Tuesday 10 June 2025, 5pm (AEST), 4:30pm South Australia, 3pm Western Australia
Register on Zoom here
Join Tara Poole from WoCCA and Creative Ballarat for a discussion on the merits, pitfalls and power of collaboration between artists, between mediums and what collaboration can really mean.
A rural view – ceramicist Ruby Pilven, owner/founder of the Ross Creek Gallery, Haddon, rural Victoria and on Wadawurrung country. Ruby has been involved in ceramics from an early age. Ruby studied a double degree in Business (marketing) and Visual Arts (printmaking) at Monash University. She is the instigator of the Infuse collaborative art prize which calls on partners to create a work together, linking different mediums and styles. Ruby will discuss the power of working with artists all across the country to create new works, and the influence of her father master potter Peter Pilven who died suddenly in December 2024.
A regional view – Meanjin-based artist and curator Carol McGregor is of Wadawurrung (Kulin Nation) and Scottish descent and is a possum skin cloak maker, painter, printmaker and sculptor. Carol engages with cultural practitioners, archives and material collections to visually activate memories and sustain intergenerational transmission of Indigenous knowledge systems. Her recent art practice revives the traditional possum skin cloak as a contemporary art form and a way to collaborate with and strengthen community and individual identities. She is currently a lecturer at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
A national view – Susan Luckman is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Founding Director of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3), and the Cultural and Creative Industries Research Platform Leader of the EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia. Susan is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar whose research brings a feminist materialist lens to the study of creative employment and the cultural meanings associated with being a creator. Susan will be discussing the implications of craftpeople working within the industry in Australia, the loss of skills and what craftpeople in Australia are seeking.
The image above is of the 2024 Infuse Art Prize winners, a piece which is also showing in Craft Lab 2025. Infuse was an inaugural program run by Ruby Pilven in her gallery which encouraged collaboration between artists. This image is of the winning work.
Emma Stoneman & Cameron Ross, Looking up; looking down, 70 cm h x 70 cm w x 50 cm d, mild steel, aluminium, copper, ink, lacquer, $900
Artist Statement:
What percolates beneath the hum of a city, its windowless buildings, and ruminating doors? In a post caffeinated conversation, two long-term friends lowered their guards momentarily. In a brief exchange, their shared story, now connected them with a mutual understanding.
Halfway along Dawson Street, to their left, a cluster of buildings, an unnoticeable charm, in their drab and tired exteriors. The artists used this memory and moment for the inspiration of ‘Looking Up; Looking Down’. During periods of challenge and isolation, Stoneman looked up and Ross looked down.
Their separate worlds of printmaking and sculpture, combined to fuse both practices, jointly exploring the body as a vessel with buildings as metaphor. The discarded, tarnished warehouse, a suitable roofline and a tapered, non-descript form, coated with a colour resembling bitumen. Burnished and etched, are lines scratched deep into a hard, steel façade. With occasional adornment of lofty and light cumulus clouds, an optimism and resilience, emanates quietly beneath a windowless chamber.
Meeting regularly at their ‘local’, similarly aided by caffeine, the artists developed initial concepts in the environs where the original exchange took place. As the testing of materials, forms and techniques progressed, the meeting place changed to Ross’s studio, and the beverages at times turned alcoholic! The frequency of meetings increased, and discoveries both in the work and the shared experience deepened. Final details were completed remotely (through necessity), over the oceans, via screens and postal services. Both artists consider the work unified in terms of contribution and personal gravitas.
