This pop up exhibition of ceramics by Sarit Cohen features as part of the 2019 DESIGN Canberra Festival. The selection of works follows on from Cohen’s participation in the 2018 group exhibition The Void: Re-imagining Enrico Taglietti held at the Craft ACT gallery in which artists were invited to respond to and re-imagine the design work of Canberra architect Enrico Tagietti.

Tagietti’s description of Canberra, when he first saw it in 1955, as a ‘perfect void’ – a city unfettered by history and tradition, an ideal place to push boundaries and start anew – resonated with Cohen and her understanding of the vessel as a container. It subsequently reignited her interest in the Italian artist Lucio Fontana whose work questioned spatiality through the puncturing and slashing of the picture plane. In 1952 Fontana famously wrote:

“An earth-bound form occupies a place, if I empty this form I create a space; a form above the earth occupies a place, if I put a hole in it I create a void”