Craft / Beautiful Tensions: Gray Street Workshop celebrates 40 years. At Craft + Design Canberra, until November 15. Reviewed by MEREDITH HINCHLIFFE.

This exhibition celebrates 40 years of a co-operative workshop, opened on International Women’s Day in 1985, by three women now well known through the jewellery/craft world nationally and internationally.

The original workshop was in the stable block of an old mansion in Gray Street, Adelaide. It has operated from five different addresses, and has provided a workspace and professional support to more than 100 artists.

The workshop was established by Anne Brennan, Sue Lorraine and Catherine Truman. Lorraine and Truman are part of this show, along with Jess Dare and Lisa Furno who are now partners of the workshop.

Brennan has written an accompanying book, in one description of the workshop, says that “… it exists to meet the needs of the people who work there. … a kind of elastic web of relationships as much as a physical site.” Brennan also says that the group works “separately together”.

Lorraine is showing works that are seemingly worlds away from her previous work. She has rescued wooden objects from op shop, from which she has deconstructed and re-arranged napkin rings, trays, pen-holders, and what might have been egg cups – many of which are mulga wood souvenirs – to create a series of masks, or human faces.

They are fun and fanciful, and require viewers to ignore any feelings of remorse for their own disposal.

Furno says she has only ever worked with things which have had a previous life in this throwaway world. She uses scavenged and used plastics to create head coverings for herself and her family.

Anna Green has photographed them, and in some cases both the object and the images are being displayed.

Furno’s materials determine how the work will ultimately end up. She chooses simple making methods too, such as cutting, joining and adapting. There is a distinct feeling of a return to childhood in the finished objects.

Decorations ‘from Jen’s 40^th party’ – metal foil polyethylene, were used to create a small group of necklaces.

Truman is an environmentalist at heart. As long as I have known her work, she has carved precious wood to represent parts of the human body often unseen by all but doctors who might be operating on the body.

In this exhibition she has expanded the size of her work. Perhaps most poignant is the work titled Bender. A squashed glass beaker, handblown by Liam Fleming, rests under pieces of fallen cypress pine and fallen red gum. Leaves are draped over pieces of twigs.

The final exhibitor is Dare, who is showing works that bring back memories of cemeteries, where flowers and floral tributes lie on the graves of loved ones. Some are called immortelles, floral sculptures covered by glass.

In Stillness Interrupted, Dare has created a still life of weeds or flowers in vintage jars, one of which has fallen, as if disrupted by a small animal prowling in the cemetery.

Gray Street Workshop has made an immeasurable contribution to the world of jewellery-making in Australia.