Hand Held Gallery

Hand Held is a tiny gallery in inner city Melbourne. Our focus is on object based work including installation, hand held objects, found objects, paper and book arts, glass, textiles and jewelry.

Exhibition Calender:

May: 6th – 29th May; Paul Compton, ‘Houses of Blood and Rapture’.
Houses of Blood & Ratpure uses drawing and handmade books to represent the mystery, charm and duality of Australian houses. I am intrigued by the idea that what goes on in a house impacts on people’s perception of the house as an inanimate object. A house can be seen as quaint and charming but if a terrible murder should occur there it will develop an air of menace and become more negatively charged in the suburban conscious regardless of its outward appearance. It may even become thought of as haunted. Every one recalls hearing about or seeing a house that is considered haunted; sometimes a house may not look particularly forbidding but the stories associated with its past occurrences make it cursed in our minds.

June:3rd – 26th June; Glen Skien, ‘Oh Bird’.
“I’m not certain what came first the bird or the tobacco tin but somehow they seem to meet in the studio one morning along with fragments of etchings, piano keys, shoe tacs, old photographs, and other things on the studio shelves… perhaps what they now contain is that space between the reflective moment and endless possibilities..” Assemblage, collage, box and book objects

July 1st – 24th: Collette Dane, Artist Books

July 29 – August 14; ‘Snip, Slice, Saw’, book, paper and object works exploring the techniques of cutting.

August 16 – 28; ‘Chalkboard’, an evolving exhibition of daily chalkboard drawings by various artists.

September 2 – 25; Sarah Ritchie, ‘Select’.
Select considers the act of collection and display. Small objects and book works are presented as pseudo-museum cabinets in miniature. Personal and intimate in stature and material they may be folded closed at will, safely hidden and secreted away, limited in view. The miniature cabinets are constructed from digitally and traditionally printed papers and allude to replicas and models, perhaps samples for theatre designs and sets. Small worlds of ambiguous objects are contained within each fragile paper cabinet –anatomical viscera or unnamed biological specimens? With reference to historical medical imaging, cabinets of curiosity as well as classical architecture, Select reflects on the potent relationship between the frame and the object contained within.

September 30 – October 30; Michael P Fikaris, comics

November 4 – Dec 4; Sandra Winkworth, Artist books and objects

December; Chloe Vallance and Melissa Cameron, ‘Measuring the Space Between’.
collaborative exhibition.

Hand Held Gallery is now accepting proposals for 2011.