Good as gold

In 2021 we will celebrate Craft ACT’s 50th – golden – anniversary. Craft ACT members from the Ceramics, Glass, Metal, Textiles, and Wood mediums have helped us mark this anniversary. They have mined the Craft ACT archives and proposed defining images/moments for each of the past five decades. We remain constantly inspired by the ways that artists and designers transform raw materials and ideas into objects, spaces and buildings to creatively express layers of meaning, history and connection from the domestic to the public sphere.

In 2015, Craft ACT commissioned a survey exhibition of one of the most influential and iconic figures in the Australian craft movement, Janet DeBoos. Janet is a long-term Craft ACT member (since 1996), and friend, mentor, teacher and collaborator to many people in Canberra and across the globe.

In the first major publication that surveys her career, guest curator Peter Haynes revealed Janet's extensive and diverse career, describing her art as ‘conceptually complex, referentially rich and aesthetically beautiful’.

The exhibition catalogue is available online  and you can see recent work by Janet DeBoos in the current Craft ACT exhibition Intersections: Two artist’s approach to landscape through dialogue, making and getting lost (with contemporary visual artist Wendy Teakel).

Image: Janet DeBoos, Large Vase, 2001. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 2011. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Australia.