Fresh!

DESIGN
FRESH!
Craft Victoria, city, until January 24

Jewellery designer Lisa Van Sinderen received the Fresh Award for 2003, which was judged by Susan Cohn, one of Australia's leading designers.

Furniture is also included. Lisa Vincitorio, a graduate of industrial design at RMIT University, is represented by Revolution, a doughnut-shaped seat made in high-density foam, plywood and silver polyurethane fabric.

Designed with a central table that also acts as a light (not included in the exhibition), Vincitorio's design comfortably seats six people.

Instead of her fluorescent, silicone jewellery, Sinderen, a Monash University graduate, created a set of exquisite skin-tone pieces in the form of cuffs that stretch over the hand.

With their thorn-like scales and vertebrate-like protrusions, Sinderen's cuffs raise the issue of genetic engineering.

One cuff includes several loose bands, resembling delicate folds in the skin.

Run by Craft Victoria and sponsored by Multiplex, the Fresh Award attracts Victoria's most talented students from a broad range of disciplines: jewellery and glass, ceramics, furniture and textiles.

Seventeen selectors visited graduate shows at universities and TAFEs in all parts of Victoria and selected 24 students with the freshest ideas.

Eloise Short, one of the 24 students picked for the exhibition, is a third-year textiles student from RMIT.

Her three-metre-long, hand and screen-printed banner, includes a delicate montage of drawings, hand-stitched with fragments of quilting.

Titled Darwin's Dressing Room, Short's sparrow is as finely depicted as her reindeer with its gnarled antlers.

Appropriately displayed next to Short's work is a fine, silver-and-steel, painted sparrow by jewellery designer David Neale, from RMIT.

Perched on a branch precariously placed inside a dish, the work resembles papier mache.

While there are several "serious" pieces here, there are also the more whimsical.

But even some of these pieces have a darker side.

Frances Egan, from Holmesglen TAFE, turned two scrubbing brushes into a pair of 1950s-style mules.

She Scrubs Up Well is bright red, with the bristles of the brush forming platform heels (for the 1950s housewife, there was no escape from household drudgery).

In true '50s style, Egan uses bright gingham fabric and daisy motifs for the uppers.

While not chosen for this exhibition, in Egan's graduate show at TAFE, the brushes were complemented by a 1950s shift-style dress made of Wettex and a handbag that was originally an iron.

The only minor disappointment this year was not being able to see some of the work in its entirety.

What's a pair of shoes without the right dress and handbag?