Critical Narratives

Telling stories through design is nothing new, and there are plenty of creatives who continue to do it well. Companies like Droog and Studio Job have built a reputation around imbuing everyday objects with narrative, allowing their designers to better inform, engage and entertain the end user. It makes a chair, rug or utensil appear all the more intriguing and certainly doesn’t hurt from a marketing point of view.

However, what sets design production house Broached Commissions apart is the rigour invested in its storytelling. The Melbournebased studio was launched in 2011 by creative director Lou Weis and his business partner Vincent Aiello to create limited-edition collections of objects and furniture. Each piece is more work of art than product, the result of research-driven curatorial processes that leave no stone unturned when it comes to conceptual exploration. It’s an approach essentially motivated by intellectual curiosity to investigate what it means to live in Australia, as well as to understand and critique the experience of international design from a humanist perspective.

As Weis explains, ‘We initially wanted to tell individual stories of important moments in Australia’s history, like the colonial and gold-rush periods, and we realised that the bigger story we’re actually telling is about the material culture of globalisation.’ Themes like migration and its impact on the movement of material culture run throughout the collections. Broached Colonial (2011), for example, looks at a very specific slice of time when ‘stuff ’ first arrived in Australia. Ideas of discovery and hardship are also explored, with Lucy McRae’s Prickly Lamp family, featuring 280,000 hand-dyed toothpicks as an ornate ‘protective skin’, drawing attention to the often-horrendous conditions under which women convicts lived. Broached Expectations (2018) chronicles Mimi Jung’s personal story of migration from Korea to the US, and features pastel glass works with ruptures across their delicate surfaces.

Each collection’s narrative influences the selection of designers in much the same way as a film script determines the director and cast. For the designers themselves, focusing their energies on the collective ambition of telling a story as well as possible has been a highlight. ‘It’s exciting to be challenged in this way, especially because I’m more of an intuitive designer than a narrative-based one,’ says Sydney-based Adam Goodrum, who along with Trent Jansen and Charles Wilson, is a founding designer of Broached Commissions and a regular collaborator. ‘It definitely takes me out of my comfort zone and I’ve found the research process to be really rewarding.’

With their strong political, social, cultural and historical engagement, the works create an engaging dialogue. On the other hand, there’s no overlooking their sheer beauty. ‘The material language and formal mechanisms of assembly and artisanship are either discreetly displayed and it’s the expert who understands how difficult it is to achieve that seamlessness, or the complexity of the making is clearly visible and anyone of any age with any experience can look at it and go, “Wow, how did they make that?”,’ notes Weis.

As the studio moves towards the production of its next collection, and a broader audience is introduced to its work in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Broached Commissions continues to reinforce the power of design to narrate history and culture. By positioning design as a tool for change, it enables the type of self-reflection necessary for progress.