LIFE LIFE STYLE: May 2010

Craft Hatch gets a makeover + market madness!

June marks our 20th Craft Hatch market since our launch in November 2008 and to celebrate this, we’re debuting our fabulous fresh new look by designer Adam Cruickshank! Yay thanks Adam! It’s bright and bold, just like our 12 talented designers and collectives featured this month.

The June market will be held on Saturday 12 June at our usual spot in the City Library Gallery, so make sure you come check it out. Click here for more information including a stallholder gallery!

Meanwhile, applications are now open for the next round of markets in August, September and October. In August, Craft Hatch revisits the wonder years with a special 'childhood' themed market programmed to coincide with our annual Craft Cubed festival. This extra-special market will be held on Sunday 8 August at the Atrium in Federation Square. To match our one-off location, it'll also be extra-big one with around 30-35 emerging designers participating! It's an excellent opportunity to enjoy the beautiful surrounds and the deadline for applications is Monday 28 June.

In September we will be reprising our annual fundraising edition for graduating students. Stay tuned for more updates as we are currently in the process of gathering up the next wave of talent for your viewing and buying pleasure... September also sees Craft Hatch returning to the Fed Square Atrium with Craft Hatch @ Melbourne Writers Festival. More details to be released soon!

After all the excitement, it's good to be able to put up our feet for a wee rest in October when the market resumes normal programming. When we say 'wee', we really mean 'wee'... in late October Craft Hatch pairs with the ever lovely folk from the State Library of Victoria for one last hurrah to celebrate the end of 'Til You Drop: Shopping - A Melbourne History'. Stallholder applications will be opening very soon!

So to recap, applications to participate in the August Craft Cubed special at Fed Square, the September Graduate market and the October market are now open. Click here to fill in the online registration form. Applications close Monday 28 June.

We've also got some more exciting collaborations up our sleeves, but we can't give it all away so soon. Make sure you're subscribed to the Craft Almanac, our free monthly e-newsletter (sign up is on the main website), or keep reading CLOG for more updates!

PS. did you know stallholder rates are the same for the August market at Federation Square? That's $15 for Craft Victoria members, $30 for non-members and $50 for groups of five or more. There's no excuse not to apply and emerging designers, you'd be craaazy not to take advantage of this!

enCOUNTER windows: Phillip Stokes & Peter Mclisky - until 3 June

Glassware by Phillip Stokes: $390 - $790

Metal sculptures by Peter Mclisky: $130 - $460

Both exhibitions are currently showing at our 24-hour window space enCOUNTER from now until 3 June (that's next week!)

5 minute t-shirt trick with Dell Stewart

Here's a quick DIY from Dell Stewart: how to tie-dye t-shirts using bleach! It's quick, easy and not very toxic at all. Perfect for a Tuesday evening activity.

What you need:

Bleach (Dell uses White King)
An old t-shirt
Some string
A plastic bucket
Rubber gloves
Access to a sink

Step 1: Get your t-shirt and twist it like a sweet danish roll or an escargot pastry (either counter clockwise or clockwise, depending on which way you'd like your swirls to go).

Step 2: Secure your twist with a bit of string by wrapping it around the t-shirt so that the fabric stays put.

Step 3: Put your gloves on!! (This is important, hence the two exclamation marks) This is because you'll now be working with bleach.

Step 4: Pour the bleach into the bucket first. Just a little bit will do!

Step 6: Once you've got your bleach in the bucket, pop the t-shirt in and give it a poke around so that it soaks up the bleach. You'll begin to see the bleach taking effect almost instantly!

Dell went easy on the bleach, but it doesn't mean you have to!

Step 7: After a couple of minutes, take the t-shirt out, undo the string and give it a rinse in the sink. The bleach smells a bit, so make sure you're in a well ventilated area.

Step 8: Hey presto! The finished product. Now you have some snazzy new threads for that Tuesday night on the couch.

Thanks to Dell for showing us this great DIY!

Social Studio presents: The Quick Unpick

We hope you're familiar with The Social Studio, a great space in Collingwood that reworks recycled clothing. In addition to this, The Social Studio also runs a series of talks called 'The Quick Unpick' and coming up in their May and June program are Adele Varcoe and Ellie Mucke, both of whom have done fantastic work with Craft Victoria!

The talks are ticketed at $10/$8 concession and this includes drinks. All proceeds go towards supporting the community work of The Social Studio - a worthy cause! The Quick Unpick takes place between 6.30pm - 7.30pm at The Social Studio, 128 Smith Street, Collingwood.

Previous Gallery 1 exhibitor Adele Varcoe (of iFOLD fame) will be presenting at The Quick Unpick on Wednesday 26 May, 6.30pm - 7.30pm

And following hot on her heels is COUNTER stockist Ellie Mucke on Thursday 10 June, 6.30pm - 7.30pm

A Peculiar Geometry

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Space and time are perhaps the most familiar features of lived experience. They are also the most beguiling. Space and time appear as eternally fixed essences, fundamental to the character of reality, unyielding to the vagaries of conduct and perception. Yet for all the familiarity of space and time, the appearance of stability remains a mysterious illusion. The everyday experience of space rarely accords with a classical geometry of planes and fixed distances. For space is always experienced as a process of movement and rest, of travel, communication and associations. The earth is never still and distances are never fixed.

Kant was the first to perceive this ‘enfolding’ of space and time in the movements of a thinking, feeling body. Space and time exhibit for Kant, the properties of pure intuition. We experience space and time as subjective points of perspective and movement. Space and time are meaningful only in relation to our experience of this perspective, such that any notion of an objective, geometrical space must remain an abstraction, perhaps even an illusion. The world might be mapped, its contours measured and its expanses navigated, but the space of maps is never the space of the living body. No map has ever captured the experience of place; the living, affective, cognitive and emotional experience of being in the world. To chart the disjunctive spaces and jarring temporalities of this life-world requires a different kind of map, more sensitive to affective rhythms of embodiment and place.

Andrea Eckersley and Dell Stewart’s work explores the spaces and temporalities of embodiment and place. Each artist works between the geometrical space of surfaces and distance and the subjective life-world of experience and movement. Each artist creates work that addresses the body directly, taking the fixed spaces of the canvas, the silk-screen, the dress-maker’s pattern and the ornament, warping and moulding these spaces to accommodate the body’s peculiar geometry. The triangle provides an ideal example of the abstract surfaces of geometrical space and the ways these surfaces must be continuously distorted to fit the living body. Scales lift off
the surface of the canvas only to land in the imbricated folds of the adjacent garment.

To wrap the body in the abstract geometry of the triangle is to be reminded of the intensity of lived place and the inhuman flatness of extensive space. It is to force the living, feeling, thinking body back into space. It is to introduce the body’s sinuous folds into the flat abstractions of geometrical surfaces. Space and time are undeniable constraints – few bodies escape gravity and few bodies elude time. Yet to regard space and time as fundamental and immutable essences is to refuse the affective and corporeal potential that space and time present. All spaces are lived spaces; all time is experienced. Eckersley and Stewart remind us of the lived, felt, affective and relational dimensions of space and our desire to recover a place for the body, for experience itself.

Cameron Duff

SIGNAL workshop: Dell Stewart & Andrea Eckersley

Current Gallery 2 exhibitors Dell Stewart and Andrea Eckersley recently facilitated a t-shirt customisation workshop at SIGNAL.

Here are some photos from the day!

For more, click here to view images.

Half time borek break! Thanks Katie :)

Coming up soon: Dell Stewart teaches how to tie-dye a t-shirt using bleach. Awesome!

Photography: Kim Brockett

May Craft Hatch

Here are some photos from the May edition of Craft Hatch which took place a couple of weekends ago. If you'd like to see more, click her e to view more images, including photos from all Craft Hatch markets in 2010.