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Funaki 30th Anniversary
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Happy Returns: Funaki at 30
I like walking. Especially in big cities. For thirty years, the morning walk on my first day in Melbourne has always been from Fitzroy to the city. Just thirty minutes. And the first stop, after coffee, is always Funaki.
At the beginning, that was in Crossley Street, the narrow lane that had harboured galleries and makers for decades. I vividly remember the day Mari Funaki told me that she was opening a jewellery gallery. It seemed a quixotic project, but also entirely necessary. A real Melbourne story. I see Melbourne as ‘the capital of stuff’ in Australia; its history of manufacturing in the city centre goes back to the 1850s, and the Chinese furniture makers who returned from the Victorian goldfields to start new lives just around the corner from Crossley Street, in Melbourne’s vibrant Chinatown. With its concentration of energies and talents, with its fiercely independent artistic life, Melbourne really did need a gallery devoted to the best in contemporary jewellery and object making.
Within the twinkling of an eye, or so it seemed, Gallery Funaki became a global reference point for invention and excellence in contemporary jewellery. And delight, and beauty, if there is any doubt about that. From the beginning Funaki brought together makers from this part of the globe—Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand—with their counterparts in Asia and Europe. It has made a huge contribution globally because it has always shown an exciting mix of work by wildly different artists. What united them from the beginning, though, was passing Funaki’s scrutiny: Mari’s ferociously high standard, expressed with clarity and entirely without remorse, was legendary. None of this was simple and straightforward: Gallery Funaki was always an arduous labour of love, as well as a small—one might say very small—business. But it made Melbourne an essential location in a network of distinguished galleries worldwide that are devoted to contemporary jewellery and objects. Gallery Funaki became a global waystation.
After Mari died in 2010, Katie Scott took over the keys at Funaki. Even as we grieved, I was confident. In my work as a curator, I had worked with Katie, appreciating her focus, her attention to the fine detail of works; as a client, I enjoyed her unsparing counsel: ‘That doesn’t look good on you.’ On the day of Mari’s memorial at the National Gallery of Victoria, I walked around to Crossley Street to pay one last visit to her gallery and was greeted by Katie. As I left, I saw a small but telling difference: Katie had installed a handle on the street door. Finally, one could exit without the familiar ritual of fumbling. I knew immediately, with that confident change, that Funaki was in good hands. Indeed, it prospered over the next decade, recruiting new makers, counselling established ones, and securing connections with major museums worldwide. Under Katie’s direction, Funaki constantly reviews the field. The biennial Mari Funaki Award, staged in 2014, 2016 and 2018, for instance, attracted hundreds of entries; it was effectively an international survey of the field at the time.
And then in early 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in Melbourne, and with it came terrible times: an unbearable caesura in the city’s thrumming rhythms for over five months, the longest lockdown of a major city anywhere in the world. Katie Scott’s decision in early 2020 to quit the lease on the beloved Crossley Street premises, after 25 years, was prescient. And she, who had never favoured online transaction, pivoted in an instant: Funaki immediately began to present artists’ works online, but also in intimate personal meetings with clients, in cafés, in private settings, wherever. The Covid year was a new world; it demanded new ways of working. (It still does.)
By 2022, Funaki had moved a very short distance to Flinders Lane, and with the thoughtful refit of a domestic apartment by Workshop Architecture, the gallery reopened in October, with what Katie Scott called ‘Funaki’s third story’. (Pun intended - the gallery is located on the third floor.) Here, Melbourne continues to show local makers and welcomes those from elsewhere: about half of the artists represented by Funaki come from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and half from the rest of the world. Funaki is a meeting place, in several senses: not only for the works themselves but for the artists who travel to Melbourne, meeting colleagues, curators and collectors, participating in the rich mix of cultural conversations that the city offers. I’m thinking here of a particular cluster of energies: the many jewellery studios and retail outlets; RMIT, with its workshops, teachers and programs; more recently, Radiant Pavilion, the biennial gathering of jewellers has brought new oomph to the city’s focus on making.
All these pathways and journeys converge on Funaki, and then they spin off and out, far into the wide world. I said before that Funaki was a waystation, and a meeting place. It’s also a clearing house: for the works themselves, and also for the ideas that they distil and provoke, for the unexpected encounters they encourage, and the conversations that follow. For jewellery is always on the move, with its wearers. Jewellery walks out into the world with us; it travels with us and makes friends, connecting people: every day there are conversations about jewellery we wear. In a contemporary world that is dangerously in flux, this sort of movement, this way of coming together, is a blessing
One excellent reason to walk is to be surprised by the destination. Thirty years later, I still walk to Funaki. The route has changed slightly, but the quest remains the same: what will I see? What fresh surprises do the artists at Funaki have for us? And what will I find in that same white bank of shallow wooden drawers, originally commissioned by Mari Funaki in 1995, which I have visited now for thirty years? That question is still exciting. Whatever the answers at Funaki may be—and they are always different—they are always rewarding. As is the journey itself.Julie Ewington
