Artists
As a member-based organisation, Central Craft aims to:
build the visibility of contemporary craft and design from the Northern Territory.
exhibit high quality craft and design to local, regional, and international audiences.
engage and educate individuals and groups in craft and design practice.
improve the viability of emerging and professional craft and design practitioners.
build strong cross-cultural partnerships to create opportunities for innovation in craft and design practice.
enhance the reputation of the Northern Territory as a significant centre for contemporary craft and design.
Anna Hartwig
Anna Hartwig is a realist oil painter who works from her home in Alice Springs. Her working life began as a manufacturing jeweller, but her interest in design and visual arts led her to painting. Mainly self taught, her love of simple shape and form is now the basis of her predominantly Still Life painting practice.
Bathhouse Studios
Bathhouse Studios is a collective of local Mparntwe creatives operating in various capacities on unceded Arrernte Country.
Brigida Alberti
Working on the uncomfortable by looking and feeling my way through clay, which began when I was 17, growing my voice though still emerging and finally able to commit to my practice. Bringing the function to the sculptural is my current focus, finding textile in the surface, creating a sense of form through simplicity, looking to faith to inform my work, and not wondering through other eyes, but through my own. Through function, I can find the human essence of purpose and emotion.
Cynthia Burke
Cynthia Burke was born in Alice Springs and grew up in the central desert of Western Australia. She has been a youth and media worker for many years and has hosted a weekly radio programme for Radio NGm. Cynthia is an internationally exhibited painter with Warakurna Artists and very successful with Tjanpi Desert Weavers. She is one of Maruku’s foremost up and coming wood carvers, and in 2014 became one of its youngest directors. She carries on the traditions of the Tjukurpa, the Law and way of life governing her country. Cynthia is one of the most skilled contemporary carvers at Maruku Arts. She uses abstract sculptures to tell her stories. In addition, she works on Walka Boards and produces traditional forms like animals or different kind of bowls in her own very modern style.
Cynthia is represented by Maruku Arts
Em Frank
Em Frank is an artist and arts worker living and working in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, born, and raised in Sydney NSW. She is particularly interested in art as a tool for nurturing community and raising quiet voices. Since moving to the NT seven years ago, Em’s professional life has focused on assisting First Nations communities to create and exhibit artworks and participate in the art economy. Projects have included painting, screen printed apparel, public murals, the development of picture books and bi-lingual educational resources, and social enterprise. Em’s creative practice spans drawing, printmaking, painting and photography. These days however, she is overwhelmingly preoccupied with all things ceramics.
Ikuntji Artists
Ikuntji Artists was the first art centre established by women in the Western Desert Art Movement. Already in the 1980s women began painting in Haasts Bluff in the aged care facility. They had been instructed by their husbands and fathers, and they had often assisted them in completing their paintings. By the early 1990s these women artists decided to pursue setting up their own art centre.
Ikuntji Artists was first established in 1992, after a series of workshops, and under the influence of the then community president, the late Esther Jugadai. The art centre was initially set up to fulfil the role of women’s centre providing services such as catering for old people and children in the community. After first experiences made in printing T-shirts, the artists began producing acrylic paintings on linen and handmade paper, which quickly gained the attention of the Australian and international art world as well as earning the centre an impressive reputation for fine art. The focus changed from a women’s centre to an art centre in 2005 with the incorporation of the art centre as Ikuntji Artists Aboriginal Corporation.
Today Ikuntji Artists are represented in many national and international galleries and institutions. Their art is famous for bold colour choice, decisive brush strokes and a long legacy of internationally renowned artists.
J9 Stanton
Since 2004 J9 has been working with Yarrenyty Arltere artists at Larapinta Valley, originally as an arts trainer and then facilitator. She has been integral in developing the niche practice of soft sculpture that has matured into a sustainable social enterprise for members of that community. J9 continues to develop her own work while maintaining her investment in the success of local Aboriginal artists. She has worked on both Wide Opens Space and the Alice Desert Festival for many years and has had numerous public and community art commissions in the central desert region. J9 has been a receiver of The Lofty Award, The Advocate Art Award and has been a two-time winner of the Wearable Art Award. Her work has been twice selected for the Alice Prize and has been collected by Araluen and Deakin University and other private collectors. J9’s current work explores a merging of 2d and 3d practices creating wall art that welds sculpture to painting as well as drawing with sculpture. In an abstract 2/3-dimensional format, she is focusing on the spirituality and deep ecology in relation to the effects of climate change on land and sea scape. She feels it is important to use her art to convey ideas of beauty, illumination, and sustainability. J9 hopes to continue developing and strengthening her arts practice and aspires to show her work interstate in the future.
Image Phytoplankton shifting - Michael Walters
James B. Young and Elliat Rich.
Elbow Workshop is James B. Young and Elliat Rich.
We are based in Mparntwe Alice Springs, that town right in the middle of the vast continent called Australia. We think this place is pretty unique, it's wilderness, languages, people, cultures and seasons. Elbow Workshop products are our collaborative musings, inspired by this place and its stories; parochial, built to last and informed by our designer / maker family fusion.
Elbow Workshop revolves around our 650kg handmade concrete and steel table from which we and a variety of guests work. Directly out the front windows sits Paint and Panel (think 90's airbrush art) in front of a registered sacred site; a perfect dichotomy of the industrial, cultural and natural landscapes of Mparntwe.
Our studio is located within a vibrant creative precinct, 8 Hele Crescent, right next to a gallery, art store, coffee cart and coffee roasters!
We love when people drop by our hybrid workshop/studio/shop. We stock our own objects as well as products from local artists and makers.
Julie Millerick
Nature is my greatest teacher - combining nature with art contributes to my emotional and spiritual connection, evolution and wellbeing.
Email: Juliemillerick@gmail.com
Karen Montey
I am playing with felt and silk fibre to produce a range of small pieces including scarves, brooches, bangles, and purses. I try to utilise recycled fabrics and fibre in my work. I have just started to explore dyeing with plants, herbs, and spices.
Email: rustle0801@outlook.com
Maria Vanhees
Ceramic Artist. My mind slows down, my hands take over, clay starts working with me rather than the other way around…
Pamela Mills
Diverse interests in landscape and wildlife photography, Nuno and wet felting, glass fusing and slumping with a particular focus on recycled glass, drawing (life drawing, pattern, various media).
Pauline Clack
Following many years designing patterns for screen printing on fabric for clothing and homewares, I now enjoy painting the patterns within the Central Australian landscape. I mainly work from photos of remote places taken by my partner Henry Schreiner. My background is in graphic design, and I continue to design interpretive signage for Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife parks in the central region. Alice Springs has been my home since 1980.
Email: pjclack@iinet.net.au
PO Box 8008 Alice Springs NT 0871
Philomena Hali
I work primarily in textiles - textiles are my passion, however fibre is also a large component of my work. Anything to do with ‘stitch’ by hand or machine, excites me and drives me to create. ‘I am ultimately content with a swatch of fabric and needle and thread in my hand’. My practice incorporates Shibori, Bojagi, fibre basketry & felt work, along with a newly learned technique such as paper- string- making/shifu. I also enjoy making clothing by deconstructing recycled clothes & re making clothes, that become unique wearable items. I teach, and exhibit widely & have work in museums & private collections.