2020 VISION
Design luminaries Patricia Urquiola and Faye Toogood reveal the inspiration behind their new work for the National Gallery of Victoria’s TRIENNIAL 2020.
Design luminaries Patricia Urquiola and Faye Toogood reveal the inspiration behind their new work set to be unveiled at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial 2020
Snapshotting a moment, a mood, and new modes of making across best global and local art, architecture and design practice, the National Gallery of Victoria launches its Triennial and promises to take museum-goers on a revelatory roller-coaster ride through culture now. The concerns of conservation, representation, collectivism and cataclysm thread through 86 projects, by more than 100 artists from more than 30 countries, all challenged to steer their respective commissions through the realities of Covid-19. The results are telling of human tenacity and historically will be judged to mark the moment when the lights figuratively and physically turned on. We talk to two of the Triennial’s star billings, a pair of genre-defying designers who determined to make the most of a crisis in their startling concepts.
THIS PAGE Patricia Urquiola with prototypes of her NGV Triennial 2020 work, Recycled woollen island (2020).
When Patricia Urquiola is pressed to recall the circumstances surrounding her commission to create a floor installation to feature in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria for its moment-defining Triennale 2020, the Madridborn, Milan-based designer declares herself “bad at these questions”.
She is hazy on the when, what and how of it all, because it’s early morning in Milan and her diary is always over-subscribed with dates — the downside of being a polymath architect, product designer, strategist, creative director (for Italian furniture group Cassina), mother and task-master of endless side projects. But the truth of it, as Urquiola admits, is that she finds the “who of it” to be a much more compelling reason for both her dialogue and design.
“Friendly relations, I think this is the story,” she says with smiling command. “My projects come from the lovely side, which means if I like a person, if I like a company, I work with them for a long time; get involved in discussion [about] how they do things, how they produce — if the conversation is good, it goes on.”
That declaration is later put to the NGV’s senior curator of contemporary architecture and design, Ewan McEoin, whose job it was to finesse her upcycling concept through the lockdown constraints of Covid, the logistics of its production, and the pragmatic links to a grand space cast in the jewelled light of Leonard French’s majestic stained-glass ceiling (the world’s largest). He laughs to be told that she must have liked him and his line of conversation.
“We had a beautiful meeting in Melbourne,” McEoin recalls of the pre-pandemic discussion ensuing from conversations with Spanish soft furnishings company GAN and its creative director Mapi Millet with whom Urquiola has long collaborated and recently launched Nuances, a range of rugs radicalising the process of wool felting. “I had met Patricia when working in magazines and she always impressed as a warm and generous person. This commission was all about friendship and the shared commitment to making it happen.”
The ‘it’, as Urquiola volubly explains, was to upcycle the scraps of past GAN projects into felted wools — “like a terrazzo of leftovers” — for the making of floor furniture that facilitated the museum-goer’s full scoping of the Leonard French glass ceiling. “In this fantastic room you’ve got to go and lie on the floor just to get a relation with the space, with the art piece, no?” she questions. “We lie in domesticated landscapes where there is always a sock. I live my life in socks — they are part of our shadows — can we interpret this idea in this immense, fantastic room?”
Eulogising the humble garment as a symbol of connection — always needing another, with a shape largely unchanged since the Stone Age — Urquiola details her proposition for a woollen island of giant socks that label with the sort of motivating missives scrawled on sporting footwear. ‘HOP ON LOOK UP’, one black-and-white tag playfully pleads to Grand Hall visitors to view the ceiling plane. “I don’t want to worry about formality or elegance — I want people to smile,” she says with an Aussie ease. “No worries.”
While her agreement to take the commission was conditional on the manufacture going to GAN’s contacts in India — makers who had refined new felting techniques and for whom she had an existing regard — Covid quickly tested commitments, concept, time frames and fabrication. “ dd nly, there was a possibility that none of it would deliver on time,” says who recalls mooting manufacture elsewhere. “But Patricia was super d to the ecological footprint and making it in India, because a significant nt was being made and she wanted it to go to these people.” ics and big design identities aside, what McEoin considers most amazing project is that the NGV backed the risk and bought into the collective ent. “Sure, on the surface of it, this appears to be a famous designer, eautiful objects in a nice colour selection, with a sense of humour, but otionally, it is a work about this moment in time and about the boundaries ” he says. “A commitment to the environment, a commitment to ethics e supply chain, and a commitment to people.” a responds from the other side of the planet, recalling the photo sends man faces and hands committed to getting her upcycled felt made in given form in Spain. “I saw little videos of them working the last days,” beaming in memory of the doors closing on a shipping container bound urne. “A chain of relations that make something fantastic, that is the iracle.” patriciaurquiola.com