NEWS
22 April to 6 July 2025
Beautiful Tensions: Gray Street Workshop celebrates forty years
Jamfactory Gallery One
In celebration of Gray Street Workshop’s 40th anniversary, JamFactory presents Beautiful Tensions, a major touring exhibition honouring the momentous legacy and talent of the workshop by showcasing new work by the four current partners: Jess Dare, Lisa Furno, Sue Lorraine and Catherine Truman.
Established in 1985, Gray Street Workshop is one of Australia’s longest running collectively run studios for artists working in the field of contemporary jewellery and object making. The uncompromising commitment of this group of artists to their work and to studio-based practice has enabled Gray Street Workshop to evolve into one of Australia’s most exciting and respected workshops.
Beautiful Tensions brings together new work by the four current partners and is the culmination of two years of work and research. Witty, playful and poignant in equal measure, each body of work is distinctive, yet share certain themes and formal concerns. This timely exhibition articulates the group’s shared commitment to the value of making and the power of objects to transmit meaning. The way their shared themes are articulated so differently in the exhibition is a cogent expression of how the group works, in their own words, ‘separately together’.
The exhibition will be launched at JamFactory Adelaide before touring to 12 venues nationally across SA, VIC, TAS, NSW and QLD. It is accompanied by a 152-page hard-cover monograph, co-published by JamFactory and Wakefield Press, and written by author and Gray Street Workshop co-founder Anne Brennan.
Beautiful Tensions: Gray Street Workshop celebrates forty years is a JamFactory touring exhibition supported by the Visions of Australia touring program, an Australian Government program aiming to improve access to cultural material for all Australians.
Exhibitors: Jess Dare, Lisa Furno, Sue Lorraine, Catherine Truman
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2025
The Taken Path
The Wall Gallery, Carrick Hill.
The Taken Path by Catherine Truman in collaboration with video-poet and erstwhile neuroscientist Ian Gibbins,is a durational, site specific series of videos showing on six screens and a 4-channel soundscape presented in the Wall Gallery at Carrick Hill as part of the official visual arts program of the 2025 Adelaide Festival.
Seeded during an ANAT project Partnership for Uncertain Times, 2022-23, the artists worked together, each filming the same path that bisects the Carrick Hill estate, once a month over the course of a year. Bridging art and science, together they explored Carrick Hill’s delicate connections between human intervention and the natural environment.
November 2024
Unspoken by Jess Dare acquired by Art Gallery of South Australia
We congratulate Jess Dare on the acquisition of Unspoken from her recent exhibition A Handful of Flowers… at Funaki.
Unspoken has been acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia via a gift by the family of Adelaide artist Alice Potter. The magnificent work, which speaks of the long processes of grieving, can be seen now in Gallery 15.
AUGUST 2024
The (re)Arrangements: assembling nature
Gallery Funaki, Melbourne
The Arrangements; assembling nature, an exhibition by Catherine Truman presented at Carrick Hill Museum as an Adelaide festival event in March 2022 has been reframed for Gallery Funaki, Melbourne and introduces two new works: Black Tear Tree and White Tear Tree.
I am thrilled to present this collection at Funaki. The re-siting of the works within an elegantcontemporary domestic interior offers a rich re-contextualisation of the original themes. Shifting theemphasis to the contemporary impact of colonisation upon the land we call home.
Catherine Truman, 2024
Black Tear Tree. 2024. Wall mounted object. Olive sapling. Thermoplastic, photoluminescent powder, paint, twenty crystal-cut aquamarine stone tear drops, steel. h560xw360xd300
NOVEMBER 2023
A Handful of Flowers… by Jess Dare at Funaki
17 NOVEMBER - 23 DECEMBER, 2023
In ‘A Handful of Flowers…’ Jess Dare draws on her long interest in plant forms to explore the ways in which we use flowers as offerings to mark both the smallest and the most profound moments in our lives. In a sense, this exhibition is a kind of emotional chronicle of her own life. It brings her earliest and most joyful childhood memories of picking flowers together with the pleasure of receiving them as offerings from her own child. But it also draws on the sombre associations flowers have played in her adult experiences of grief and loss, events that are both universal and irreducibly raw and particular.
At the heart of the work is the labour invested in its making, a labour of love, certainly, but a labour that is also analogous to the hard work of grief and mourning. The fact that this work is installed in a space which is both a gallery and someone’s home is also significant: Jess treats it as a liminal space, somewhere between the private place where the emotional work of love and loss so often comes about and the outside world, the public terrain in which these profound human experiences are invested with social meaning.
Anne Brennan
Excerpt from catalogue essay
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2023
The Arrangements: assembling nature
Carrick Hill Museum
Catherine Truman responds to a year-long residency at Carrick Hill and draws on the intimate nature of this English manor home and its extensive grounds to investigate a set of complex relationships including the impact of climate change and the fragility of the natural world. The new works are integrated into the domestic spaces of the house museum positioned and alongside Carrick Hill’s unique art collection. An official 2023 Adelaide Festival Event.
Milk Jug. 2022. Found dairy cow and kangaroo bones, polymer putty, paint. h300xw360xd200
March 2022
Measured #2 by Sue Lorraine.
Gray Street Workshop is delighted to invite you to the launch of the 2022 Adelaide Fringe exhibition Measured #2
The exhibition is being shown in our specially fitted out POD and the ceremonial lifting of the roller door is on Thursday 3 March from 5.30pm to 7.30pm.
Have you ever wondered how to measure the emotions of our time? Uncertainty, intimacy, anxiety, relief, reflection, introspection and aspiration.
Measured #2 is an installation of beguiling objects that tackle that very challenge. A personal contemplation on the measurable and unmeasurable limits and margins of a world in flux.
The exhibition hours are
4-5 March 11.00 - 5.00pm
11-13 March 11.00am - 5.00pm
18-20 March 11.00am - 5.00pm
or by appointment
3/8/2020
EXCITING NEWS!!!
What better way to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Gray Street Workshop than to announce some fabulous news?
Gray Street Workshop is delighted and excited to welcome Lisa Furno as the newest workshop partner.
Lisa brings with her an understanding of issues around social and environmental responsibility and a creatively light-hearted approach to tackling weighty subjects.
Known for her bold use of colour, recycled plastics and a playful aesthetics, Lisa’s mischievous use of materials and energetic approach to making will add another dimension to the workshop.
Lisa will join Jess Dare, Catherine Truman and Sue Lorraine in running Gray Street Workshop and together the partners are looking forward to future projects, collaborations and conversations and to developing the shared and creative workshop space.
10/9/2015
Radiant Pavilion
Catherine, Sue and Jess have just returned from Melbourne where they were exhibiting Theatre of Detail at Funaki Project Space during Radiant Pavilion, a week long event includes urban interventions, performances and installations, as well as exhibitions, talks and open studios celebrating aspects of contemporary jewellery and object practice. Fingers crossed this is the first of many radiant pavilions!!!
It was an action packed week and we were thrilled to be a part of it. We had scores of people through the gallery each day and a fantastic response to our work and lots of people interested in coming an working with us at Gray Street.
Crossley Street was also being occupied by a number of New Zealand jewellers, it was so nice to spend some time with them and we are super excited about spending more time with them in their respective home towns when we take Theatre of Detail to New Zealand in March 2016.
25/3/2015
Theatrette...
Thank you to all those who attended our Theatrette during the Adelaide Fringe Festival, showing Provocations: inimitable voices, the body & progressive thinking. A film event curated by Sim Luttin and presented by Gray Street Workshop. Two programs that aim to provoke questions about art and craft practice, the body, its boundaries and innovative ways of thinking all in our very own driveway cinema!
3/3/2015
4/2/2015
This year Gray Street Workshop celebrates 30 years as an artist run space… a very good reason to celebrate and that is exactly what we are going to do!!!
Soft Landscapes
To kick the year off we have a pop up exhibition soft landscapes by workshop tenants Kelly Jonasson and Nadja Maher. The exhibition launch is this Sunday, 8 February from 2-4pm please come along and brings your friends.
Theatre of Detail
The workshop celebrations will continue throughout the year with an exciting program of exhibitions and events under the banner of Theatre of Detail.
Starting this month is the Calendar Girls Project a year-long online presentation of the work and practice of twelve alumni and tenants of the workshop, culminating in an exhibition early next year. The Theatre of Detailexhibition, new work by workshop partners Jess Dare, Sue Lorraine and Catherine Truman, will open in our gallery on 5 March and this will be followed by the Theatrette, a pop-up driveway cinema featuring a curated program of jewellery related films on 11, 12 and 18, 19 of March. Please see our website for more information.
The Calendar Girls Project is underway and the featured Calendar Girl for the month of February is Kath Inglis.
Images, film clips and fascinating insights into Kath’s practice will be up loaded onto our website, Facebook and Instagram pages over the course of the month.
Image: Gold Doily Cuff, Kath Inglis, photography by Craig Arnold
Then of course there is our regular exhibition program….and this year we have a fantastic line up including Sim Luttin (Vic.), Erin Keys (NSW), Vicki Mason (Vic.) and a vibrant exhibition of contemporary New Zealand jewellery curated by Lisa Furno.
Please keep a close eye on our website and social media pages for up-to-date information on all of our events.
The Theatre of Detail project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
