EMERGENCY | Signal, Adapt, Repair Talk
With CURATOR STACY JEWELL
7 November 2026
Day + Time | Saturday | 2pm – 3pm
Location | Craft + Design Canberra, Level 1, North Building, 180 London Circuit, City ACT 2601
Entry | Free | Booking required
Access | Wheelchair accessible, accessible bathroom, quiet room available, assistance animals welcome
Join curator Stacy Jewell and exhibiting artists from EMERGENCY | Signal, Repair, Adapt for a shared conversation exploring resilience, transformation and repair. Artists discuss material experimentation, contemporary craft and how creative practice responds to uncertainty, change and dissent.
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Anna Madeleine Raupach is a multidisciplinary artist based on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Canberra, and a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University School of Art and Design. Working across multimedia installation, augmented and virtual reality and mixed media practice, Anna engages with science and technology to critically examine the social and political dimensions of climate change.
Anna’s practice is informed by interdisciplinary research and collaboration, bringing artistic and scientific approaches together to investigate relationships between technology, environmental systems and human experience. Anna holds a PhD in Media Arts from UNSW Art and Design and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the ANU School of Art and Design.
Recent projects include a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts (2024), an Australian Network for Art and Technology Synapse Residency (2022) and a Powerhouse Museum Research Fellowship (2019 to 20). She has developed commissioned works for the Tellus Project, Solar Protocol Network and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, undertaken international residencies in Paris and Indonesia, and presented solo exhibitions in New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Bandung.
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Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/Chinese/German/Irish/Scottish heritage. Since the mid 1980s, she has been at the forefront of the Australian and international First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors as a multidisciplinary creative practitioner, artist, curator, educator and researcher.
Her creative led research encompasses critical performative First Nations Autoethnography, First Nations Storywork and historiography, framed within multimodal methodologies and theories. Since 2018, Brenda has been based at the Australian National University, Canberra, where she is Professor of Indigenous Art History and Curatorship and leads the ANU Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Grand Challenge project Murrudha: Sovereign Walks, tracking cultural actions through art, Country, language and music.
In 2024, Brenda was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, where she taught in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences across the Departments of History of Art and Architecture, and Art, Film and Visual Studies, alongside undertaking research projects.
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Jessie French is an artist and experimental designer based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Grounded in an ethos of sustainability and regeneration, her practice invites engagement with the possibilities of a post petrochemical world. Through material experimentation, Jessie explores closed loop systems, (re)use, conscious consumption and our interactions with objects.
Her practice examines petrochemical dominance, chemical pollution and environmental justice through material and spatial interventions. Her work traces the biological origins of fossil fuels, centring the contradiction of mobilising deep time for disposable use. Working across installation, liquid formed works and material systems, Jessie develops new material frameworks within an artistic context, including OM Signage Film, a patented alternative to petrochemical plastics.
Jessie's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Biennale of Sydney, Institute of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, MONA, Royal Academy of Arts and Design Museum, London. Her work is held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria and Anchorage Museum. In 2020, Jessie founded OTHER MATTER, an experimental design studio working with algae based bioplastics to explore applications for new materials through objects, experiences and futures.
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Jo Victoria is a ceramic artist based in Mossy Point on the South Coast of NSW whose practice explores place, materiality and the experience of living close to the ocean. Working primarily with unglazed porcelain, Jo draws connections between the material's whiteness and translucency and the bleached bones, fossils and broken shells found along beaches and rock platforms. Her sculptural forms evoke fossil like remnants, capturing traces of once living things and reflecting on fragility, transformation and deep time.
Light is central to Jo's practice. Its interaction with translucent porcelain and glassy glazes evokes the shifting qualities of ocean light. More recently, she has introduced glass alongside porcelain, exploring how light transfers, intersects and interrupts relationships between materials and forms.
Jo holds a Master of Visual Arts in Ceramics from the Australian National University. Her awards include the Emerging Contemporaries Craft and Design Canberra Exhibition Award and the Guldagergaard International Travel, Exhibition and Residency Award. She has undertaken residencies at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center, Denmark, SIM Residency, ReykjavÃk, Zentrum für Keramik, Berlin, and Tactile Arts, Darwin.
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Isadora Vaughan is an Australian artist whose sculptural practice engages with the concept of novel ecosystems, drawn from environmental conservation and restoration. Through this framework, Isadora examines the systems of value that shape our interactions with the material world. Her studio practice responds to a local environment situated between remnant waterways, heavy industry and suburban development.
Isadora approaches materials not as passive substances, but as carriers of complex political and cultural values. Considering novel ecosystems as dynamic material assemblages, her work explores relationships between living and non living matter and how these entanglements can be spatially articulated through sculpture. Her material encounters examine the changing ecologies of contemporary landscapes and challenge conventional understandings of materials as static or predetermined.
Isadora has created major commissions for Yield Strength, the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, The National 2021, New Australian Art at Carriageworks, Overlapping Magisteria, The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and TarraWarra Biennial 2018, From Will to Form. She has presented significant solo exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art and Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne.
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Scott Chaseling is an Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores mobility, transition and liminality, shaped by many years living and working across Europe, Asia and America. Working across glassblowing, sculpture and painting, Scott subverts traditional techniques through contemporary forms informed by movement, alongside influences from Memphis Design and West Coast ceramics.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including a major solo exhibition at the European Museum of Modern Glass and large scale works presented at Sculpture by the Sea. In 2025, Scott was a finalist in the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. A former Director of Berlin Glas and Leverhulme Fellow, he has taught internationally at institutions including Pilchuck Glass School and Tokyo Glass Institute.
Scott has received numerous awards, including the Ranamok Glass Prize, Bavarian State Prize Gold Medal and Hindmarsh Glass Prize. His work is held in major public collections internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the LOEWE Collection.
Images
Jessie French | Other Matter (detail) 2026 | Photo by Marnie Hawson
Jo Victoria | Skeleton 2025 | Image courtesy of the artist