ONCE UPON A TIME

Stephen Todd discusses what it means to have a national design identity, and whether multicultural Australia can lay claim to one. With a young – though not always admirable – history, it’s time to move forward with respect to the past.

Narrative can imbue Australian design with a sense of its singularity.

Everyone needs a narrative these days, but some stories are more coherent than others. We understand the origins of Nordic design, for instance, its softening of Bauhaus rigour by a pronounced penchant for wood. We readily decode the essentialism of Shaker, the infantile joy of Memphis, the quirk of the latter day Dutch. But what do we understand of Australian design? What tales do our objects tell of our history, our context, our place? Has current Australian design practice sprung from the loins of Modernism, perfectly formed in blond wood – or is it just a Pinterest board away?

As a nation, we love a good yarn. But as a people we still balk at talking about ourselves. With a mere two hundred and twenty nine years separating us from the unleashing of one of the most ignominious periods of British history, uneasiness about our roots is understandable. But by minimising gesture, effectively damning the decorative, we risk obliterating allegory, denying anecdote a place in our own heritage tale.

Our inherent antipathy to the applied arts may be, according to curator David Clark, “a result of the fact that Australia came of age in the Modernist era, which was aggressively anti-decoration. Before that, there is no long history of aesthetics that we can use as a touchstone.” We’re talking about David’s recent At Home show at Old Government House in Parramatta, in which he adroitly set some 60 pieces by 50 modern and contemporary designers in the context of the historic Georgian manner house inhabited most notably by Governor Lachlan and Mrs Macquarie. Among those pieces was Trent Jansen’s Briggs Family Tea Service, a gnarly set of six pieces in porcelain, brass, kelp and wallaby pelt representing the union of George Briggs, a free settler to Tasmania, and Woretermoeteyenner of the Pairrebeenne people and their four children. Developed for Melbourne creative powerhouse, Broached Commissions, the mix of British and indigenous materials was intended to symbolize the beginnings of a hybrid, uniquely antipodean culture.

As At Home was being installed in Parramatta, Trent was at work in his studio at Wollongong University (where he is a sessional lecturer and PHD candidate) preparing his latest collection. Broached MONSTERS is a series of variously hairy and scaly pieces inspired by mythologies trafficked between European and Indigenous Australian cultures. One is the Pankalangu of Western Arrernte mythology anchored in the area west of Alice Springs around an old Lutheran mission that is now the Aboriginal community of Hermannsberg. Narrated by tribal elder, Baden Williams, the Pankalangu, Trent relays, “is a creature who is invisible in the bush. He’s so well camouflaged that the only time you can see him is if it rains and the sunlight hits him and the rain drops transform his body into this glistening thing.”

The other fabulous creature is a pure British invention, conjured up in advance of the First Fleet even leaving England. The Hairy Wild Man of Botany was a bog-standard Bogey Man, evoked as a cautionary tale to the unruly. “But then they found out when they got here that there was a local mythological creature called the Yahoo or Yowie, so there was this linkage through story telling,” says Trent.

“They represent a kind of cultural hybrid, an exotic creature made up of known European creatures.”

The Pankalangu is manifest in the MONSTERS wardrobe and chest. Crafted from Queensland walnut and molded plywood, their proud, bombée forms are covered in a scaly, copper-lined armature that glistens surreptitiously as one moves around it. The accompanying hairy, scaled chair is squat and pert. Alert, it appears ready to pounce. The chaise longue is related, though notably more languid.

The Hairy Wild Man of Botany is incarnated in a series of flat, New Zealand cow leather bowls covered in wry Icelandic sheep fleece. “They represent a kind of cultural hybrid, an exotic creature made up of known European creatures. They are not made from Australian native materials because the Hairy Wild Man was an imagined creature conjured up through British imagination.”

Broached MONSTERS comes replete with its own creation story. In 2010, Trent was awarded a residency with Edra to work alongside its visionary creative director, Massimo Morozzi at the Tuscan factory. “Toward the end of the three months, Massimo sat me down and encouraged me to embrace the, I guess you might say, exoticism of aspects of Australian culture and landscape that don’t exist elsewhere. He was speaking specifically about central Australia.” Massimo gave Trent a copy of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines shortly before he died, the Edra collaboration perishing with him. Reincarnated as Broached MONSTERS, the capacity of the series to encapsulate a specific history is inspiring. Collector pieces, the wardrobe, chest, side table, armchair and chandelier are in limited edition of three. The XL, M and S bowls are in open edition.

Around the same time as Trent was conjuring up his Monsters, Nicole Monks was confronting her own demons, bringing them to life in her Marlu (Kangaroo) series of seating. “Growing up, I didn’t know I was Aboriginal,” she recounts, “that I was a product of the Stolen Generation. I’m also of Dutch and English descent, and I wanted to express that complexity of origin in my designs.”

“My mother had always told me that her grandmother was adopted. She was quite fair and spoke with an English accent since she had grown up with the Salvation Army, had undergone deportment lessons, language classes. We’d had our suspicions that she was aboriginal, but she wanted no one to know because being aboriginal entailed so much tracking and control of behaviour and movement.” A graduate of the KVB Institute of Technology in North Sydney, Marlu is Nicole’s means of coming to terms with that discovery, of distilling her history into furniture that tells a tale of cultures historically – and somewhat haphazardly – intertwined. Gesturally refined, ‘waburn-waburn’ (Bounce), ‘walarnu’ (Boomerang) and ‘Nyinajimanha’ (Sitting Together) are respectively a hammock seat in hemp canvas, kangaroo hide and goldplated steel; a tensile, bent wire chair embellished with kangaroo fur; and a seating unit comprised of a Tasmanian oak low table and attendant stools arrayed around a sixpointed kangaroo tail rug. As much as the waburn-waburn chair provides flaps of kangaroo skins to create a kind of nurturing pouch, walarnu emboldens the sitter, puts them on the alert. Finely crafted, the series riffs off the sleekness of mid-century Modernism while the story they tell goes back many millennia.

Designers don’t need to have a unique family background like Nicole’s to inspire their work. Neither do they need be cultural anthropologists, like Trent. They just need to be curious, to look beyond a reductive Modernist canon which – lacking historical grounding – can come off as simply uninspired. There are so many moments in our various stories and histories of this country to be mined for contemporary design. David Clark’s At Home show was exemplary. By inserting contemporary designs by the likes of Adam Goodrum, Charles Wilson, Elliat Rich, Chen Lu & Co into a historical context it created compelling peripheral noise, the kind of musical frisson that arises as piano notes get closer together. David was wary not to impose narrative where there was none, but the recontextualisation of current creation opened up dialogues previously unheard. Seen again now removed from that historical setting, the objects still glow with an aura of new authenticity. The very idea suggested by David’s curation appears to stick to them, reposition them in our mind’s eye. Once seen, history it seems can’t be unseen.

Trent Jansen’s Broached MONSTERS will be on show at Criteria, Melbourne from February 16th 2017 through March 2017.