Subscribed | 2026 Craft + Design Canberra Annual Members Exhibition
Image | Ruth Hingston Π Pie 2026 | Photograph Tim Brook
Exhibition | Subscribed | 2026 Craft + Design Canberra Annual Members Exhibition
Artists | Amy Schleif, Angharad Dean, Anna Williams, Brenda Runnegar, Cathy Franzi, Debra Jurss, Elliott Fox, Fran Romano, Harrison Le Lievre, Isaac Kozlovskis, Jo Victoria, Julie Bradley, Lisa Cahill, Lynn Petersen, Madeline Cardone, Melanie Olde, Melinda Capp, Michele Grimston, Monique van Nieuwland, Rosalie Rose, Rosalie Ryan, Rozalie Sherwood, Ruth Hingston, Sarit Cohen, Sharon Peoples, Sue Hewat, Sue Peachey, Susan Buret, Suzanne Knight, Taryn Powick and Ximena Natanya Briceño
Dates | 24 September – 24 October 2026
Opening | Thursday 24 September. Artist Talks from 5:30pm. Opening from 6pm. Official Speeches from 6:30pm | RSVP here
Subscribed is the name and theme of the 2026 Craft + Design Canberra Annual Members Exhibition. From trends and traditions to tools, techniques and social currents, our creative lives are shaped by influence. Sometimes we inherit it. Sometimes we resist it. Sometimes we quietly reinvent it for ourselves.
This year, the Craft + Design Canberra Annual Members Exhibition invites our community of artists and makers to explore the idea of following. What guides our hands, habits and decisions? What do we hold onto, and what do we leave behind?
Featuring contemporary craft and design from across the ACT and surrounding region, the exhibition brings together diverse practices that blend time honoured techniques with fresh ideas and experimental approaches. Together, the exhibition offers a snapshot of contemporary making that is thoughtful, playful and at times quietly subversive.
Artist Statements
Amy Schleif
The word subscribed is not one that I have thought of directly when making my work; however, it is a delightful consideration. My work is thematically grounded in the awareness of our perspectives and how they can shift our identity if we have the willingness and the opportunity to change them.
In the proposed work for this exhibition, I specifically looked at the idea of the ripples caused by our behaviour patterns and the impact they have on those around us. If we are aware of this impact, do we let that inform how we behave in our communities? Or do we choose ignorance and complacency to soothe our discomfort in being challenged?
I like to present an opportunity to the viewer to consider their perspectives and willingness to change the way they think and consider alternative thought and behaviour patterns.
The work is technically simple; they are drawings. However, using glass as a substrate gives a contemporary layer of context of fragility, transparency and reflection to the thematic foundation and takes full advantage of how glass captures and holds light.
Angharad Dean
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
As an artist and maker I am constantly exploring techniques that other artists use and combining them in new and unique ways. When an idea is flowing my work takes on a life of its own, where the accepted rules of a process do not determine the outcome. Just as Thoreau in his long contemplation of nature at Walden Pond eschewed following others, so in my art, whilst I learn from others, many others, I follow my own way. Thus I have embraced, indeed subscribed to, the possibilities of mixing thread, paint, ink, canvas, paper, fabric, all materials that are flexible and can flow, following an idea.
I make art using colour and the illusion of movement. I use painting, printing, drawing, collage and stitch, both hand and machine embroidery, to create layered and sometimes three-dimensional representations of the world. I prefer to reuse, recycle and repurpose wherever possible, and my art is often an assemblage of different rescued materials, including my own previous failures. I do not concern myself with rules about process; I let the idea make the art.
My latest body of three-dimensional pieces has added the fourth dimension of time to the work itself, so it is experienced by walking around it, as light passes through or over it, or as it rotates in space.
Anna Williams
This intricate wall-hung moon bowls explores dissent as an act of disruption, challenging the bowl’s traditional associations with containment and functionality. Instead, the work embraces the tension of a suspended, wall-hung work and invites close looking, revealing that dissent can be both confrontational and subtle.
Brenda Runnegar
My ability to translate my style and iconography into a variety of media is central to my artistic evolution. Piet Mondrian was a pioneering Dutch abstract artist best known for founding “Neo-Plasticism”, in which he reduced his artistic vocabulary to straight horizontal and vertical lines, right angles, and a palette of black, white and primary colours (red, blue and yellow) to reflect universal spiritual harmony. He has long been a favourite of mine and an influence on my work.
I have been knitting ever since I was a child and thought, therefore, that it was time I used my skills in knitting to overlap into my art practice. The Mondrian-inspired throw rug has been handmade by me and fulfils the theme of the exhibition Subscribed by adhering to a known brand or design.
Cathy Franzi
The work I am submitting relates to themes of plants, environment and landscapes, which are all topics evident in my social media follows and membership subscriptions. I seek them out in images, ideas and in real life. They feed my creativity and keep me excited to make.
I also keep an eye on artists exploring similar themes or perhaps something completely different. Encased by a rush of colours, patterns, structure, representation and abstraction in a moment of scrolling, one hint of resonance might spark a new way of thinking about my own work. Or it might disappoint and despair both inwards and outwards. Imitation and trend desire just lead to feelings of dissatisfaction.
But the next scroll, the next subscription to a podcast or, even better, the personal meeting with members of a group I subscribe to, often leads to fresh ideas, hope and the wonder of how much information and visual feasting we have access to.
Debra Jurss
Does it have to:
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be untouchable?
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look like glass?
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be “acceptably” polished?
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stay the same?
I don’t think so
Elliott Fox
My current series focuses on greyhounds as individuals and family members, and how this conflicts with their commoditisation by the dog racing gambling industry. As part of my advocacy, I create subtle, soulful and thought-provoking works respecting the sentience of all non-human animals.
Dog #128 / Calais Magic (2025) is a mixed-media work which asks the audience to consider that a dog lead isn’t always just used to “lead” or take care of dogs, but in the context of dog racing it is used to “control” and ultimately lead the dog to its death. As the audience’s attention is guided up and down the dog lead, they are provided with additional focal points—the noose, the distressed dog tag, the human death toe tag, the wooden hand with red nail polish, and the $20 note.
In memory of Calais Magic, the 128th dog to die on a racetrack in Australia in 2024 for the sole purpose of gambling. He was only two years old and died in South Australia.
enddogracing #petsnotbets #saintgrey
Fran Romano
I'm subscribed to following my instincts now. Just allowing myself to be playful and do what feels right for me. What I am drawn to is exploring materials, and spaces. And not wasting things. Re-purposing and re-using found materials, or my own works. Is this a trend? Probably. Has it always been me though? Yes. So, in my own way, I'm ignoring trends - there are too many distractions. Just sticking with self-expression is enough to grapple with anyway.
Harrison Le Lievre
In Australia, we are increasingly subscribed to a fast-fashion culture of disposable identities: clothing designed to be worn once and discarded. In contrast, the traditional formal suit is tailored to its wearer, intended to be repaired, adjusted, maintained and worn for life.
Tent Suit fuses these ideas together, adopting the form and ethos of the traditional suit while constructing it from second-hand, broken outdoor equipment. By transforming discarded products into a tailored garment, it challenges the disposable nature of contemporary fashion and proposes an alternative relationship with clothing, materials and consumption.
Isaac Kozlovskis
Historically the text on bricks has been used to assert ownership over place. How can we confront the politics of these everyday objects?
Jo Victoria
A walk on the beach always brings inspiration to my studio making. I am particularly drawn to weathered surfaces and broken shells and bones washed up with the tides. Narratives of experiences and evidence of place are written into these objects. Landscapes carry stories of time and connection as well.
The whiteness and translucency of unglazed porcelain capture some of the material qualities of beach finds. Porcelain sculptural works feel fossil-like in the way that they capture the life essence of once-living things in this environment.
I use light in my work to portray a sense of ephemerality. The way light interacts with the materiality of porcelain enhances ideas of fragility, strength and the influences of deep time. This work represents a resistance of sorts to traditional functional clay making.
Vessels that carry only light and air, forms that reveal details of natural things, and surfaces that spike and weave a magic of fragile strength.
Lea Durie
Do We Have All We Need? illuminates human and more-than-human ecosystems of matter in the suburbs. Informed by fieldwork, material exploration and queer perspectives, the work investigates what are the essentials of life for all living beings.
With architectural references, local McNamara clay, rock, and housing construction waste, collected on daily walks, become part of the work, bringing attention to the interwoven connections between beings in the suburbs.
Lisa Cahill
Against the Current explores the idea of dissent through the unpredictable nature of glass. I began with a clear idea of how the form would move, but as the glass responded to heat and gravity, it shifted in a completely different direction. Rather than forcing it back to my original plan, I allowed the material to lead. The resulting form is a record of that resistance, a reminder that sometimes the most interesting outcomes happen when we let go of control.
Lynn Petersen
Subscribe: To sign with one’s own hand; to give consent to something written, or to bind oneself by writing one’s name beneath. (Webster’s Dictionary)
How many times have I signed my name to support a cause? Have I offered active or passive agreement? If I sign a petition, do I then go on to take action? Or is the act of signing enough to show my commitment (or assuage my guilt)?
Is this commitment endorsed in pencil or pen? That is, do I intend to take action, or can my endorsement be easily erased or forgotten?
Melanie Olde
The creation of my work fuses traditional and contemporary practices, processes, and perspectives. Within my practice, weaving is a technology and craft influenced by thousands of years of human culture, identity and intelligence. I overlay this historical embodiment with my contemporary data and digital-driven perspectives, viewing my work as a collaboration of human technology, natural systems and unscripted emergence.
My woven artworks question the loom as a processor to understand the natural world through human technology. Natural systems contain underlying complexity of data and encoding to grow and develop. What emergent outcomes could result if a human imitated those systems and created objects using our own technological system of weaving?
This work is influenced by and infused with plant growth patterns. Taking measurements from local plants, I interpret the data through woven algorithms. By using data and information from plants and the loom processor, I aim to understand natural systems, and to weave together multiple intelligences to build emergent knowledge.
Melinda Capp
My work focuses on a world beneath the ocean’s surface. Marine inhabitants are the true stewards of the sea; they are native dwellers, living in perfect harmony with the tides and anchoring together in a delicate, interconnected community. Here, nestled among shifting clusters of clam shells, molluscs and swaying seaweed, lies a breathtaking, hidden underwater garden.
I create contemporary wearables using the ancient metal craft of chasing and repoussé. My present focus is on designing and creating jewellery that is inspired by marine life, its beauty and fragility. The work has a tangible, tactile quality, which acts as a conduit between viewer, wearer and the stories I create in metal.
Michele Grimston
Being in the World is part of an ongoing series of explorations of the power of slow textile processes to reconnect us with the physical world around us. Through a meditative process of walking, exploring, collecting and stitching, these works are built up over time, alongside a deeper relationship to my local environment.
An exercise in paying attention to where I am and a refusal to subscribe to a culture of attention fragmentation.
Monique van Nieuwland
Whenever I create work, be it conceptual or practical, I subscribe to quality and experimental work that makes people think.
In my practice, I also weave scarves. I consider these to be exercises and experimentations with materials, texture, drape and colour. The work that I will create for the members’ exhibition is about this ordinary textile: a scarf. Rather than it being a scarf in itself, it is the ‘idea of a scarf’. It is an abstract piece of weaving which honours the clever use of materials and design as used by so many creators who weave scarves.
This piece is part of a body of work, simply cloth, which will be exhibited in the Netherlands in 2027.
Rosalie Rose
This work is my act of being subscribed; subscribed to time, to care, to shared making. Over many months of repetition, I committed to slow stitch as a daily subscription to attention. Antique kantha cloth, made by women in Bangladesh and India, forms the petals and indigo-dyed, handwoven mud cloth from communities in Mali forms the backing upon which the flower sits. By stitching into these textiles, I subscribe myself to a similar practice: working with my hands to create something soft and lasting.
Like grains of rice, these stitches hold a space where my inner child and patience can meet; a daily subscription to presence. They sit on the cusp of centrality and insignificance, where balance and chaos coexist. Amid the pace of the modern world, Giant Flower has given me an unlimited subscription to care and wonder, offering a connection point to the child archetype that asks for conscious recognition.
Rosalie Ryan
My work for Subscribed explores refusal and resistance within material practice. Resin is often associated with predictable processes: pouring into moulds, setting, and polishing into glossy, uniform surfaces. In my practice, I deliberately work against these expectations. I shape resin in its transitional state, pushing, folding, and sculpting it to create forms that feel organic, unfamiliar, and slightly unruly.
This approach reflects my interest in not subscribing to the established norms of the material. Rather than following the conventions of resin craft, I treat the medium as something alive and negotiable, responding to its behaviour moment by moment. I often pair resin with unexpected materials or structures, testing how different elements interact and what new forms can emerge when the rules are loosened.
The works I am developing for this exhibition, whether they take the shape of blooms, hybrid organisms, or entirely new species, sit within an imagined ecology shaped by experimentation rather than tradition. They reflect a practice that values curiosity over repetition, and material exploration over trend. In this way, my response to Subscribed is a quiet resistance: a commitment to doing things differently, and to allowing form to evolve outside the systems we usually follow.
Rozalie Sherwood
Having left behind the world of fashion with its demand for precision, perfection and control, I have chosen to follow a more intuitive approach in my artwork. What once felt important now feels limiting. I no longer seek flawless outcomes or polished surfaces; instead, I am drawn to spontaneity, instinct and the unexpected.
My practice is guided by feeling rather than formula, allowing the work to evolve naturally through process and experimentation. In every item I make, I search for a language that feels personal and unresolved, something that cannot be easily replicated or defined. Originality is important to me, and it comes from trusting intuition and embracing uncertainty.
I am deeply inspired by material excess and the overlooked fragments of everyday life. I love using what I find around me—discarded objects, remnants, textures and materials that carry traces of use and memory. These elements become part of an ongoing conversation between destruction and renewal, chaos and beauty. Through this process, I create work that feels raw, immediate and alive, reflecting a desire to move away from perfection and closer to authenticity, curiosity and emotional truth.
Ruth Hingston
Watching a film about the mathematician Alan Turing, I was curious about the ways 0s and 1s are represented in binary code. In knitting I could use purl and plain stitches or different coloured yarns. A knitting pattern uses the oldest programming language in the world: it has all the key features of an algorithmic process. For this reason, I thought I should try a pattern generated by a computer program and executed by me, a person, not a computer.
Trying to knit the binary expansion of an irrational number, π, will never end. And, as a knitter, I was intrigued by the idea of a pattern with no predictable pattern. Since π was originally defined as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, I knitted the expansion of π as a circle.
This is a case of irrational knitting: a pie made from π! The filling is the first part of the binary expansion of π, knitted in three colours of wool: white for 1, black for 0 and red for the binary point. The number of stitches in each row is calculated to produce a reasonable approximation of a circle. The pie crust is knitted and the base is crocheted in orange wool. I serve the pie on a white china plate to complete this whimsical exploration.
Sharon Peoples
This work had its origins in CraftACT’s 2020 Residency Program at Namadgi. The partner institution was the National Museum of Australia, where I examined the wet specimen collections of thylacines as well as thylacine skins. Research underpinned the bodies of work that stemmed from this program.
In responding to the environment at Namadgi at the Ready-Cut Cottage, I began to use gardening gloves as a motif to indicate the care taken in the regeneration of the former farmland. Most of our national parks are worked by hand. They are essentially gardened. The gardening gloves I stitched were initially two-dimensional but over the years have become more sculptural.
The demise of thylacines was due to a concerted effort by the wool industry. This is well documented. Hence, the use of wool in embroidered gloves. These gloves were very difficult to construct and embroider. In my frustration, they lay in the storage cupboard until this year when I rediscovered them and I could now finish them with some new skills I had curiously picked up through bookbinding.
Sue Hewat
Subscribed: is to have an agreement with or belief in an idea; or to mark with one’s signature. I subscribe to the notion that most artistic endeavours are influenced by observing imagery and visual ideas that coalesce, producing work that ultimately becomes the signature concept of the artist.
In these contexts, the concept behind my work is the pictorial representation of the beachscape and the ebb and flow of the tide. I am influenced by the lines, layers, textures and colours that make up the essence of the Australian beach. This concept has become my signature for creating art.
I combine traditional wheel-thrown clay vessels and contemporary image making to portray a modern abstract impression of the beach. This work, Into the Deep, is from my Coastal Collection. To give fluidity and movement on two wheel-thrown tall porcelain vessels, I have combined coloured painterly monoprints with horizontal sgraffito lines, giving the impression of coastal waters and tidal waves lapping the shore. The shallow bowl represents the sand. Mid-sea blue glaze brings the three vessels together.
Overall, as my signature, I aim to produce an impression of the lines, layers and colours of fluctuating sea, sand and tidelines.
Sue Peachey
Lost in the backstreets of Kyoto, I noticed a handmade ceramic cat sitting outside an antique shop with some plants and other sculptures. This maneki-neko is very different from the shiny, brightly coloured, mass-produced kitties, with their mechanical waving arms, that I’ve seen in the stores. Large, with rough fur, a strong arm held aloft with a curled paw in a gesture of welcome, its open, inquisitive face, blue eyes and rough fur are grimy and worn from life on the street.
Japanese folk tales of maneki-neko, or the lucky cat, tell of an encounter with a cat, the paw raised in a beckoning gesture, and a subsequent lucky escape or good fortune. They emphasise the value of offering hospitality and refuge to strangers and that, through the act of spreading goodwill, good things will come back to you.
This work evokes the Japanese practice of Utsushi, a long-standing artistic tradition in Japan. Rather than simple imitation, Utsushi preserves tradition while allowing the artist to reinterpret it in contemporary contexts. The Lovecat is streetwise, the arm signaling welcome, and pink for romance because being lucky in love is really the best kind of luck you can get.
Susan Buret
I am an avid gardener. I am interested in the forms and colours found in my garden. Fragmented impressions from daily observations of the garden shape my works as these perceptions guide my hands to make marks and form the clay. As such, I subscribe to my garden as a source of joy, comfort, inspiration and as an antidote to news of the world around me.
Using mid-fired clay and porcelain, I work with underglaze to make painted patterns, exploring the relationship between pattern and form.
Suzanne Knight
In this work, I reflect on the legacies we inherit. Drawing on my colonial ancestry, I’ve explored how migration, identity, tradition, and a need to belong continues to shape us today. Early settlers carried familiar plants, seeds, crafts, and habits across oceans to recreate their homeland in a foreign environment. In doing so, they transformed Australian ecosystems, contributing to the displacement and loss of native habitats and the spread of invasive weeds.
The tartan pattern references my ancestral heritage, while its colours are derived from invasive weeds including St John’s wort, Paterson’s curse, mullein, ivy and saffron thistle, all originally planted in recreating an ‘English’ garden in settler Australia. By using these weeds as a source of natural dye, I’m highlighting the relationship between place, belonging and the unintended impacts on native environments.
I am interested in the choices people make, and how these decisions may create lasting cultural and environmental legacies. Contained within the silhouette of a plastic bottle, the tapestry links colonial migration to modern patterns of consumption, waste and material excess, where our current habits of ownership and consumerism have already impacted future generations through climate change, urban sprawl, ocean pollution, habitat loss and species extinction.
Taryn Powick
Unceded (On Another Frequency) considers the tension between belonging and individuality. Among a river of noise and undulations, individual feathers interrupt the pattern and resisting conformity. The work reflects on what we choose to follow, what we absorb from those around us, and what we retain as our own.
Bloom (Beyond the Packaging) reflects on what can happen when we move beyond the structures and expectations we have followed. A rigid, contained form is overtaken by colour, feathers and an emerging porcelain rose. A celebration of allowing curiosity and creative independence to take up space.
Ximena Natanya Briceño
Born in the USA in 1970 and an Australian citizen since 2009, I have held a lifelong fascination with Peruvian filigree jewellery and its origins. I am interested in the history, social history and technical aspects of filigree making in objects and jewellery.
I have a longstanding interest in adornment, jewellery, the manufacturing process and the origin stories of objects and images. My practice examines the histories and cultural iconography, both sacred and secular, embedded in making. Working across diverse materials, I embrace the possibilities of new technologies alongside traditional and innovative metalsmithing techniques.
My work is informed by ideas of nature’s finite resources, climate change and colour, and explores the passage of time through Indigenous and colonial images and histories. I investigate precious materials and commodities as they are manifested in objects, alongside the ephemera of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Landscape and geography are also important, offering ways to explore location, migration and identity.