CAST Gallery

Repeat Business: Tasmanian Craft and Design is the third and final in a series of exhibitions at CAST showcasing contemporary Tasmanian craft & design, supported by Arts Tasmania.  Peter Anderson, the 2009 interstate curator, is an independent writer, curator and research consultant with particular interests in visual art, craft, design and cultural policy.

Anderson’s curatorial concept developed as he travelled the state visiting shops and market stalls, studios and workshops in a research method he likens to ‘cultural tourism’. The handmade items he purchased and took back home – including a timber strainer by OSSA Design – revealed new levels of aesthetic experience through daily domestic use. He writes:

…the exhibition seeks to hold onto this concern with usefulness, but adds to that a dialogue around those shifts that occur as a work passes from hand to hand, from making to using, from the workshop to an eventual place in the routine of daily life. In doing so it necessarily opens up further issues. What sort of working (and business) strategies might be involved in developing a sustainable practice? How do particular local market conditions shape the practice, and the work that emerges from it?

Versions of new and used objects from the homes, studios and showrooms of designer/makers Peter Battaglene, Lisa Boyter, Rex Heathcote, INDECO (Patrick Senior & Mieke Senior-Loncin), Alan Livermore, OSSA Design (Karen Harvey) and Rudolf Sibrava are presented within the gallery in groupings and assemblages that celebrate the multiple in commercial design practice. The show’s title at once acknowledges the repetitive action involved in manufacturing products by hand and the financial importance of ‘return custom’ to the survival of any small design brand or business.