Blake Art Prize Finalist Photographer, Host of SBS TV's Letters and Numbers and former ABC TV News Reader RICHARD MORECROFT will be at Bungendore Wood Works Gallery and Cafe for two functions on Saturday 4th February, 2012.

At 2pm he will open the Gallery's latest exhibition by outstanding Abstract Landscape artist ROBERT SIMPSON. For full details go to the Upcoming Exhibitions page.

At 7pm he will host An Evening and Dinner event at Cafe Wood Works. For more details go to the Events or Cafe page.

Have a look through the exhibition catalogue for Michael Retter & Scott Mitchell exhibition. The works are best viewed in fullscreen.

This year, 2011, marks Craft Australia’s 40th year. It is a year for acknowledging and celebrating the outstanding achievements of an exceptional generation of studio craft practitioners many with high profile international reputations.

And this is also the year that the Visual Arts Board informed Craft Australia that it will be defunded. This is the last year Craft Australia will act as an advocate for the Australian craft sector.

In recent years the crafts have been elevated in popular and academic writing. The Craftsmen, by Richard Sennet is erudite and compelling in arguing that “the craftsman’s realm
is far broader than skilled manual labour; the computer programmer, the doctor, the parent and citizen need to learn the values of good craftsmanship today.”

When these values are widely embraced in society they can form the national character, and can impact on productivity, prosperity and civil society.

At a time when craft and art and design are all struggling in this global financial decline one segment – craft - will be defunded. It is this sector that can delineate a national character establishing a global reputation for excellence, not only manufacturing and construction, but government, finance and social policy as well.

For Bungendore Wood Works Gallery the defunding is blow to us because we seek guidance and some inspiration from craft Australia, to move our gallery towards an international reputation, as a gallery that show cases a nation’s outstanding work in wood; a de facto national collection of wood works.

There are the many missed opportunities. Craft is in a resurgence in other countries, and where the young generation have embraced we are turning our backs on craft.

David Mac Laren
Artistic Director
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I find it amazing that this is David Mac Laren’s first solo exhibition after 40 years of practice. Amazing because his name is synonymous with high quality furniture and excellence in design in woodworking in Australia and has been since 1983.

This exhibition has two main parts: the first is the work on display in the upstairs Octagonal Gallery of Bungendore Wood Works Gallery and the second is the accompanying catalogue in which he is quoted at length from discussions with Stan d’Argeavel. In these transcripts he speaks about his philosophy and his approach to his materials and how they impact on his designs.

There is surprisingly little work on display in the exhibition considering that the artist's career spans nearly forty years. However, the reasons are that many of his pieces over the years have been private commissions, and also that this is not a retrospective exhibition but an exhibition of the maker’s more recent works and design ideas.

The work is diverse, but it is all derived from the same belief: “the idea of structure as pure form” and the “decoration which makes it pleasing, connecting it to time and place”.

The exhibition and the catalogue are arranged into sections. The first is Seating. While three forms of seating are on exhibit and discussed in the catalogue, this is an area Mac Laren has investigated throughout his career.

The three works exploring seating are closely related. They are sculptural and austere – pared down to the minimum number of “members”. Leda, the first, in pale Silver Ash, is stark and seemingly simple in construction. The curves of the legs, seat and back all emanate from a solid cylinder of timber. Jester is a harsher, more masculine form of seating, ironically made more playful by the addition of turned spheres on the back slats, the seat and the legs. Mac Laren says that Jester is in the playful territory between domestic seating and sculpture. Strut, the third work, is a pure structural form particularly when viewed in profile and evokes the blades of the wind towers bordering the shores of nearby Lake George.

Large photographs of Bunk Beds commissioned for a client’s grandchildren demonstrate Mac Laren’s thoughtful design processes. All elements are rounded or ‘ovalised’, so they are soft, and as he says, cuddly. They meet the exacting standards for safety for bunk beds, are completely resolved and dearly loved and used by the children. Mac Laren reflects on the making processes in the catalogue and his choice of timber – in consultation with the client. He says at the time “it felt like he was building a house”.

We can see from this commission that Mac Laren usually complicates things, which he freely admits. He seeks resolutions to three issues that confront furniture makers: carbon emission, energy usage and sustainability. A fourth could be the use of noxious fixatives and surface treatments. He thought about the use of magnets a “whole new way of holding furniture together”. One benefit would be that flat packing furniture held together by magnets could be more easily transported. The second is the versatility of more than one fixed piece of furniture. Still is a table, or two tables, or two with a display shelves.

Mac Laren explains that the experimentation behind this work, which took him a year to resolve, led to the thinking behind the other solid timer projects in this exhibition. The table is solid, resolved and would be ideal for a small area, when a larger table is needed for dining occasionally, but takes up too much space when not being used.

Stack is derived from the work he undertook on Still. Two rectangles, divided by a diagonal can be made into several pieces of furniture as required. Shelves, seating and low tables are made up by eight triangular tables. One set is ebonised and the differences in colour add a dynamic which could be lost.

In his search for conserving resources, Mac Laren has jettisoned the traditional belief that using veneers will help stop the destruction and eventual loss of exotic timbers. Partial Ellipse is of curved solid timber, which he says is “veneer’s natural territory”. He describes the processes he followed to make this dynamic work. This work is further demonstration of his penchant for seeking to complicate things.

One line of design and thought leads to another, and Mac Laren has created several sets of ‘shoes’ for one table, a truly whimsical line of pursuit. The shoes are interchangeable, and combine different coloured timbers and designs including one with stainless steel stilettos. They are simply fun and come from a sense of complete knowledge of design, materials, what can be done with them, and how you can create a playful approach, providing enjoyment for both maker and audience.

Mac Laren is exhibiting several works which he titles Products. These include clocks, gifts, business card holders, mobile phone holders, hand mirrors and lighting. The same amount of thought has gone into how the making of these objects can help conserve resources both in the materials and the making.

All pieces have a poetical simplicity, including the three versions of Conical , lamps in three heights. As viewers we are not aware of the complications that are worked through in the making – clearly one mark of the skills required in the maker.

The excerpts of conversations are illuminating, making the catalogue valuable. Mac Laren tells us he is not afraid of failure – most people are wary of taking risks and this boxes them in. Mac Laren tells us about the risks and failures, as well as celebrating the successes. The exhibition is the ultimate celebration of Mac Laren’s successes in his pursuit of design, innovation and play, while the catalogue details the pathways he took to them.

Meredith Hinchliffe
November 9, 2011
Approved to value Australian ceramics, glass, textiles, jewellery, leatherwork, wooden objects and furniture from 1970 for the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Address by Dr. Rodney Hayward, Former Head, Furniture Workshop, School of Art ANU, on Saturday 15 October 2011 at the opening of Design Innovation Play.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”
Mahatma Gandhi

A story of a life is filled with the nuance of history and the ambiguity of decision.......in telling the story we can only connect the dots.

For where we are standing today, in this Gallery and this body-of-work, David’s story begins in 1977 with his coming to Australia from the USA and settling in the environs of Bungendore. Australia and the region were not unknown to him as he had previously completed an Arts degree at ANU in 1965.

Back in the early ‘60s when contemplating this earlier adventure, he had entertained the idea of a back-to-the-land self-sufficiency as a wood turner in Tasmania. In these times, especially in the US, the appeal was strong for the power of individuals to conduct and shape their own lives, and find their own inspiration. A common view was that the problem with American society stemmed from the realization that there was nothing left within it that was small and simple; that there was nothing remaining on a human scale.

When David came into Australia again in the late 1970s, the grass-roots political counterculture that he had been part of in America had largely foundered and all that was left was perhaps to move to this grass-roots power of tools and skills. It was the political power of the hand and its unequivocal evocation.........that to make could be to create a better world.

In Bungendore in 1980 he picked up the threads of his New York experience and began to make furniture again. Yet, and I am guessing here, to make furniture in the hinterlands of Bungendore would be to both know its numbing labour, and loneliness and frustration. The appeal of a place in town to show, to display, to actually meet people must have been enormously appealing.

In 1983 the Bungendore Woodworks Gallery was born across the street in the “Bungendore Store” from the subtlety of connecting a number of makers from the region with his pile of American black walnut, but there was this catch.......a piece in return for exhibition. It was what was, and is, common in David’s life: about being the change you wish to see in the world.

The “Bungendore Store” was the home for the gallery for the next 11 years until again the changes he sought in the world were demonstrated in the creation of the premises where we now stand.

Probably the most catastrophic thing that can happen to any craftsman short of death or blindness is fire. David lost his workshop in 1998 to a fire that cleaned the slate. Its loss was a cruel thing and it broke what seemed the successful formula.........

Steve Jobs died this month on October 5. However back in 2005 he delivered the Commencement Address at Stanford University. The generic formula for such an occasion is “SUCCESS”, Jobs however, talked about adversity. His speech underlined that the hardest trials of his life were also the most fruitful........And there is this wonderful parallel between Steve and David: not only the heroism of the entrepreneur, but the outcomes that some people can make happen when it really hurts.

Two things came out of that fire: both are characterised by “lightness”:

The Gallery where we stand as being a creative entity: a place of design, innovation, and play: that any gallery, but this Gallery especially, was deeply set in an ecosystem of creativity, makers, and end-users. By seeing the future as belonging to the young designers and makers coming, in not holding to some line of orthodoxy.......this Gallery would be a space of growth and a space for growth.......

The new workshop when it arose in 2003 would also be a new creative entity; a place that was formulated to be more of a laboratory than a production shop........it was to be a place also of design, innovation, and play.......a place of mistakes. To seek is to have failure: if you are doing work that really should be done, you should expect more failures, not less _____ but what failures...... glorious failures; smart failures.........and then the successes.

To play again as a child: Picasso said that, “to be young, really young, takes a very long time.” About 40 years..........?

Material and process still remain central to the development of ideas for David. But the materials will involve traditional materials set about by emerging restrictions of the environment, sustainability, climate change: there will be new materials; unorthodox and experimental. Processes too will be a combination of the traditional and the new: changes will involve digital technologies and connection with others.

At the end of that Stanford commencement speech Jobs talked about Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue: this was that amazing thing of grass roots direct power ____ of tools and skills and of people being the change On the back cover of what I think was the 1974 issue, there was an image of a country road in the early morning: it spoke of a road less travelled, a road inviting exploration. The caption was a sign-off message from Brand, it read: “stay hungry: stay foolish”.

Jobs appropriated this as his message to his young audience.......and I too appropriate it, not as a message, but as an appeal to David to not give away being hungry, but to want to see change, and to stay foolish, to be forever unorthodox.

RCH15.10.2011

Marquetry wall pieces

Furniture

The Design Innovation Play catalogues arrived just in time for the exhibition opening and they look great. The catalogues are available at the Gallery for $10.