Local ambitions
Creative director of Sydney Design Week, Stephen Todd delves into the thriving diversity of Australian design in the 21st century.
VL VIEW
Creative director of Sydney Design Week, Stephen Todd delves into the thriving diversity of Australian design in the 21st century
The lightbulb moment happened on November 10 2011 when, having recently returned to Australia after 20 years living abroad, I found myself at the launch of the first Broached Commissions collection in a disused film facility in Sydney’s Surry Hills. Until that second, I’d been wondering what ‘Australian design’ might look like. And there was an answer: the work on show included a tea set made from lacquered kelp and kangaroo pelt, a lushly polished tallboy devised along the lines of rustic outback structures, and a towering tripodal floor lamp the legs, stem and head of which were covered in thousands of hand-dyed toothpicks to evoke the psychological carapace of convict women who managed to survive transportation from Britain.
Deeply thoughtful, supremely crafted and responding to the specifics of history and place, Broached Commissions has in its various iterations over the ensuing decade added gravitas to the accruing critical mass that is a nascent Australian design aesthetic.
That’s not to say that all Australian design is intellectually or aesthetically outré, yet it is characterised by a certain edge: something awardwinning designer Yasmine Ghoniem identifies in her own style as “arty-casual”. “As a country we’re very refined but not pretentious, and when you mix that refinement with a certain Australian harshness you get this really great concoction,” she says.
For Richard Munao, director of Cult and founder of locally designed and manufactured brand Nau, Australian design is marked by an “easy, unpretentious” allure often reminiscent of the clean lines and honest materials of mid-century architecture across the nation. The Nau collections
— designed by Adam Goodrum, Tom Fereday and Zachary Hanna in Sydney, Kate Stokes and Adam Cornish in Melbourne, and Jack Flanagan in Perth — are manufactured in New South Wales (timber and upholstery) and Victoria (metalwork).
That means that when, say, Hermès orders Goodrum’s Fat Tulip armchairs for its Tokyo and Osaka stores, fine Antipodean craftsmanship is being recognised not only on the international stage but within the rarefied environs of one of the world’s most renowned leather goods houses. “The maturity of what’s being conceived and produced by Nau has made the brand evolve even quicker than I expected,” says Munao. “I’m quietly proud of where we’re at.”
Aidan Mawhinney, director of Living Edge, which imports Tom Dixon (UK), Vitra (Switzerland) and Herman Miller (US) but also works with Sydney designers David Caon and Henry Wilson as well as Brisbane’s Alexander Lotersztain, sums up Australian design as simply “progressive”. “I’ve kept an eye on the Australian designers showing in Milan in recent years, and they’re not underperforming in any way,” says Mawhinney, who insists he’s intent on “supporting great global design, and it just so happens that a lot of that is coming from Australia these days”.
Until recently, designers across our nation of any stature would flock to Milan for Salon de Mobile in the hope of getting their self-funded prototypes in front of any of the hundreds of major brands based and/or showing there. Sometimes, they’d luck out and actually get an appointment; mostly they talked their way into the endless roster of parties in the hope of schmoozing someone in the know.
“Australian designers are like mushrooms in a forest,” says Alberto Alessi, whose grandfather Giovanni founded the namesake company in 1921. “At first you can see just one, but the more you look, the more you spot. There must be something that makes design there special.” ››
‹‹ And so in a lineup that rolls off the tongue like a libretto — Castiglioni, Branzi, Dominioni, Botta — it’s easy to detect the twang of Antipodean talents like Newson, Goodrum, Kontouris and Cornish. Alessi is so convinced of the talent pool here that in 2014 the company launched the Alessi Design Prize, most recently held in conjunction with Vogue Living.
Since Covid has grounded most international travel (with the Milan fair cancelled last year), Australians have had to hunker down — and that might well prove to be a boom for the local design scene. Certainly the handful of galleries dealing in the burgeoning collectible design sector have made good inroads recently.
Sally Dan-Cuthbert, an established art consultant with a private client list, established her “functional art” gallery in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay in late 2019 and today represents some 20 designers — including Trent Jansen and Johnny Nargoodah, Ivana Taylor and Edward Waring — and almost the same number of visual artists.
Her design collectors “are a mix of people who are just understanding collectible design and functional art and, like me, want to have pieces with a story and importantly an artist’s hand,” she says, noting her stable is of “Australian artists and designers who are of international quality but who have remained local”.
In Melbourne, Tolarno Galleries held its first design exhibition in March last year of three hand-crafted straw marquetry pieces by Adam Goodrum and Arthur Seigneur, who collaborate under the banner of A&A. All three sold out, two to Sydney philanthropist Judith Neilson AM (for whom Goodrum is also designing several bespoke pieces).
Also in Melbourne, art dealer Sophie Gannon began exhibiting design in 2017 — the year of the inaugural Melbourne Design Week held under the auspices of the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria). Today her regular roster includes Melbourne creatives Danielle Brustman and Dale Hardiman, as well as Alice Springs-based Elliat Rich. “The market has become sophisticated very quickly,” says Gannon. “The label ‘art’ or ‘design’ can be made by the collector if they want to categorise it. But more and more people are just going with it and appreciating the object for what it is.”
And more and more, they are appreciating — and consuming — it onshore. “The local design community has always been very rich but it was under-recognised because there were limited opportunities for expression,” says NGV director Tony Ellwood AM, who established the Department of Contemporary Design & Architecture in 2015, three years after taking up the reins. “I would come across these great Melbourne designers when I was abroad, and they’d tell me they’d had an opportunity to exhibit with a gallery in Paris or Vietnam or had been picked up by a store in New York. But they had no presence in their home city.”
As Melbourne Design Week goes from strength to strength, the Victorian government has plans for NGV Contemporary, a new gallery that will house the hundreds of design pieces acquired since 2017.
Meanwhile in New South Wales, the Powerhouse Museum — which has organised an annual Sydney design event for more than two decades — is reorienting the historical Ultimo space while forging ahead with a new setup in Parramatta designed by Moreau Kusunaki and Genton: the largest spend on cultural infrastructure in the state since Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, completed in 1973.
“Design is central to how we think and what we do as an institution,” says the museum’s chief executive Lisa Havilah. “The distinctive scope of the Powerhouse allows us to consider design across all aspects of contemporary life, from our built environment to fashion to engineering. By working across existing design sectors and investing in new work, we not only document and amplify Australian design but contribute to its development.”
Today, 10 years after that initial lightbulb moment, it’s clear that Australian design is a vibrant constellation of creators and brands, makers and manufacturers, independent galleries and important institutions. All synapses firing, positively brilliant.
Sydney Design Week runs from September 14-20 at the Powerhouse Museum; maas.museum/powerhouse-museum
“Australian designers are like mushrooms in a forest. At first you can see just one, but the more you look, the more you spot” ALBERTO ALESSI