EMERGENCY | Signal, Adapt, Repair
TBC
5 November – 12 December 2026
Location | Craft + Design Canberra, Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit, City ACT 2601
Opening Hours | Open Wednesday – Saturday | 12pm – 4pm
Entry | Free | No bookings required
Access | Wheelchair accessible, accessible parking, accessible toilets, off-street parking
SEE OPENING | SEE TALK
We are living through overlapping emergencies, ecological collapse, housing insecurity, geopolitical conflict and systemic inequality. For many, emergency is not a singular event but an ongoing condition.
EMERGENCY: Signal, Repair, Adapt is a major exhibition presented as part of the 2026 Craft and Design Canberra Festival. Bringing together artists and designers working across ceramics, glass, textiles and media, the exhibition examines what it means to make objects in a time of disruption.
Craft and design operate at a different tempo to the speed of political rhetoric and digital information cycles. Materials hold memory, clay records touch, glass responds to force, fibres stretch, fray and mend. Through these processes, making becomes a form of critical inquiry, revealing the pressures and systems shaping both matter and society. In an age of mass production and disposability, work made locally, by hand and at a human scale, becomes its own form of resistance, a refusal of the standardised and the instant in favour of the considered, the repaired and the lasting.
Drawing on the 2026 festival theme of Dissent, EMERGENCY | Signal, Repair, Adapt asks how making can function as a form of critical action. At its heart, the exhibition affirms the power of creative thinking to meet problems that resist easy answers, to imagine alternatives where established systems have failed. The works assembled here document, speculate and hold tension between alarm and possibility, exploring how creative practice can move through uncertainty toward adaptation, resilience and the imagining of new futures.
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Alison Jackson is a metalsmith based in Braidwood, Australia. With more than two decades of experience in metal forming, her practice is characterised by an elegant, timeless and minimal aesthetic, expressed through fine jewellery, tableware, large scale installations and limited edition exhibition works.
Alison completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Gold and Silversmithing at the Australian National University and has received numerous awards and grants, including project funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and artsACT. Her work is held in public and private collections and has been exhibited widely across Australia and internationally.
Alongside her studio practice, Alison is Creative Director of Ferro Forma with Dan Lorrimer. The metalsmithing workshop specialises in handcrafted, small batch objects that celebrate materiality, skilled making and the enduring qualities of contemporary craft.
SEE ARTIST WEBSITE HERE
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