Behind the flawless-finish of Ross Gardam’s copper pendants is a raw handmade process. The spinning of copper, as we see happen here in the workshop, takes time and skill, and is beautiful in its own right. Seeing the creation of this project feels like we’ve been let in on a little secret. Gardam’s Touch Pendants are even more precious than we thought.
The Open House Melbourne juggernaut rolled into town and its surrounds last weekend. Annie Reid joined the 130,000 fans trawling through Melbourne and unearthed some inner city treasures.
We are naturally drawn to celebrating new designers, and rightly so; new energy and creative talent is inspiring and exciting. It is also significant to celebrate designers’ milestones and longevity, to recognise those who continue to create year after year and at the same level of quality they began.
Australia has a pool of talented designers on our doorstep, plus a well-established connection to the Region surrounding us. Celebrating the links we have, we look at both sole practitioners and distributors that make up our global design community. With Melbourne Indesign around the corner, where many of these names will be exhibiting, you can even follow these up in the flesh. A win-win for Design Hunters.
Site-specific art – as its name suggests – is intrinsically intertwined with place. Informed by a pre-existing landscape or built into one, art and place alter each other. We delve into the practice and talk to the artists who create it.
Emma Coulter’s site-specific work has a direct link with her background in painting and interior architecture. Blending the two lets her explore the ideas that overlap between them, de-constructing and re-constructing a space to using a refined palette to create something new.
Klara is a Melbourne-based street and studio artist, combining painting, illustration, paste-ups, stencil, installation and more. For Klara, the more she delves into her practise, the more site-specific it becomes. We find out why.
For Suki, site-specific art can work both ways; sometimes the site comes first and other times it’s the idea. Here is her take on art that alters our experience of place.
Currently juggling a number of projects, from a solo exhibition to creating an installation at Melbourne Indesign, Emma Coulter is one busy woman. While her roots are in Northern Ireland, Emma belongs in Melbourne now, clearly immersed in the art and design world it offers. We talk to Emma about where a background in interior architecture and painting has led her, what she can’t live without, and how a Design Hunter has nothing to do with age or income.
Pok Pok Juniour – Pok Pok’s new sister cafe in Melbourne – is an authentic taste of Thailand. As well as the food, the design by G.A.B.B.E is inspired by local markets and the essence of what makes Thai street eating so appealing. Alice Blackwood speaks to Georgia Ezra, director and interior architect at G.A.B.B.E about the process, why there’s a generous fruit display and how clusters of stools for seating helps to create a genuine experience.
Oliver MacLatchy is a carpenter, builder, tinkerer and inventor with a massive love for timber. The result of that passion is Wood Melbourne, spouts made from reclaimed wood, designed and crafted by hand in his workshop in Melbourne. Each piece goes through 12 stages to become the beautiful, sustainable fixtures they are. Through a series of images we get to see some of this laborious and careful process.
Working together, working at home, a green or grey outlook, perhaps no outlook at all – everyone has a different solution. Peter Hyatt talks to architects and partners, Michael and Cat Bellemo, about their solution in suburban Melbourne.