Grace Cochrane
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

The role of the real

My task is to provide a curatorial perspective on the themes of this conference, that is, a particular view of the changing nature of the crafts, their relationship to new technologies and their place in our lives. As a curator working with objects, I think I deal with the real and to me the crafts have always been to do with that. But what, in our changing technological world, is the role of the real, and what is, in fact, real?

What is being challenged here? What is meant by a crafts approach to making or working with anything? At the outset, I need to explain my understanding of what I think we are talking about. A crafts approach to me is the development of ideas through a skilled interaction with materials and the technologies associated with them. It isn’t to do with virtuoso skills alone – traditional or digital – or great ideas without satisfactory resolution. It is a combination of ideas and know-how, skills and imagination, generally built up over a considerable time. The values of a crafts approach might apply equally to writing, film-making, digital technology or painting as to the more commonly identified crafts of working with clay, metal, wood, glass or fibre. The interaction between ideas, skills and materials has always been a very tangible and often emotional relationship, both for the people making objects in this way, through feeling, touching, shaping and reshaping, and for people who use them for functional and symbolic purposes. A crafts approach involves a physical as well as an intellectual understanding of what one is working with.

But first, I’d like to take a detour, or a side-track around ‘the real’. Right in the heart of Sydney, is the 283-hectare (700-acre) Rookwood Necropolis, the largest cemetery in the southern hemisphere. In the spring, its gentle hills are covered with a carpet of now rare native grasses and sweet-smelling South African freesias, as well as here and there some very old English heritage roses and very Australian eucalypts and acacias. In 1862 this Victorian-style cemetery was marked out for nine religious denominations, but now caters for around eighty. There are 650,000 bodies and 200,000 ashes interred there. It is like a town: there are streets with signs directing the visitor to suburbs of for example, Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Greek Orthodox, as well as war memorials, all with characteristic headstone styles and forms of inscription, from huge vaults with impressive urns and columns to simple crosses and humble stones.

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It is like a town, but to me it is more like a museum. I’ve always thought that botanic gardens, zoos and cemeteries are like museums. Each has specialist collections. They are all to do with acquisition, classification, registration and conservation. Each has layout plans of their displays for audiences and a range of labels from title panels to theme labels and individual object labels. They have people like curators who manage the information about the collections and guides to show people round. They have friends’ groups and sponsorship programs. Zoos have loans and gardens have merchandising in the form of seeds and propagated cuttings. Gardens and cemeteries have permanent, not temporary, exhibitions, of course. You can’t move the objects around. However, they do offer thematic interpretation through tours that cross the whole place: at Rookwood you can select from the Irish Tour, Plague and Pestilence, Ships and Shipwrecks, Our ANZAC Heritage, Murder and Mayhem, Our Convict Heritage and Flowers, Gardens and Symbolism.