The Crafter's Way - Wallpaper Project

This week's Messenger's column.



What’s On at Artisan

When we were looking to buy our first home we found the perfect house for our needs. Perfect, except for one thing, every room was wallpapered. Images of peeling early 70’s wallpaper came to me from the recesses of my memory. Not something I could live with.

“The Wallpaper Project”, an exhibition at Artisan, will challenge all our preconceptions about wallpaper design. The exhibition of contemporary art pieces will expose the latest designs of seven well-known Australian Artists; Rob MacHaffie, Anne Wallace (in collaboration with Aaron Hill), Lisa Radford, Simon Mee, Tiffany Shafran, Sadie Chandler and Megan Keating.

















The exhibition is the result of collaboration between Simon Mee and William Wilding. They explored the concept of applying stunning contemporary art to traditional wallpaper processes. Tired of “clean, white box style of interior design” Mee believes that “wallpaper has ways of interacting with the space and transforming it”. Accompanying the exhibition is a new retail range of unique wallpapers. The range of styles will suit rooms from the nursery to the most avant garde parlour, and are at home in spaces ranging between the highly contemporary and the ultra-traditional.

Also exhibiting at artisan is Deirdre Feeney’s Double Bill. Dierdre is an emerging artist who merges glass and projected moving images to explore the overlapping of
architecture and memory. For this exhibition Deirdre has created small replicas of the Sun Theatre in Yarraville and the Valhalla in Northcote, after she fell in love with their Art Deco details. She builds them in glass then projects images of the buildings' histories - a kind of moving ghost story - onto them, "like a collected fantasized memory," she says.

Artisan's exhibition space is a leader in the presentation of quality crafted design. Artisan offers a stimulating program of innovative work from Queensland, Australian and international craft and design practitioners. Their opening hours are 10:30am - 5:30pm Tuesday to Friday and 10:00am - 4:00pm Saturday. Exhibitions continue until Dec 24th.

Read more of The Crafter's Way here