Craft on the Horizon
The Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (IOTA21) is a new major craft festival, anchored in Perth, Western Australia. It extends over two focal exhibitions, satellite shows, a conference, talks and a fashion event at Boola Bardip WA Museum. For three months, some of the world’s finest craft practitioners and their work will muster in Perth and Fremantle. This congregation represents a profound concentration of craft skill and will undoubtedly catalyse a long-lasting wave of influence and connection in craft here and abroad.
The communality of craft is the great undercurrent of IOTA21. Behind each featured artist are their guilds, clubs, classes and groups; networks of knowledge, learning and togetherness. Craft traditions develop slowly, over lifetimes, making them inherently communal, as skills are taught, inherited, innovated and safeguarded beyond the horizon of any individual practitioner.
The IOTA21 artist cohort, therefore, is not drawn from any single guild, discipline or nation. Artists and artworks will travel from
