This program is part of Australian Design Centre’s ongoing research into object, furniture, lighting and industrial design, fashion design, architecture, crafts, ceramics, jewellery, textile arts, glass, timber and mixed media.
As part of Sean O'Connell's Kettles now on in Object Space, ADC's Communications Producer Laura Wesolowski asked Sean three quick-fire questions to find out what inspires him as a designer maker.
ADC was thrilled to host UK design journalist, curator and advocate Corinne Julius in conversation with respected Sydney designer and academic Rina Bernabei. They talked about many aspects of making and design, including its importance in education and how to embrace the hand-made in home interiors.
As part of rachel farag's work رُفات قِدّيسٍ (rufat qiddys: object of a holy person) now on in Object Space, ADC's Communications Producer Laura Wesolowski asked rachel three quick-fire questions to find out what inspires her as an artist.
Curator, weaver and academic, Liz Williamson spoke at the launch of the International Art Textile Biennale 2023 and discussed the vibrancy of contemporary textile based art.
As part of Minka Gillian's work Mini Mind Garden, now on in Object Space, ADC's CEO & Artistic Director Lisa Cahill asked Minka three quick-fire questions to find out what inspires her as an Australian designer.
A collective of creative people worked with the ADC team to make the exhibition, GOOD NATURED: design art architecture, with the lowest possible carbon footprint.
The industry focussed panels held in July and August 2023, pulled apart this process and discussed sustainable exhibition design and production for the future.
8 September 2023 Read about the gathering of two groups of ceramic coolamons, resulting in the With Our Elders exhibition, beautifully capturing stories proudly and generously shared by Elders — ensuring they are passed down to generations of family and community through continuous cultural practices and material objects.
This article first appeared in Garland magazine. Time is the theme for this year's Sydney Craft Week Festival and this article is pertinent to that theme. Bridget has also curated Remade - Reloved 2023 to be presented at Australian Design Centre during the Festival.
ADC worked with Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative to secure the loan of the significant artwork by Euphemia Bostock, Boomalli Ten Founding Member Coolamons (2012).
ADC's Rhadi Bryant recently asked textile artist Lynn Pavey a few questions about her Object Space exhibition, Febrile Momentum, including the significance of the environment and material use in her practice.
Lisa Cahill recently spoke to Brian Parkes, CEO of JamFactory, about starting their sub-brand jam australia and the process of working and collaborating with Australian designer makers to create their exclusive range of furniture, lighting and objects.
Jam: Show + Tell is exhibiting at Australian Design Centre between 3 August – 16 September 2023.
ADC’s Artistic Director and CEO, Lisa Cahill, recently spoke to guest curator, Liane Rossler, about GOOD NATURED: art design architecture produced by and presented at Australian Design Centre from 15 June to 27 July 2023.
They spoke about the inspiration for the exhibition, our responsibility to create better environment outcomes and living a sustainable creative life.
Good Natured celebrates creative projects by designers, artists and architects working to design a better future. These practitioners are focussed on creating outcomes that are both beautiful and good for the planet.
ADC’s Debbie Abraham spoke with curator, weaver and academic, Liz Williamson, about curating Weaving matter: materials and context, exhibited ADC Gallery 2. They spoke about the inspiration for the exhibition and the role of the curator.
To coincide with recent exhibitions at ADC – Tjanpi Desert Weavers’ Mutukaku Ngura: Motorcar Country and Weaving matter: materials and context, ADC presented a symposium about contemporary weaving.
Dr Guy Keulemans and Dr Trent Jansen research new models for the sustainable use of materials and products to establish new opportunities for consumers and collectors to thoughtfully repair their broken things. In 2022 the transformed objects were exhibited at ADC and a live auction was held.
Professor Kate Sweetapple, Head of School, School of Design, Sydney (UTS) spoke at the launch of Beyond design as usual and discussed what it means to be a School of Design.
Curator and author Eva Czernis-Ryl examines the intensive tangle of challenges and opportunities over the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the approaches glass artists across Australia and New Zealand have incorporated into their works.
ADC’s Holly Williams spoke to artist Sue Jo Wright about her Object Space exhibition Dinner Table Syndrome. They discussed Sue Jo's practice and her identification as a Deaf person and her advocacy activities.
John Saxby spoke to furniture design Tom Fereday about his first collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales to design and develop seating for its public spaces.
ADC’s Lisa Cahill recently spoke to designer Matt Harkness about his exhibition Bioplastic Futures. They spoke about the 3D printed waste challenges he's uncovered; the impact of the Maker Movement; and how good design can help solve environmental issues.
Holly Williams reflects on the recent exhibitions The Art of Making: Studio Woodworkers Australia at Australian Design Centre and Beyond Ordinary at Sturt Gallery and Studios.
A journal can be a place/space to plan a project or procrastinate; to dream and develop ideas; to draw with purpose or doodle; to play; to collaborate; to escape; to write or wonder; a space for lists or loose thoughts; ideas that are meaningful or meandering.
This resource was developed by artist, contemporary jeweller and educator Melinda Young for creative journaling workshops held during the Design/ Isolate exhibition in conjunction with Sydney Festival 2020.
In this article architect and director of Custom Mad Claire McCaughan spoke to Yuwaalaraay woman, artist and designer Lucy Simpson about her connection to country and duty of care to place.
Textile designer and educator Eloise Rapp applies the wisdom of traditional textile methods and philosophies to contemporary challenges in design and manufacturing.
Contemporary jewellery and object designer and maker Bic Tieu communicates narratives of identity, cultural memory and materiality through her hybrid approach.
Isolate Make: Creative Resilience in a Pandemic explores how creative practice has adapted to isolation, associated restrictions and production challenges, or simply in response to the tragic global events.
Watch the films made by creative practitioners: Glenn Barkley | Crossing Threads | Kathy Elliot | Benja Harney | Liz Payne | Donna Sgro | Lucy Simpson | Melinda Young
After a career working in community development and later as a family therapist, Nicole Robins now devotes herself full-time to her fibre art and basketry practice, one that is almost completely materials-driven. Inga Walton writes about her work.
This is the twentieth year that furniture, lighting and object designers have created new works for WORKSHOPPED exhibitions program. Article by Penny Craswell.
YOU ARE DOING IT AGAIN by Zoe Brand is an exhibition where general musings about an unprecedented time are put front and center, multiplied, divided, made colourful and offered anew. Catalogue Essay by Melinda Young.
Incorporating glass processes with photography and the moving image, Kate Baker creates deeply introspective and highly emotional work that touches the transcendent, ethereal realm of raw human emotion. Kathleen Linn explores her work.
Exploring the shift towards textile arts and 'craft'-artforms, this essay was written by Glenn Barkley, the curator of Open House: 3rd Tamworth Textile Triennial.
Myf Doughty explores the work of contemporary jewellery designers Susan Cohn, Julia deVille and Kyoko Hashimoto in this essay, included in NGV publication She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art and Design.
Walgett Women and Girls Jewellery Project is a project facilitated by the Australian Design Centre in conjunction with the Indigenous Jewellery Project. A reflection by Nardi Simpson.
The Prue Venables exhibition, recently held at the Australian Design Centre in Sydney, is on its first stop in a national tour. H.R. Hyatt-Johnston reviews the show for Artist Profile magazine.
Yvonne Koolmatrie works at the intersection of past and present. She creates works at the same river where her ancestors once met, using the same traditional rush grasses they harvested. And yet her works speak of revival, innovation and the personal journey of a modern Ngarrindjeri woman, who has lived in constant connection with her homeland and its long, ancient history, writes Louella Hayes.
Concrete stands for progress, it is the building block of our cities and has been used by architects as a defining material of Modernism and Brutalism and by artists as one of the defining materials of Minimalism. This essay by Penny Craswell is republished from the exhibition catalogue of CONCRETE: Art Design Architecture.
CONCRETE: art design architecture is a major exhibition exploring innovative ways that concrete is being used by artists, designers and architects in Australia in the 21st century. This essay by JamFactory Senior Curator Margaret Hancock Davis is republished from the exhibition catalogue.
Blake Griffiths is a Broken Hill-based artist whose practice centres around weaving. This essay by Broken Hill-based artist Asma Mather is a review of his latest display ‘Finding Balance’.
Australian Design Centre partnered with The Indigenous Jewellery Project’sEmily McCulloch Childs and contemporary jeweller, Melinda YoungandYuwaalaraay sisters Lucy and Nardi Simpson on a week of workshops in the regional NSW town of Walgett. This essay by Emily McCulloch Childs captures that joy and cultural connection that the project created.
Prue Venables sees herself unapologetically as a potter—meaning she sees no need to try to
elevate the title of her vocation to ceramic artist. Heidi McKenzie writes about this Living Treasure.
Anita Larkin reconfigures everyday objects to explore our relationship with the physical world.By combining found objects with each other, sculpted pieces, or her own cast body parts, she explores how language, memory and human experience influence how we interact with our surroundings. Bridget MacLeod writes about her hybrid objects.
Contemporary jewellery has evolved as an artform, often exploring materiality and form, and the relationship of objects to the body. For many contemporary jewellers, the term “wearable art” feels more relevant to their practice, while others find their work very much connected to the jeweller’s bench and others, again, are looking at their work in relation to the body, rather than necessarily worn on it.
This is an extract of an essay by ceramicist Neville French, published in the exhibition monograph Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft \ Prue Venables, reflecting on the quality and significance of Prue Venables’ work. For the full essay, the book is available to purchase from Object Shop.
This project examines how shifts in technology, society and the environment are impacting the jobs of the future. It invites the next generation to imagine their place in a future world of work where automation, AI and robots are part of everyday life. What jobs will we have in 2030 and how will they be different to the jobs of today? Read short essays from guest writers including Laurie Aznavoorian, Jess Scully, Balder Tol, Sasha Alexander, Melissa Silk, Natalie Parker and Kate Dunn.
Four films were produced for Ideas Intersecting: Innovation and Design, an online exhibition that explores a single project within the practice of designers Alia Parker, Bic Tieu, Carly Vickers and Harriet Watts. Through visually documenting each practitioner’s processes and design methods for a selected project, the exhibition illuminates, and makes tangible, the moments in creative practice when seemingly disparate ideas intersect.
Guy Keulemans from the University of New South Wales and Niklavs Rubenis from the Australian National University are researchers interested in the power of design-led repair to change the way we think about waste, consumption and the life of objects.
Oliver Smith, Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, writes about a creative exchange between silversmiths Kenny Son and Hendrik Forster characterised by intensive activity, sustained effort and prodigious creative output.
Examining issues related to a lack of diversity in the craft sector and the fact that black women receive more online abuse than anyone else, a new report by Karen Patel of Birmingham City University in the UK asks what can be done to support greater diversity in the UK craft sector.
Matthew Martin and Ewan McEoin discuss SO–IL: Viewing China, a presentation of more than thirty white porcelain items within a vibrant architectural display by US/China architecture practice SO-IL, currently on show at the NGV in Melbourne.
ADC's Creative Strategy Associate, Penny Craswell explores the strong silent nature of steel and its role in the creation of cities, contemporary architecture, art and the future.
Steel: art design architecture curator, Margaret Hancock Davis from JamFactory writes about this most versatile of materials that has also played a vital role in Australia’s design vernacular.
Part architectural pavilion and part sound installation, 80Hz is a project that turns paintings from the State Library of NSW into music using data. Sydney-based British designer and architect Thomas Wing-Evans talks to ADC’s Penny Craswell about the installation, which he designed in collaboration with DX Lab, the library’s experimental design research group.
Emily McCulloch Childs writes about her first trip to the Torres Strait Islands as part of the Indigenous Jewellery Project, with artist and workshop leader Melinda Young teaching the lost wax technique for metals to participants at the Gab Titui Cultural Centre.
Soraya Abidin, textile artist, explores in this essay and in her exhibition Hypersensitive/ Hipersensitif, the double consciousness and ‘in-between’ space of a bi-cultural identity. Her solo textile exhibition is part of Sydney Craft Week at Gaffa Gallery, Sydney.
Making is not just a creative outlet – it also generates a focused, thoughtful state of mind similar to meditative practice. Sydney maker and psychiatrist Megan Kalucy from Shared Threads explores the benefits of mindful making.
Furniture stores are often filled with designs that look similar to others. But is copying furniture legal, and should we feel bad about buying replicas?
Joshua Smith’s miniatures of overlooked buildings offer a street artist’s perspective of the city and raise questions about the spatial politics of Sydney, according to Luke Tipene and Campbell Drake from UTS.
This newspaper-style publication includes articles by some of Australia’s leading experts on 3D printing, including features by Berto Pandolfo and Jennifer Loy (UTS) and jeweller Bin Dixon Ward, and interviews with Kate Dunn (UNSW) and Melbourne ceramics studio Alterfact.
Melbourne jeweller Bin Dixon Wardis fascinated by the relationship between digital technology, jewellery and its maker. She discusses the development of 3D printed jewellery including her own work in this field.
ADC’s Lisa Cahill spoke to Kate Dunn, designer and research leader in Digital Fabrication and Material Innovation in the Creative Robotics Lab at UNSW Art and Design, about the intersections between the traditional craft of ceramics using clay and the use of 3D printing to explore cross disciplinary collaborations.
3D printing has promised to
significantly impact the way objects
are realised. Berto Pandolfo, an
industrial designer and Senior
Lecturer at the University of
Technology Sydney, examines the
evidence that this prophecy is
coming to fruition.
Join a team of experts discuss the future application of 3D printing (or additive manufacturing), exploring not only the latest in new technologies, but also how these technologies are used across manufacturing, business and solo practice.
This digital archive of the magazine is a work in progress. We are progressively uploading the key articles and contents pages of each of the 59 issues of the magazine as a record of 20 years of craft and design in Australia.
Object Book Group is based on a monthly book selected for its resonance with art, craft and design. Fiction, non-fiction we’re not fussy. We’re into great reads on the topics we love! Object Book Group is a new initiative by Australian Design Centre for our creative community to talk with each other, and with us, about books about craft, design, art, fiction and non-fiction.
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