Joseph Gardner Presents ‘DONE/UNDONE’
This summer at Craft Victoria, the walls of the Watson Place gallery will hum with the raw energy of the ‘DONE/UNDONE’ exhibition, curated by stylist and creative director Joseph Gardner for the Craft Visionaries 2025 program.
Opening on November 14, the exhibition invites visitors to consider the creative process not as a linear path but as a constant act of negotiation between building and erasing, completion and possibility. “‘DONE/UNDONE’ is a question to both the viewer and the maker around the idea of ‘finishedness,’” says Gardner. “It’s a celebration of process.” Known for his decade-long career in publishing, including as Vogue Living’s style editor at large, and as co-founder of Studio Gardner, he brings his sharp editorial eye to this curatorial project that feels very human in approach.
Curating the exhibition, as he explains, has been “purely intuitive”, a show designed to foster calm contemplation where negative space becomes part of the whole experience. Visitors move through a conceptual series of rooms within the gallery – a harmonious enfilade of light, raw textures – each one revealing works that sit somewhere along a spectrum of resolution, from unpolished and deconstructed to meticulously refined.
The exhibition features over 50 artists and makers from across Australia such as Annie Paxton, Adam Goodrum, Kenny Yong-soo Son, Jordan Fleming and Rosanna Ceravolo, whose works span furniture, objects and sculpture. Gardner was drawn to the diversity of materials and voices. “I wanted to include a variety of materials and mediums – everything from sculpture, glass, wood, metal, ceramics and leather to shell and pearls,” he says. “There is a real array of different works in the show. My job was to find a thread between them.”
For Craft’s executive director Nicole Durling, the collaboration with Gardner felt like a natural evolution. “We have been working with Joseph for several years,” she explains. “He has a very considered approach and a strong visual language, which we know will make this year’s Visionaries exhibition distinct.” The Visionaries series, she says, was created to showcase the incredible range of Australian art, craft and design by engaging in cross-industry collaboration, as well as to inspire people to support local artists, makers and designers – and ‘DONE/UNDONE’ exemplifies that goal.
Durling also sees the exhibition as part of a broader cultural shift towards valuing the handmade. “We’re seeing a significant shift in contemporary society back to the tactility and honesty found in the inherent flaws of the handmade,” she says. “It’s not only satisfying to witness the transformation of raw material into something new, but through this transparency, it also establishes trust in what is created.”
‘DONE/UNDONE’ is an invitation to step off the streets of Melbourne into a quiet space to slow down and engage with process as beauty, and to find meaning in what is considered unfinished or imperfect. “Knowing when to stop shows restraint – like all creatives, it’s something I too always grapple with in my work,” says Gardner. “Unfinishedness is in the eye of the beholder… a crack in a ceramic piece can be what makes it collectable and covetable.”
‘DONE/UNDONE’ runs from November 14 2025 to February 7 2026 at Craft Victoria, located at Watson Place (off Flinders Lane) in Melbourne.
