What connects the objects in Talking Points is that all of the makers at one time or another over the last five years has been associated with the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop of ANU School of Art and Design. Represented here is the work of current undergraduate and postgraduate students, alumni, staff, visitors and research fellows. At a time when the role of art schools within universities has never been more contentious, the decision to display the work on the board table in the heart of ANU House in Melbourne offers a playful yet serious provocation.

The table plays a profound role in Western culture and this is evident in the number of metonymic allusions to it that abound in our language. We sit at God’s table, we bring things to the table, we lay things on the table, we take things off the table, we turn the tables, we keep a good table and sometimes we are even under the table. In all of these expressions we can read how the table can be variously the site of ceremony and religious mystery, a regulator of secular hierarchies and power, the physical locus of negotiation and debate or of domestic pleasure, conviviality, even excess.

Every item here had its beginning on another kind of table. The metalsmith’s bench conjures up a very specific and intimate table-like form. A generous semi-circular curve is cut into its top, which snugly accommodates one seated person. The benchtop is at chest level, so the worker is encircled in a private space of reverie and concentration.

The focus of this space is the bench peg, where most of the fine work of the metalsmith is done. It is the support for sawing, filing, drilling, burnishing. The first thing you do when you acquire a new bench peg is to make it your own, by sawing out a small niche to brace a specific component, or by altering its slope to accommodate the filing requirements of a particular object.

Over time, the bench peg and its immediate surrounds become scarred with drill holes, file marks and burns from soldering and annealing. This  reminds me that the etymological root of the word “table” is the Latin word tabula or slate. In Roman times a tabula was a slab of wax upon which text was inscribed. The text could be erased by melting and re-inscribed afresh in a potentially endless cycle of recording.

In a shared workspace like the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop, the benches’ surfaces operate like a form of tabula on which the labours of their previous occupants are inscribed. Or perhaps it is more accurate to think of them as palimpsests, surfaces upon which previous inscriptions are still legible. Thus, every new undergraduate sits for the first time at a bench that is scored with the traces of their predecessors’ hard-won induction into skill and craftsmanship. However much each student brings their own selfhood to the bench, they are always reminded by its work-worn surfaces that they are part of a bigger community of makers.

Here in Talking Points, the bench and the board table converge. The board table is an instrument of hierarchy and power, but the disposition of these objects across it undercuts its authority. Everyone has brought something to the table - from the youngest undergraduate student to the most distinguished faculty member or research fellow - and all are given equal space to be heard in a communal conversation.

There are many voices to be heard here, and they are diverse. Some objects speak directly to the relationship between hollowware and the table. Here are candlesticks, trays, platters whose formalised nature recalls the tradition of the conversation piece, the eighteenth and nineteenth century practice of making an arrangement of objects at the centre of a table, designed to provoke civilised conversation and debate. There are jugs and cutlery that remind us of the embodied relationships we have with the implements that deliver the pleasures of the table. You can find here, too, objects that speak of the customs built around food cultures other than our own.

Other objects use the body as a starting point for another, startlingly diverse set of conversations. Jewellery and small hand-held objects explore inter-cultural enquiry, the family romance, the talisman, the miniature, the worn object as sign, the object as site of contemplation, relationships between the body and architecture, formal explorations of materiality and of process. But the seeds of every object in Talking Points lie in the modest collection of hollow ring forms, generic and sculptural in form.

These are the first exercises students in the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop undertake in their long journey to technical proficiency. Most metalsmiths can remember the first things they ever made. They remember the frustrating gap between idea and resolution that seemed so irreconcilable when skill lagged so far behind imagination. They remember the excitement they experienced when for the first time they got something right, when the solder performed its mercurial miracle, flashing and running into the perfectly prepared join, or the annealed metal bent obediently under the hammer.

The presence of these little rings in Talking Points puts the maker’s agenda squarely on the table, right here at the heart of ANU House. They remind us that the exhibition is not about skill per se, although there are plenty of displays of skill in the work on view. They remind us that Talking Points is about the slow circumlocutory route to the acquisition of skill, and the even more complex process of learning to harness those skills to concepts. It tells us that each maker is the product of a community of other makers. It tells us of the role that generous exchanges between students and teachers, and the inspirational presence of distinguished visitors in a workshop environment can play in the nurturing of students’ experiences. Most of all, it tells us that there will be a triumphant moment when a student, having learned what they can, finds their own voice and takes their own place in the world.

Anne Brennan
Senior Lecturer, Centre for Art History and Art Theory
ANU School of Art and Design
August 2017