ANU Graduate Exhibition shines the spotlight on emerging talent
Monday, 30 November 2023
‘The arts provide windows through which we can see future realities under construction.’ This quote by arts director Peter Sellers resonates with many in the arts and design community, including Rohan Nicol, Head of the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art.
Canberra is deservedly proud of the School of Art. The diversity of talent emerging from the school is astonishing. You can see this for yourself at the Graduate Exhibition that is opening tonight as part of DESIGN Canberra.
The exhibition features the work of 40 graduates across craft and design and is, as always, a key highlight of Canberra’s annual artistic calendar.
The School of Art has five workshops, each specialising in a different media or discipline area—glass, ceramics, gold and silversmithing, furniture and textiles. The students select to study through the visual art stream or design art stream.
Many who have graduated have gone on to become successful, full-time designers and artists, including gold and silversmith Alison Jackson, Nellie Peoples, Phoebe Porter and Robert Foster, all of whom participated in DESIGN Canberra 2015.
This year’s graduates include Chelsea Lemon, honours student in the furniture workshop who won the Design + Craft People’s Choice Award during DESIGN Canberra’s inaugural year for her Triangulation Chair, made from American White Oak and housed edible plants. The award is granted by Designcraft.
Rohan says the exhibition is always fascinating since the graduates’ exhibit the outcomes of the work they have produced in their final year.
‘While the work is highly diverse, one common element is that the students have found their own creative voice by this time in their studies,’ says Rohan. ‘So the work exhibited is a fully developed outcome of their own interests and creative themes, and in accordance with a proposal they put in at the start of their final year.’
Some of the work incorporates a functional focus, as with the students producing furniture. Others are liberated from functional concerns and use their medium more for personal expression, as with some students working in, say, glass
The exhibition—free to the public with drop-ins welcome—features work from all workshops. It’s a great chance to meet students and talk to them and staff about design thinking that highlight students who explore design themes and thinking within their final works.
The ANU School of Art Graduate Exhibition runs until Sunday 6 December, located at 2 Childers Street, Acton, 10.30am to 5pm daily.
