Festival Director's Message

This year marks the 9th annual Sydney Craft Week Festival! Proudly produced by Australian Design Centre since 2017.

The Festival includes more than 240 events across 37 suburbs. Craft is making a big impact in 2025.

This year’s Festival theme is material intelligence.

In many ways material intelligence is a counterpoint to our lives increasingly lived online with artificial intelligence rapidly doing many of the things we once considered human skills.

Making is a human skill that requires thinking at each stage of the process about concepts, techniques, tools and materials.

Craft practitioners have a deep respect for materials, and the skills needed to work with those materials, to manipulate them, combine them and source them to make things.

Intelligent use of materials for craft needs to consider environmental sustainability including the lifecycle of material use.

Exhibitions, workshops and makers markets feature strongly in the program. In each event the artists reflect on the materials they use, many taking care to reuse and reinvent with those materials demonstrating the considered thinking that goes hand in hand with making. Textiles, fibre, clay, metal, glass, wood, and paper are just some of the materials that feature in the programs sometimes in association with technology and always with sustainable use high in the mind of the maker.

We are grateful for the continued support of The City of Sydney for the Sydney Craft Week Festival.

We hope that you enjoy this Festival experience, finding new ways to engage with materials, making and makers.

Lisa Cahill
Festival Director

Images top (l-r): Amy Kennedy, Work in Progress, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist; Waiting for Spring, Carving Knife and Pickle Fork, 2025, Photo: Lisa Bienz