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JamFactory’s ‘Art Design Architecture’ Series Leads the Way

Ian Were
Eyeline 87
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From the outset of his tenure as CEO of Adelaide’s JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design in 2010, Brian Parkes had wanted to develop a series of media-specific exhibitions; each show in the series would be an authentic and scholarly exploration of a particular material. The four exhibitions would need to be both curatorially demanding and appeal to a broad audience, include a prudent mix of objects, perhaps with some tangential or poetic aspects and, importantly, tour nationally.

The material on Parkes’s mind for the first show was wood and the various ways it has been used in creative practice. Parkes explains,

 

The strategy for choosing wood was to shift the paradigm a little. JamFactory, with its craft-based workshops, had a particular set of histories and relationships and I felt that the material disciplines were a meeting place for a broader set of practices—thus the idea of art, design, architecture.

The idea gradually matured and eventually came to fruition in Wood: art design architecture, a show that toured Australia in 2013 and 2014—I saw it at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Art Museum, Brisbane in 2014.

Combining the three components in a single exhibition allowed for a more catholic exploration of JamFactory’s relationship to wood, as well as our daily interactions with it. An early question for Parkes was how you might, through a series of exhibitions, create a dialogue between people from divergent disciplines that opened up opportunities for his organisation? The idea of involving designers, architects and visual artists was that there might be longer-term benefits in these expanded networks, whether it was manufacturing components for designers, undertaking interior fitouts with architects or producing components for the work... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Catherine Truman, Some uncertain facts: spiral, cone, funnel, 2012.

Catherine Truman, Some uncertain facts: spiral, cone, funnel, 2012. From WOOD: art design architecture. Paper, card, wax, clay, plastic conduit, shell, cotton cloth, hand-carved English lime wood, 15 x 70 x 90cm. Photograph Grant Hancock.

John Wardle Architects, Shearers quarters, Tasmania 2011. Photograph Trevor Mein; Khai Liew, Julian chest, 2011

John Wardle Architects, Shearers quarters, Tasmania 2011. Photograph Trevor Mein; Khai Liew, Julian chest, 2011