This exhibition brings together the work of RMIT Gold and Silversmithing alumni who completed within the six year period between 2018–2023, a stretch of time that encompassed the COVID 19 pandemic — an acutely challenging and impactful era of our lives as a global society.

As I took in the breadth of work created, I didn’t find a prevalence of themes related to the pandemic, the traces of fear, trauma and isolation that many of us experienced. Of course that’s not to say it wasn’t there, but what has come forth in this work is something different. I wondered about this, and thought perhaps more of the positive aspects that glowed through this giant, challenging shift in our ways of living and being were presenting themselves in this collection? Through resourcefulness, resilience, and a looking to what is at hand to create and maintain our crucibles of wonder and hope. The way stillness encourages you to sit and to be with what is, and to let your glow make its way to the surface, like a bubble of air slowly releasing from the cavities of a coral bank, or water finding lower ground, making its way back to source.

For me this is much like what working in the studio brings. It is a microcosm, a contained space, where the ways the larger world has entered you surface through the alchemy of it mixing with the stuff of which you are made, and the substances you reach for with which to create. In this space so many things coalesce and collide: the colour of the sky, the music you woke up with in your head, a lifetime of embodied energies and swirling, shifting memories, a recent phone call from an old friend, the breeze buffeting the blind on the window behind you, that makes you turn and notice the afternoon sunlight hitting the wall in a way that reminds you of last summer. You sit, and you feel, and then you pick up your materials and see. And in this stirring of a world within a world, things surface and we nurture them into life. These are the treasures that become treasures. And maybe in the darkness and fire, or the dullness and the monotony, or just the quiet, there is a spirit that has a chance to come to bear, either through challenge, or longing or just being given the space to step into — perhaps the most generous of offerings. A lot of the world can be this way — watch and wait and something will emerge, the fruits of patience, and of grace.

In the artist’s studio it’s where you might meet something from yourself that feels like a visitor but which couldn't be more essential to ourselves and is at the same time part of everyone. It brings to mind the largest known organism on earth — Pando, that appears to be a forest of forty seven thousand Quaking Aspen trees but is actually one individual tree, a multitude of above ground expressions connected by one root system. So looking at this collection of work, I feel blessed with the opportunity to step back and absorb the creativity, dedication and personal alchemy of all these individuals, both in the intensity of forced isolation, or the general solitude of artistic practice, bringing their glows to the surface, connected by a source, the gentle fire that feeds them all.

The extraordinary breadth of themes, materials and processes engaged with in this collection is something to behold. It is a celebration of what is possible. When asked recently about why I chose to study gold and silversmithing, the words wrote themselves — ‘because I thought it showed the most potential for nuanced expression of all the material arts’. This exhibition lays bare what I find so special about this studio area, its potential for a sensitive fluency with materials and processes that are yours for the dreaming-up. I see original and deeply personal innovations, realised through embodied skill and visionary dedication.

These themes include: personal ritual, our perceptions and experiences of ‘nature’ including critiques of the relationship between the human and more-than-human natural world, and grief filled reflections on the damage that our species has caused, relationships between technology, society and the body, and the powerful influence that machines, devices and the digital realm have on our ways of being and seeing, and our very perception of what our world is and could be, performativity, body image, impermanence and the effects of time, the notion and experience of the self and identity, cultural identity and cross-cultural and personal experiences of the Australian landscape, personal trauma, the ephemeral and material trace, fan culture, and the symbolism of bananas.

This wonderfully diverse array of themes are made manifest through both new and traditional techniques such as forging, fabrication, enamelling, 3D printing, casting, electroforming, hand-weaving and new processes brought into being in order to realise the creation of new materials. These materials, when taken in as a collection, present like a treasure trove: soap, shell, resin, brass, paint, paper, textiles, aluminium, silk, plastics, snakeskin, glass, cardboard, silicone, silver, vitreous enamel, rice, soil, copper, horse hair, coffee grinds. Each material a world of its own, conjuring a multitude of meanings, textures and associations.

Here I see a reaching out towards materials as an effort to know the world, where the way we speak about our experiences through artmaking might find nuanced expression in the very substances from which our world is made. These material voices are invited in, and merge with us in our creations through deepening attunement and artistry. It is a moving in and stretching out, a breathing across the boundaries of self and other. Perhaps the more we come to see our interconnectedness with our environments, both human and more-than-human, the more we might understand that what we touch and feel around us is a part of us. And the more it might become drawn into the way we speak — like gesturing with our own hands. We are brought closer to our world through this, the world we were given and the one we are creating, for all the feelings this may inspire. It is a catalogue of beauty, aspiration, caution, grief and regret. But I see great hope there, because to speak with the materials of the world, and to draw them into our personal dimensions, frames all things on earth as continuous, and surely with that comes responsibility, compassion and care. That is certainly what I feel when I take in the work of these artists.

Wattle is blooming as I write this, spilling gold through the trees and lacing the edges of creeks and rivers with its glow. It is Spring, or True Spring in the Wurundjeri perspective of seasons, which brings an abundance of life to the surface, and such a fitting time for this exhibition, also a blooming. It brings the work of many students who didn’t have the opportunity to exhibit their graduation folios due to the lockdowns, into the shared space of community.

Is sharing an inherent part of the artistic process? I have heard that for some artists, they feel this is not so. But I think perhaps for most of us, it is important to share our work, that part of the creation of our work is bound, in a circular way with its emergence into the greater world, where it can nourish and enrich the evolution and experience of culture. I know as someone experiencing the art that others have made, how enormously important it is for us to keep stirring the coals of our hearts and imaginations through it. For emerging artists it grounds those early steps in a career, forging connections with a growing artistic community, and helping to mature a relationship with public presentation. This exhibition has created a space for these important moments of connection and development to play out. It is a pooling of years and years of work, of artistic gestation, now blooming and igniting a live community engagement around it. It brings with it a sense of abundance, and I hope and imagine a momentum, on which many future seasons of glowing work will be bouyed.