The final day of this cheerful exhibition, with its bright colours, playful designs and fun ideas, marked a dismal event in the Victorian craft year: another venue closing its doors to exhibitions by Victorian craftspeople. Body/Felt, a collaboration between milliner Waltraud Reiner and designer and ceramist Simon Lloyd, was the last exhibition to be staged in the temporary exhibition space in Melbourne's Old Treasury Building (now known as the Gold Treasury Museum ). For want of $150,000 a year, provided by Arts Victoria for five years from 1999 but not renewed, the museum has been forced to lease the impressive, high-ceilinged rooms to the marriage registry.

The closure is bad news. The beautifully refurbished rooms have hosted a diverse and interesting range of exhibitions in recent years, notably featuring crafts and the so-called decorative arts. Weighing the amount needed to have kept them open against that to be spent from the public purse on the Commonwealth Games is yet another depressing example of the low priority given to the arts in Australia. At least Lloyd and Reiner ensured that the end came on a relatively high note.

Their exhibition, admirable for its skill, broke little new ground but was nonetheless highly professional and very enjoyable. Alarm bells ring when an artist's statement cites the development and successful marketing of a commercial venture as an outcome of an artistic collaboration. Just how cutting edge will this be? So it was with Body/Felt. Given the exciting potential of handmade felt it was disappointing to discover that the pieces on display were mostly made from flat, commercial and industrial felt and that, despite the title, most were hats, almost all of which would have fitted right in at the Melbourne Cup. There were, admittedly, other items, notably a superb, full length, multi-coloured dress made by Reiner from seamless felting of silk on wool, creating a glowing, bubble-textured surface (credit was given to a feltmaker here). The funnel neck dress with cutaway armholes was topped by a sleeveless bolero, but a photograph showing it worn by a model revealed details such as decorative strips around the upper arms hidden by the bolero.

Similar large, framed colour photographs increased our understanding of the hats and other pieces such as a pieced and hooded cape. Showing how they should be worn also relieved the static nature of the exhibition and added to the entertainment value, for instance a 70s-style cap with cut outs was pictured covering almost the entire head, eyes visible through the cut-outs. A hat created from a series of wrap-around strips, its brim created by one of the strips, was worn with the brim covered by the model's fringe, reversing our expectations.

All the hats were sculptural and stylish, based on simple geometric shapes combined with ingenious construction: laced together with felt strips; palm fronds woven with felt strips, the frond ends secured with felt stoppers; felt strips wound around the head and secured with steel wire pins. The workmanship could not be faulted — felt smoothly sliced by a sure hand, not a crooked seam, stray stitch or uneven edge in sight.

But it was the other items, especially the jewellery and dresses, which were most interesting and in which the collaboration between the pair was most evident. Lloyd's ceramics training was put to good use in creating several large pendants: ceramic rings surrounding felt discs into which a pattern had been punched. In one case superb shibori fabric peeked through the punched-out sections. These pendants (yes, they could be worn, there were the photographs to prove it) hung by felt ties, as did others consisting only of the punched-out felt without the rings. And a clever, albeit uncomfortable-looking bracelet was a felt-filled ring, the felt with a single slit through which a small hand could pass.

Lloyd says that while working with felt has been a 'liberating experience' for him, he has found himself using techniques which echoed those used with more familiar materials: clipping together two edges instead of stitching them, for instance.

This cross-pollination resulted in some of the most unusual and interesting pieces, for instance a black and white commercial felt dress, its pieces attached at the sides and front and back yoke by an ingenious system of felt clips with slots into which they were pushed. Variations of this system were also used on hats and a smaller dress. The hooded cape featured seams buttoned together — felt circles pushed through matching slots in the two pieces. Other hats were joined with studs or tabs, another with a delicate porcelain brooch woven with felt strips.

The Gold Treasury Museum was not an ideal venue for such an exhibition which would have benefited from a more intimate, less severe space. The large main room, the cream walls and high ceilings all contributed to a feeling of remove from what Lloyd and Reiner had to say, and the glass cases in which most pieces were displayed not only heightened this sensory barrier but created a physical one. It was a pity the pieces could not have been seen without the Mona Lisa-style barrier, but peered at close up, the textures more evident. Probably this was a result of the total lack of security, further evidence of the museum's wafer thin budget.

These criticisms of the venue aside, it was still a valuable asset and provided an opportunity, now lost, for Victorian craftspeople to have their work seen. Where to now for exhibitions such as Body/Felt and for those without the clout or funds to hire a major venue? The exhibition space's closure was clearly a source of regret to the museum staff and volunteers, as it should be to us all.

Sue Green is a Melbourne textile designer and writer.

BODY/FELT exhibition at the Old Treasury Building, Melbourne

BODY/FELT
exhibition at the Old Treasury Building, Melbourne