EMERGENCY | Signal, Repair, Adapt | Exhibition

Overview

We are living through overlapping emergencies, ecological collapse, housing insecurity, geopolitical conflict and systemic inequality. For many, emergency is not a singular event but an ongoing condition. 

EMERGENCY: Signal, Repair, Adapt is a major exhibition presented as part of the 2026 Craft and Design Canberra Festival. Bringing together artists and designers working across ceramics, glass, textiles and media, the exhibition examines what it means to make objects in a time of disruption. 

Craft and design operate at a different tempo to the speed of political rhetoric and digital information cycles. Materials hold memory, clay records touch, glass responds to force, fibres stretch, fray and mend. Through these processes, making becomes a form of critical inquiry, revealing the pressures and systems shaping both matter and society. In an age of mass production and disposability, work made locally, by hand and at a human scale, becomes its own form of resistance, a refusal of the standardised and the instant in favour of the considered, the repaired and the lasting. 

Drawing on the 2026 festival theme of Dissent,  EMERGENCY |  Signal, Repair, Adapt asks how making can function as a form of critical action. At its heart, the exhibition affirms the power of creative thinking to meet problems that resist easy answers, to imagine alternatives where established systems have failed.