Ongoing from 2024 Give+Take

Multimedia installation and performance

Occupation: Artist’s aim is always to spark conversations about the connections forged between artists, their work, and the audience. Our ongoing Give+Take project explores these connections through displays, performances, and audience interaction.

2024 Radiant Pavilion, Melbourne

In past years, we participated in Radiant Pavilion through interactions and activations based around Crossley Street. For 2024 we moved from the street into the warm and welcoming space of Smith+Gertrude.

The Bunting Pendant gift exchange (necklace for a photo) was as popular as ever:

2025 Nelson Jewellery Week (NJW25)

In 2025, we reprised Give+Take at Nelson’s Viewfinder Gallery.

Gallery walkthrough

VIVIEN ATKINSON

For her performance work Palimpsest, the artist created jewellery pieces from her wedding dress whilst wearing it.

Vivien’s Shelter brooches raise funds for Habitat for Humanity:

BECKY BLISS

Becky’s current works look at social issues such as global warming, fair pay and equal employment opportunities

*Play Fair* plays with gender stereotypes

*The Colour of change* charts temperature change over 120 years in the Pacific

In her long-running project Finding found Becky leaves brooches on the street for the lucky treasure hunter to find:

Lisa van Hulst

Inheritance explores the ephemerality of memory and the objects that hold these connections, through a Simulacrum of family jewellery at 1:1 scale made from photographs formed into almost three dimensional pieces.

Nadine Smith

An avid recycler, Nadine gives new life to the discarded, creating a tension between the familiar and the unknown.

Her pieces often reference the fragility of life and the relationship we have with an increasingly chaotic world.

Vernon Bowden

*Ultra Mare*. One thousand pendants, shark’s teeth, shot, silk, cord, matai, canvas and paint

Measure. Readymade silver chain, Ballad of the water and the sea by Federico Garcia Lorca 1921

Caroline Thomas

The diverse brooches in Caroline’s (Af)iliation Series reward close inspection, the backs revealing variations in a common mechanism that unites the family.

Bulletproof Oxidised brass, bullet casings, brass wire, polymer clay and Swarovski crystal beads

Great teachers cast long shadows (Peter and Viv) copper wire, oxidised aluminium, oxidised sterling silver, brass, felt, laminate sample, paint

Icon Aluminium, brass, gold filled wire, tin cans, canvas and paint

Sarah Read

Sarah’s work has a conceptual base, and often involves collaboration or social practice. In recent years she has been drawn to the meditative act of bead weaving, which delivers solace, cognitive shift and moments of flow-state bliss.