Series 8 - 15.10.24 Waxing Gibbous 🌖 Radical Design forged with the knowledge of traditional goldsmithing

1700hrs AEST or Your timezone here To attend Register on a low-traffic announcement list.

In ☲Series 8☲ Fireside, Natalie Holtsbaum (a Mastress Goldsmith) and Nancy Mauro-Flude (a permacomputing artisan) reflect on the hidden costs of solar energy, drawing parallels between the extraction of precious metals in their craft and the exploitation behind renewable technologies—the paradox and contradiction of uncanny sources.

Join them in this critical embrace of metaphysical complexity to explore how convergence of artistry, material consciousness, demonstrating how traditional craftsmanship can inform and guide contemporary aesthetic practices and ethical design and offers a path forward in a world facing planetary catastrophe to explore these pressing issues.

Sky country recently adorned us with the Aurora Australis, a cosmic array of dancing lights, as streams of protons and electrons whirled past the Earth’s magnetic fields, gravitating toward the planetary poles. These solar offerings from the sun are striking reminders of chance, alchemy, and corporeality in art and craft, awakening us to the profound complexities surrounding the demand for raw materials. When the ordinary is disrupted, Natalie Holtsbaum enters—not only as a connoisseur deeply informed by the origins of her materials but also as an ethical and visionary maker who blends traditional craftsmanship with radical artistry in her transition into the broader realm of art practice to tackle complex, evolving contemporary challenges.

The fusion of contemporary art and radical design with the expertise of traditional craftsmanship, embodied by Mastress Goldsmith Natalie Holtsbaum, opens a new frontier in addressing the challenges of material innovation. In her transition from goldsmithing to the broader art world, Holtsbaum, founder of the Radical Art Jewellery Gang, draws on her deep understanding of materials to tackle complex contemporary issues. Her discussion with Nancy Mauro-Flude, a permacomputing artisan (and founder of the autoluminence agency) reflects on the hidden costs of renewable energy, paralleling the extraction of precious metals for jewellery with the exploitative processes behind solar technologies. While renewable energy offers hope for a sustainable future, the demand for the raw materials used in solar panels often results in environmental harm and unethical labor practices, especially in vulnerable regions. Their approach emphasises the need for ethical practice in art and design innovations.

In Southern Oceania, as spring blossoms and we salute to the Sun’s golden glow, the transition from winter brings not just warmth but reflection on the evolving dialogue around renewable energy. While solar panels have provided much-needed warmth and energy for some, many are becoming increasingly aware of the deeper complexities surrounding solar technology. Discussions are intensifying about the possibilities and perils of solar networks.

Beyond the technical aspects—such as vulnerabilities in inverters that could be exploited for spying—the ethical concerns around solar energy production are gaining attention. The assembly of solar panels is often dependent on precious metals, components, and minerals that are extracted from deep mines in regions fraught with social, environmental, and labor exploitation. This highlights the dual challenge of pursuing renewable energy solutions while confronting the hidden costs in the supply chains, where unethical labor practices and environmental degradation persist. As we move forward, there is a critical need to address these ethical dilemmas, ensuring that renewable energy technologies align with the principles of sustainability and social responsibility

Natalie Holtsbaum and Nancy Mauro-Flude discuss how these current bio-social-cultural complications that enable the meeting between ecology art and design practices that intend to differentiate from carbon washing and greenwashing undertakings, often aligned with fashionable wellness lifestyle and/or low-carbon techno-solutionist paradigms. Because this situation is often at odds with the goals for sustainable production and consumption, some of the artist and design community contemplate how we can better source, recycle, and reuse materials within the boundaries of our locality and wonder about more sensitive strategies to approach the conditions of labour that lie behind these financial strategies and political power tactics that compel us to admire, gift, and make such talismans and accoutrements.

By embracing a cradle-to-cradle design ethos, they advocate for minimising waste and reducing energy consumption in both permacomputing arts and goldsmithing. Much like goldsmiths crafting with intention and care, they call for a slower, more mindful approach to technological innovation, prioritizing sustainability, reflection, and the long-term impacts of design choices on both the environment and society.

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Offering a counterpoint this session plants a seed and explores the following propositions:

How can we acknowledge the impact of the solar accoutrements that lay on roofs, wind turbines that whip through the airwaves of avian flight paths, the petrochemical nightmare from fracking the habitats of marine life and sea country of Indigenous custodians, somnambulistic children glued to contagious mobile devices?

What are the vast procedures used to extract the jewellery we wear on our hands and ears, or the sartorial complicity witnessed in the fabric rivers found in the desert of Chile, where 39,000 tonnes of fast fashion are dumped each year?

What ideologies underpin renewable energy processes, and how can art and design education and professional practices reverse engineer a more sensitive embrace otherwise?

While calling into question entire infrastructures and not just provenance and design, in this informal knowledge-sharing session, we value the small steps we, as artists and designers, can take to create and document remedial practices of resilience and regeneration that can intervene in more flourishing livelihoods.

Natalie Holtsbaum has been reflecting upon how the very material of her work seethes with telluric currents and mutant energy that pass through geographical territories—moving beyond the idea of jewels as extractive—moving towards an art practice that celebrates the possibility of designing with limited resources for eco-social transformation literally in radical acts of (critical decision) hands-on making.

Natalie Holtsbaum is an Interdisciplinary Artist and EcoScenographer, living in Kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Creating a stage for ritual, she adorns the body amongst scenographic installations by translating complex concepts through an interdisciplinary studio practice that prioritises natural materials within a cradle-to-cradle design ethos.

Holtsbaum earned a Bachelor of Fine Art (Gold and Silversmithing) from RMIT. She applies her longitudinal trade and expertise in the foundations of jewellery adornment in larger-scale experiential works that seek to activate the senses and deep-rooted biophilic connections. The environments she designs integrate pathways for the audience to respect the material’s cyclic lifespan, which she interrogates through her master craftsmanship. She seeks to frame corporeality through a balance of refined aesthetics and the monumental scale of materials; just as wearing a piece of jewellery can elicit an emotional or socio-political response, so too can experiencing a site-specific, whole-body response, like goosebumps on your arms when a particular realisation is ignited. Tactile installations like these foster a connection with the energies of nature guided by a worldview that recognises dependency, fragility, finitude, and mortality. Holtsbaum’s practice gives rise to opulent, sensory-driven artistic outcomes that prioritise ecological health and ethical stewardship, stretching perceptions of value and material consumption to integrate a holistic awareness of societal norms and power structures as properties that can be transfigured in the act of making.