Living Treasures: Masters of Australian craft - 21 November 2007
Opening speech - Marian Hosking: Jewellery exhibition
By Anna Waldmann
Director, Visual Arts Board
Australia Council for the Arts
Anna Waldmann at Object Gallery
Marian Hosking: Jewellery exhibition
Courtesy Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design
Photographer: Joy Lai
It is important that as a society we value the arts and publicly recognise what makers have achieved in their careers.
An important objective for Object's Living Treasures has been to tour each of the exhibitions to regional and metropolitan venues across Australia.
The Commonwealth Government through the Visions of Australia program enables the Marian Hosking exhibition to be toured by Object to Bathurst, Grafton, Melbourne, Perth, Geraldton, Adelaide, Dubbo, Cowra, Brisbane, Lake Macquarie and Launceston.
Marian Hosking has been a highly visible and vital contributor to the contemporary crafts.
Hosking has consistently produced some of the most refined, beautiful and evocative work in contemporary jewellery and silversmithing, and has also been an influential mentor and educator. There is a free special public talk taking place at Object Gallery tomorrow between Marian Hosking in conversation with Kevin Murray.
When I accepted Steven's gracious invitation to open Marian Hosking's exhibition, I promised him a very brief speech. Not because I do not enjoy speaking about Marian, or because I do not see the purpose of exhibition openings.
Rather, I felt that of all artists who endure near strangers introducing their work to other near strangers, Marian Hosking was the least in need of such a formal introduction.
She is the kind of artist who doesn't merely represent a desire or inquiry, but performs it in a way that crosses the risky borderline between mimesis and praxis and uses memory and nature as her ground.
And so, I wondered, what could I say that would explore and explain the very personal experience of someone else's motifs, materials and forms?
Despite the seductive promises of cyberspace cheerleaders, we respond to very few works that do not touch a deep, fundamental and personal world. Marian's work strikes just such a chord.
I could talk about Marian's father, who, I found out, was a metallurgist and about her mother, a keen conservationist and nature lover. What could have been the result of such a perfect combination but Marian and her exquisite work?
I could comment about Marian's personal dislike of gardens and gardening. I could mention her deep love of nature that comes through in all the beautifully crafted objects: vessels, rings, boxes, brooches and necklaces.
I could mention her obsessive collecting of everything - from plants to images sourced from historic texts. Or I could bring up an extraordinary project, last year, when Marian created a ring for a 600-year-old gum tree in East Gippsland.
Marian describes her jewellery as 'signifiers of place' and her practice as 'capturing a fragment of a larger whole through a piece of landscape that might trigger a memory in the viewer of a larger vista'. I know exactly where she is coming from. In that way, there is no difference between a jeweller like Marian and a painter: in both cases, what they do is sift and select a memory, a concept or an emotion and translate it into a desirable object through their technical gift and talent.
Like all art that makes sense on a personal as well as poetic level, we can retrieve collective and individual values and find coherence where others may discover only chaos. That is why, I believe, the idea of the object as a personal talisman is so attractive, the thought of capturing a narrative, of freezing time and memory in silver brooches and capsule-like boxes, is irresistible.
The aura of what one experiences when looking at Marian's work is that of the past retrieved - or at least that is the way I relate to it. I think of her luminous objects and jewels as evocative explorations of place and identity, an alchemical wonder of faith.
Marian may disagree and so may some of you - it is, I confess, a subjective reading of an artist's work. Work I like, admire and lust after. It is also the reason, as I said at the beginning of this speech, why my introduction is mercifully brief.
It gives me great pleasure to declare the exhibitions Marian Hosking: Jewellery open.
Anna Waldmann
9 November, 2007
Marian Hosking: Jewellery was opened at Object Gallery, Surry Hills in Sydney on 9 November, 2007.
