Craft Victoria launches Conscious Craft 2025

As Craft Victoria gets ready to unveil a new suite of exhibitions, it’s also launching Conscious Craft 2025 – an initiative focused on reshaping how we interact with materials, encouraging thoughtful, sustainable, and innovative approaches.

Launched in 2022, Conscious Craft has so far championed 38 artists and showcased 127 artworks created with a conscious, sustainable ethos.

Standing at the intersection of tradition and innovation, the initiative is carving out a path towards a more environmentally mindful future for the creative sector.

For 2025, Craft Victoria has set a fundraising goal of $60,000. These contributions will go towards delivering the free Conscious Craft exhibition program, providing funding for artists’ research and development, supporting fees for new commissions, and nurturing the broader creative industry.

“We can live in a world where objects are celebrated for their beauty as well as their flexibility, their ability to be pulled apart and transformed into something else,” Conscious Craft artist Locki Humphrey said.

From May 9 to June 14, Locki will showcase their series By/Product in the Craft Project Space as part of this year’s program.

The work brings attention to the inherent value of raw materials, and reflects on how material scarcity is influencing the work and livelihoods of artists, designers, and makers.

“We can begin to understand objects as only one iteration of an assemblage of materials, knowing it’s part of a larger life cycle, where each component has a history and a future,” they said.

From May 9 to June 21, the main gallery will host Future Ambition, an exhibition supported by Conscious Craft and featuring works by Isabel Avendaño-Hazbún, DNJ Paper, Other Matter (Jessie French), Pit Projects (Anni Hagberg and Michael Gittings), and Shahn Stewart.

Future Ambition brings together seven artists and designers whose forward-thinking creations explore new possibilities in design and art.

Through inventive approaches to furniture, lighting, artworks, and installations, they imagine more thoughtful and sustainable futures.

Initiatives like Conscious Craft play a vital role in nurturing boundary-pushing, purpose-driven creativity, with the power to influence and reshape the broader artistic landscape. •