels as a foundation,
transforming historical forms into contemporary
vehicles that play with the medium’s enduring epic
narrative of both Eastern and Western perspectives
imbued with personal stories and social commentary
Image: Nathan Nhan, Trophy #24 - Mowing Map, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

Matthew Freeman
Australian National University
As a contemporary jewellery maker and artist,
Freeman engages with jewellery as a history, a
culture and as an action. Their Honours project has
explored the potential for jewellery to sublimate
violence. Historically, culturally and performatively
jewellery exists before and after violence: through
bloody trade, the spoils of war and ultimately as an
expression of power. Drawing from these contexts,
Freeman hopes to provoke new understandings
of violence through objects that reclaim individual
freedom, expose fantasies and desires whilst also
critiquing societal hypocrisies.
The main questions guiding Freeman’s creative
process has been: Can jewellery become a force
multiplier, an enabler of the wearers will? What
freedoms might be extricated through the wearing?
The work negotiates a makeshift aesthetic – a wiki
how for violence enabling jewellery- combined with
a crafted value usually used associated with gold
and silver smithing. Between the improvised and
the carefully crafted, sits the agency of the wearer
and the violent potential of these objects to enable
transformational change.
Image: Matthew Freeman, Untitled, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography.

Molly Desmond
Australian National University
Molly Desmond is an emerging artist living and
working on Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country.
Working across painting and ceramics, her bold and
experimental practice is led by material investigations
with an interest in alternative and speculative
approaches to object making.
Generated from a resource of memories and
sensations, this series of paintings and ceramics
explores the formal qualities of surface. Across
the series, material qualities have been exploited
to create visual tactility to suggest a perceptual
ambiguity of surface and depth. Employing the
grid as visual and processual device, the temporal
surfaces speak to the transient nature of space.
Image: Molly Desmond, Temporal Surface #5, 2022.

Richard Caines
University of Canberra
Richard Caines is a Canberra based Industrial
designer that is an emerging artist from the University
of Canberra. With his engagement in projects at
University of Canberra and at home, Richard shares
a common passion for being ‘hands-on’ through
bringing life to visualised solutions. Ranging from at
home solutions to visualising products.
Richard has a keen interest for emerging
technologies and developing new skills and as a
result some of his projects have involved lead lighting,
metal welding and woodworking. His work primarily
aims towards being human centric with a secondary
aim of being achieved in a sustainable practice.
Image: Richard Caines, Bio Pods, 2022.. Photo: Tim Bean Photography.

Ross Wortham
Sturt School for Wood
Ross spent the past 20 years in the community
services sector and found the craft of woodwork
and fine furniture making later in life. Now, after a
year of intensive study at the Sturt School for Wood
in Mittagong NSW, Ross is proud to call himself a
designer and maker of wooden objects. His focus is
on traditional joinery and arts and crafts ideals. His
work stresses the inherent beauty of the material,
the importance of nature as inspiration, and the
value of simplicity, utility, and sustainability. Ross is
also influenced by the Japanese worldview of ‘Wabi-
Sabi’, which sees beauty in that which is “imperfect,
impermanent, and incomplete”, such as the wood
and natural materials he chooses to work with.
The ‘Gadi bench’ is made from a single bookmatched
piece of American Black Walnut, paying
homage to the iconic century-old telephone table,
and showing a deep respect for the ever-strong
dovetail joint with over 100 hours dedicated to the
dovetails throughout the piece. The legs are splayed
and tapered at two different angles and joined using
traditional mortis and tenons with wooden buttons
attaching the legs to the base allowing for movement
and to ensure it is stable and strong enough to last
for generations. The cushion was a collaboration with
Sydney-based fabric designer Julie Paterson and
is made with natural raw linen and screen printed
by hand. This bench provides a lovely entry table,
occasional chair or even a chaise lounge.
Image: Ross Wortham, Gadi Bench, 2022. Photo: Ashley Mackevicius.

Sabina Moore
Canberra Potters Society
Sabina is a sculptor and art educator based in
Canberra. With a background in visual arts and
museums, Sabina has returned to her love of
sculpture after spending many years working in
galleries and arts organisations. She is now focussing
on her art practice as a sculptor working with clay,
inspired by her fascination with the built environment
and the emotions and memories conjured by the
remnants of urban decay.
Through Sabina’s artistic practice she explores
the built environment as a physical location where
memories can be contained and preserved. Her
ceramic sculptures are inspired by fractured buildings
and the fragmented memories left behind by both a
buildings’ users and those who constructed it.
Sabina’s work is hand-built using mostly slab
construction. A course textured clay body is left
bare or treated with cold finishes to create multiple
textured surfaces that speak to the stories and
history held within the building footprint.
Image: Sabina Moore, Fragmented Memory #1, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography.

William Armstrong Guy
Sturt School of Wood
William Armstrong Guy is an Emerging Artist
currently residing in Gubbi Gubbi Country (Sunshine
Coast, QLD). William works primarily in timber and
studied Fine Furniture Making at Sturt School for
Wood. Throughout his studies he was able to delve
deep into the complexity and beauty of furniture
design. William’s work draws inspiration reminiscent
from his experience of place, influencing form and
incorporating subtle details.
His work seeks to navigate the balance between
the romanticism of hand crafting and using
contemporary skills and techniques. William strives
to create thoughtful designs that tread the delicate
poise between function and form.
design. The character of the Tasmanian Blackwood
backrest speaks an ‘eye of the storm’ quality, while
the shaped and sculptured joinery adds a ‘waterlike’
flow to the work – giving ode to some of my most
admired chair makers. The seats textured rain
droplet-esque upholstery is a commissioned piece
of hand tufted wool onto monks’ cloth by textile artist
Nina Stirton.
The piece, Alone, Together Soon, seeks to explore
the concept of connection within disconnection
and finding inspiration in the reflection of ‘Home’.
It is the subtle details in this piece that convey the
idea of connectedness, through each of the tables
otherwise lonesome components. The parquetry
pattern translates the triangulation from the legs to
the top, from side profile the angles of the individual
components are perfectly aligned. I use negative
space to create separation whilst balancing the
overall composition. Drawing inspiration from home
and my connection to the ‘Weyba Tree’, a stoic and
distinctive tea tree with tapering intertwined limbs
that reach out to support a solid canopy.
Designed during seemingly endless days of rain,
the La Niña chair draws inspiration from rainy visits
to some of my favourite sections of Australia’s East
Coast– Gerringong Headland and Boiling Pot, Noosa.
The topography of these special places gave the
direction for the form and silhouette of the chairs’
Image: William Armstrong Guy, Alone, Together, Soon, 2022. Photo: Tim Bean Photography.
Image (page 38-39): Dianne Bourke, Contemplation on Nesting, 2022. Photos: Tim Bean Photography.