Visionaries: 2019 Craft ACT Members exhibition at Craft ACT is extensive and diverse

The annual Craft ACT Members exhibition provides a welcome opportunity to see the wide range of work produced by associated and accredited members of Craft ACT from the Canberra region. A significant increase in membership in the last few years is reflected in this exhibition with 72 artists participating and more than 100 works on view.

I always enjoy these exhibitions as, although they might not provide a wide spectrum of an artist's work, they can provide insight into their latest art practice.

Among many significant works is Keiko Amenomori-Schmeisser's Folded 1, an indigo dyed wall hanging. It demonstrates the artist's complete mastery of the shibori technique of folding, dying and tying cloth. The beauty of the work lies in the intricacy of its patterning that gives the illusion of structural folds and varying visual planes to create its architectonic presence.

Dianne Firth's quilted hanging Reflections is an abstract and tightly constructed repeat pattern design suggesting reflections of light in pools of darkness. It is testimony to Firth's consummate skill in creating a contemporary art work using traditional quilting skills.

Barbara Rogers works in a more fluid and interventionist mode by dying and decolouring textiles. Inhabit is a narrow wall hanging composed of several layers of transparent material decorated with elemental geometric patterns in warm earth colours. It is a beautiful composition of pattern, colour and changing light.

Emilie Patteson works in glass and illustration. In Fallen 111, one of her series of delicate pencil drawings, falling leaves dance across the page; each one individually observed and infused with life. Sally Blake's Remnant is also a work on paper. It gathers the tiny pinprick-of seeds she makes on paper and joins them with delicate stitching as in woven patterns.

Judi Elliott's work Black Box is anything but black, being a bold statement that brings together intense tones of warm and cool colours in a wall piece of kiln-formed glass. Elliott's characteristic sensitivity to colour and design is on display in this work as well as her interest in playing with optical illusion by creating ambiguous tensions between interior and exterior space.

Janet DeBoos also creates a sense of spatial ambiguity in her ceramic work Drawing Parallels 2 - Part of the Scenery- an interplay between the strong forms of her three black and white vessels and their background. Decorated with wavy black lines, they create a fluidity of perception of appearing and dissolving forms.

Cathy Franzi in her large ceramic vessel Murrumbidgee Bossiaea ( a vision hopeful) employs black imagery against a white ceramic body to produce an arresting pattern of the branches of this endangered species. The decoration is effective because of the sensitive interplay between image and background.

Sarah Bourke's earrings and Ximena Natanya Briceo's brooches are based on natural forms. Bourke's cocoon-shaped earrings are sleek and elegant and Briceo's use of cast filigree silver leaves on a dark titanium base serves to make them shimmer.

Tom Skeehan/Georgie Ferguson's generously proportioned AVISO Armchair would be the focus of attention in any room while Daniel Venable's hand-forged chef's knife with its two-toned wood handle is destined to become a treasured possession. In her Wagtail Tea Caddies in brass, Alison Jackson uses the upstanding handles of the caddies in a clever, subtle avian reference.

It is impossible to make mention of all the works in this well-curated exhibition. It is an exhibition that is extensive and diverse and will reward the diligent viewer.