F!NK alternative jug project: Alex Asch, Chick Butcher, Bengt Cannon, Scott Chaseling, Cobi Cockburn, Cesar Cueva, Matthew Curtis, Xanthe Gay, Marie Hagerty, Jess Higgins, Alison Jackson. Harriet Schwarzrock, Louise Scrivener, Tom Skeehan, Brian Tunks. Surface Vector: Dan Lorrimer After: Kasia Tons. Craft ACT. Until October 17, 2020.
Craft ACT is currently showing three diverse exhibitions- F!NK alternative jug project, Surface Vector and After.
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The sleek F!NK jug is iconic. The refined precision of its design and its highly finished surfaces were seemingly sacrosanct.
Yet 15 artists with a direct link to Robert Foster, the inspired director of F!NK who died tragically in a car accident in 2016, were asked to bring their own talents to bear and redesign its surface. They were given two blank F!NK jugs. One was auctioned for charity while the other jug is in the exhibition.
I think Chick Butcher is perhaps the most iconoclastic of the participants as he encrusted the hitherto pristine surface of the jug (one of its characteristic signature features) with a delectable layer of rust and added a recycled wooden handle.
Alex Asch also refigured the jug's original pristine metal surface with his painterly figures and patterns (Kind of Blue) and Scott Chaseling's images of blue skies (Cloudy with the occasional pour) wittingly suggest the jug's functionality.
Alison Jackson and Harriet Schwarzrock have created delicate jewel-like surfaces by polishing and engraving the metal. Brian Tunk's jug Popala George, with its linear design inspired by Lake George and the Canberra region's poplar trees, is a nice salute to the home of the jug's origins.
The project has provided a fascinating insight into the power of design. By redesigning the jug's surface there is a perceptible transition from a universally recognised F!NK jug to one that has become an intimate object reflecting each artist's unique creative practice.
Dan Lorrimer's suite of wall and free-standing sculptures demonstrates his interest and interaction with the process of working with metals. He has constructed linear works of metal struts (the Splinter Array series) that are enlivened with the play of shadow and light against the gallery walls or in free-standing works that dynamically pierce through space.
In the Fragment Ascent series, 12 small panels in brass or steel demonstrate his ability to mould the hollow sheet metal into deep folds and valleys so that their metallic surfaces seem soft and sensuous. These folds are enhanced by the lustrous quality of the patinated surfaces that reflect the light and defined the contours. Yet these deep linear folds also convey a sense of surface tension and dynamism.
A long wall panel, Triple Junction 2 in patinated corten steel, is a confident and assured work where linear forms converge to form surface relationships. Although these works are abstract, Lorrimer is influenced by crystalline structures of minerals and the collision of the Earth's tectonic plates.
Kasia Tons works in textiles. In this complex body of work based on the E.M. Forster book The Machine Stops (1909) she considers the implications of AFTER: that is after the age of technology.
Evocative photographs, masks, a wall hanging, soft sculptures and an animated film reflect a very personal iconography. Her intense over-layered textiles with their embroidered designs signal the artist's concern for the death of nature and human interaction in the age of technology as well as a hope for their revival in the time "after".
There is a wonderful embroidered wall hanging that rewards close attention, with small animals and lovers hidden in its complex imagery. The animated film continues this personal vision within an imaginary world inhabited by small comic figures without, it seems, the means to communicate with us.
