Welcome to the fourth entry in a series profiling the artists and works in Try This At Home, an exhibition running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in the Object Gallery Project Space in Surry Hills until 8 January 2012. Find out more about HYPERCLAY here, find out more about Try This At Home here, or catch up on the Try This At Home series here.

This week, we’re looking at the 6 Jars project from Makeshift (find out more about Makeshift at their website.)

Like most projects contained with Try This At Home, 6 Jars is deceptively simple. The basic idea is that most of the pre-packaged foodstuffs and household products you purchase can be made yourself, and often an issue with doing this is that the effort you put into creating it simply for yourself is not at all economical. If you create to scale, however, it is relatively easier — if you create six times as much, for example, you don’t use six times as much of your energy or time. But what do you do with that extra stuff?

Welcome to the third entry in a series profiling the artists and works in Try This At Home, an exhibition running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in the Object Gallery Project Space in Surry Hills until 8 January 2012. Find out more about HYPERCLAY here, find out more about Try This At Home here, or catch up on the Try This At Home series here.

This week, we’re looking at the Bike-Power Home Cinema, from Magnificent Revolution Australia + Jessica Coughlan.

The Cinema is a simple-looking contraption with a serious purpose. It’s ultimately the combination of an old Slimline exercise bike and a toy motorised helicopter — the two are combined to create a pedal-powered signal switch. This is all rigged up to a screen that, when powered, will play a short documentary about the CO2penhagen festival, a carbon-neutral festival that took place in Denmark in 2009. (Find our more about CO2penhagen at their website.)

Welcome to the second entry in a series profiling the artists and works in Try This At Home, an exhibition running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in the Object Gallery Project Space in Surry Hills until 8 January 2012. Find out more about HYPERCLAY here, find out more about Try This At Home here, or catch up on the Try This At Home series here.

Today’s entry looks at Degavlas, an open-ended project from the Slow Art Collective. Comprised of Tony Adams, Chaco Kato and Dylan Martorell (whose solo show Duppy Musique Povera was in the Project Space earlier this year), the Slow Art Collective have been working together since 2009, creating a series of installations that focus ‘on creative practices and ethics relating to environmental sustainability, material ethics, DIY culture and collaboration.’ (From their blog, which you can find here.)

Running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in Object Gallery since October (read more about HYPERCLAY here) has been Try This At Home, the first exhibition in the five year Curating Cities research project, investigating how art and design can effect sustainable urban transformations. Try This At Home is upstairs in the Project Space, and you can read more about it here.

Try This At Home features the work of five artists, all presenting examples of adaptive practice, utilising existing resource in the name of sustainability. The first work we are looking at is Natural Fuse, by Haque: Design + Research, a UK outfit.

Natural Fuse consists of a number of planter boxes, each with an included electrical port, an attached appliance and a bottle of vinegar. The idea is that you take home a plant, connect it via ethernet cable to the internet and let it act as a carbon sink. The plants are all networked together, providing ‘power’ to an online grid - a website collecting the total carbon absorbed by the plant and converting that into an electrical amount.

On Friday night, we opened our two latest shows — HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics and Try This At Home. Object director Steven Pozel welcomed everyone and introduced Jill Bennett from the National Institute for Experimental Arts, who opened Try This At Home. Executive Chef of acclaimed restaurant Quay Peter Gilmore then opened HYPERCLAY, mentioning his unique relationship with Australian ceramics — he has, in fact, previously commissioned two of the artists in the show to make unique ceramic crockery for use in his restaurant, complementing his exquisitely crafted dishes.

On top of unveiling incredible and radical work from some of Australia’s top ceramicists, the opening also allowed Object to show off a dynamic foray into the world of digital. Incorporated into the exhibition space are a number of iPads housing over two hours of content exploring the works on show in much more depth. There are four videos on each artist, looking at their process and inspiration as well as the thoughts of an expert and a student on each maker. Plus, there are three additional videos looking at international movements, ceramic technologies and a chat to the producer of the exhibition, Danielle Robson.