About — Island Welcome

Island Welcome a nationally touring group exhibition exploring contemporary jewellery as a gesture of welcome, curated by Belinda Newick, seeks to bring attention to asylum seeker issues and to extend the dialogue beyond art and craft audiences via expressions of Australian values through craft practice.

With reference to welcome garlands gifted in many traditional islander cultures, each artist has made a neckpiece, lei, or garland interpreting the theme of welcome whilst considering current Australian immigration policies.

Island Welcome provides for the inclusion of diverse yet collegiate voices, making objects that predominantly share a dialogue with the body and communicate at a physical level. There is an insight and intrinsic material specificity that each artist brings to the making process, informed by years of tacit knowledge. The exhibition explores what is inherent in the selection of materials, the careful conceptual considerations, and decisions that preclude the hand-making labour of threading a shell onto a silk cord, soldering a link in a chain, soaking, dyeing, and manipulating found materials to achieve the desired form.

Many of the garlands express ideas that address how current immigration policies misrepresent the humanist values of welcome and acceptance that continue to be expressed in popular rhetoric of Australian values. The artists use the narrative potential of each distinct garland to encapsulate a complex visual language and to express the emotions felt by the maker during the process.

Via this gentle activist enactment, the artists present their gestures of welcome, thereby contributing to the topic's political, social, and cultural currency.

© Belinda Newick

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Thanks/Acknowledgments:

There are many people who have contributed to the creation of this creative artefact and exegetical research with thoughtful advice, support, guidance and practical, digital and photography skills including:

Radiant Pavilion Directors Chloë Powell, Claire McArdle, Nico Kelly, Emily Sharp, Ben Keenan, Fred Kroh, Gemma Jones, Dr Kevin Murray, Kirrily Hammond, Jana Favero ASRC, Lisa Cahill ADC, Mandy Paul Migration Museum S.A., Rebecca Evans AGSA, Meiying Saw, Abbi and Piea Kelly, Caz Guiney Melbourne Polytechnic, Dr Adam Casey, Dr Livia Rezende, Dr Bin Dixon Ward, Dr Ben Cittadini, Dr Fiona Wahr, Dr Rohan Nicol, Margaret Hancock Davis Jamfactory SA, Sara Lindsay, Jess Lilley, Second stitch, Jess Ramsey, Dr Jemma Purdey, Thelma John.

Azizeh Astaneh, Radiant Pavilion Melbourne Contemporary Jewellery and Object Biennial, Craft Victoria, Australian Design Centre and the Migration Museum/History Trust of SA, the ASRC Victoria and, Gallery Central Perth WA. Indian Ocean Craft Triennial, Country Arts SA, Lauren Mustillo, Murray Bridge Regional Gallery SA