The HAT Project: Here and There is a program of international exchange residenceies for designer makers. HAT Australia/UK involved 17 jewellers working as artists in residence between 4 regions in the UK and 5 states in Australia. The Australia/UK program concludes with an exhibition touring both countries. In this issue Craft Australia features scenes from the UK opening in Birmingham, a preview of the exhibition and information about Australian tour dates. Following is the catalogue essay to give you a taste of the HAT journey.

The HAT Project is being toured nationally by Craftsouth: Centre for Contemporary Craft and Design with the support of the Arts Council England, Australia Council for the Arts, British Council and MIRIAD (Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design)

Relocations: the HAT project between theory and practice

Over the last thirty years, a number of linked itineraries have guided the explorations of artists, writers and theorists across the shifting cultural terrain of the West. These creative and critical roadmaps have taken us from the imperial center to the cultural and devalued 'periphery'; from art as object, to art as process; from the maker/author as arbeitor of the work's singular meaning, to the multiplication of meanings in the work done by readers and viewers. Particularly relevant to the HAT project perhaps, there has been the displacement of the artwork as a universal object, transcending the messiness of particular histories and place, and an insistence on the work's situatedness - where the work is coming from and where it's at.

One way of signposting this shift of cultural paradigms is with a series of more of less explosive de-words that took on currency and force as the process unfolded - demystification, defamiliarisation, deconstruction. The critical and creative practises those words named are all tools for undoing the oppressive of the taken-for-granted, of the special kinds of blindness that prevail in places that think of themselves as the center.

Looking in on HAT from one of the territories that has still not settled from the shockwaves - the province of literature and literary studies - I've been surprised by how much I seem to recognise. I can sum up that sense of familiarity in two paradoxes that are at the heart of The HAT Project: the residencies (placements) that draw their energy from a process of displacement; an exhibition that shifts the viewer's focus from the work to the extended, dispersed and entangled processes of working. This, I think, is where HAT plugs into the wider re-orientations I've been sketching.

In The HAT Project, a residency isn't a state where an artists settles, or takes up residence, but an engagement with an unsettling cultural other. The return passage between Australia and Britain is a journey between imaginary territitories as well as real ones, a crossing where the monolithic identities and simple oppositions of cultural memory and fantasy encounter the complex, hybrid realities of two contemporary post-colonised states. HAT opens a reflective space where those and other vesrisions of national identity - British and Australian - have the opportunity to resonate creatively and critically. Journeying out becomes an invitation to further remake and rethink where you're coming from.

That is, the kind of work that interests the devisers and curators of HAT: the work of reflection and decomposition that unfolds from the encounter with an elsewhere that has the power to shake your sense of home. And it is that work of reflection - influenced by the artist's displacement, and then given time to develop in dialogue with fellow artists and curators - that you exhibit. Not the art object isolated in its case, because objects in that sense - in their very solidity, their shapliness, their boundaries - speak of settledness, of a confidence about their and your place in the world,. What the HAT exhibition presents is not, primarily, made and finished things, but the traces of making that flows from cultural histories and archives which 'precede' the maker and object, and on into the reflective work of curators, viewers and readers that 'follows'. HAT extends the invitation, and marks out the itinerary: the participating artists have pursued their individual pathways into the new territories of the not-quite familiar, and the not-quite other, that the project has opened up to them. What holds their individual responses together is a collective working ethic based in openness, reflectiveness, and a collaborative articulation of creative processes, across a variety of border-lines: creative, geographical, and cultural. It will be fascinating to see over the next few years how the HAT model develops as it opens itself up to new arenas and complexities of cultural dialogue, in China, India, Japan, Pakistan … and beyond.

Barry Taylor is a writer and a lecturer on literary and cultural studies at Staffordshire University, UK

HAT   Here and There   Australia/UK