5 November - 12 December 2026

Craft + Design Canberra Festival

Small Rituals: handmade, handheld

In an age of acceleration, mass production and the disposable object, Senden Blackwood's granite vessels are an act of quiet defiance. Each piece is carved by hand from one of the hardest materials on earth, a process so slow and deliberate it refuses the very logic of our contemporary world. Where industry demands speed, uniformity and obsolescence, these works insist on patience, permanence and the irreplaceable intelligence of the hand.

The forms themselves, nesting hemispheres, split spheres, stacked cones and vessels of geometric clarity, carry the reductive rigour and geometric delight of Bauhaus design. Yet Blackwood turns that modernist vocabulary against its own industrial ambitions. The Bauhaus dreamed of forms fit for the machine; here those same pure geometries are wrested from stone one grinding pass at a time, each surface bearing the evidence of sometimes months of labour. It is functionalism made deliberately, gloriously slow and exacting.

To drink from a granite cup, to lift a stone bowl worn smooth by patient labour is to be returned to weight, to time, to the geological, to the aesthetic pleasure of touch. In their exceptional craftsmanship these objects dissent from the culture of the instant, arguing without a word that slow making has the highest possible worth and refusing, quietly, the logic of mass consumption that is destroying our planet.