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đây đó (here/there)
RMIT Gallery
26 September - 30 November 2022
đây đó (here/there) promotes contemporary design practice while sustaining traditional forms of art and craft practice in the wake of rapid development and global challenges in Vietnam and Australia. đây đó (here/there) opens up opportunities for cultural, economic and knowledge exchange between makers and designers from the two countries over a year-long period to present new art, craft and design. Four emerging craft and design artists from Vietnam have been mentored by Vietnamese and Australian mentors to develop their designs for international audiences and markets. Outcomes will be presented as part of Vietnam Design Week and the Vietnam Festival of Creativity and Design (VFCD) 2022. Audiences around the world will be able to experience the programs through the đây đó (here/there) website.
Designer mentees include Tom Trandt Minh Đạo, Pham Hoang Linh, Luu Nhu Ngoc, and Han Nha Dam. Mentors include Dale Hardiman, Dewi Cooke, Dương Nguyễn, James Bartle, Jennifer Conroy-Smith, Le Ba Ngoc, Ronnie Lacham and Thao Vu.
The project is a continuation of Skilled Hands, Shared Culture, a cross-cultural exhibition hosted by RMIT Gallery in 2020 that featured the work of 10 Australian and 10 Vietnamese artists, designers and craftspeople whose work explores the links between art-making and community.
đây đó (here/there) was officially launched as part of VFCD 2021 with a collaboration workshop between Phạm Phan Hoàng Linh from Rẻo (Vietnam) and The Social Studio (Australia), with mentorship from Thảo Vũ from Kilomet 109. The project is supported by the Australian Embassy in Vietnam, CAST (Contemporary Art and Social Transformation research group), RMIT University Vietnam, RMIT Gallery, Vietcraft, VICAS (Vietnam National Institute of Culture and Art Studies), Work Room Four and Vietnam Design Week.
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Archives of Feeling: Trauma, Knowledge, Empathy
RMIT Gallery
21 September - 11 December 2022
The complex repercussions of traumatic experiences, whether collective or individual, are often feelings we navigate alone. Archives of Feeling imagines new ways of sharing the felt dimensions of trauma. In this exhibition, artists share personal connections, lived experiences and the impacts of trauma on themselves and their communities. Collectively, they form an archive of works that navigate the trauma of institutions, colonialism and isolation.
Combining creative practice with socially-engaged models of community collaboration, Archives of Feeling transforms the gallery into a living, growing and sensorial archive of feelings, encouraging us to explore, learn and unlearn. Spanning RMIT Gallery and Design Hub Gallery, this exhibition presents practical and thought-provoking resources for living with trauma, offering new ways of archiving experience and of experiencing archives.
Includes the following projects and artists: Rushdi Anwar, Peta Clancy, Maree Clarke, Graeme Doyle, UNSW fEEL Lab, Julie Gough, Jenny Hickinbotham, Brian McKinnon, Rebecca Moran, Dominic Redfern, Mariela Sancari, T-collective and Julie Watkins. T-collective includes Simon Crosbie, Mig Dann, Yi Won Park, and Jude Worters.
Collectively curated by: Kelly Hussey-Smith, Grace McQuilten, Helen Rayment and Andrew Tetzlaff, and with the support of Jill Bennett, Renata Kokanovic and a community advisory.
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Archives of Feeling: Sensation, Connection, Community
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
18 August - 7 October
The complex repercussions of traumatic experiences, whether collective or individual, are often feelings we navigate alone. Archives of Feeling imagines new ways of sharing the felt dimensions of trauma. In this exhibition, artists share personal connections, lived experiences and the impacts of trauma on themselves and their communities. Collectively, they form an archive of works that navigate the trauma of institutions, colonialism and isolation.
Combining creative practice with socially-engaged models of community collaboration, Archives of Feeling transforms the gallery into a living, growing and sensorial archive of feelings, encouraging us to explore, learn and unlearn. Spanning RMIT Gallery and Design Hub Gallery, this exhibition presents practical and thought-provoking resources for living with trauma, offering new ways of archiving experience and of experiencing archives.
Includes the following projects and artists: Che-Wei Chen, the Children's Sensorium, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council Aboriginal Corporation, the Nurses and Midwives Art Exchange and Thembi Soddell.
The Children's Sensorium includes works by Tamara Borovica, Heather Hesterman, Fiona Hillary, Larissa Hjorth, Live Particle (Angela Clarke and Camilla Maling), Philip Samartzis, Anna Schwann and Hiromi Tango, with leading artistic direction from Boonwurrung elder N'arweet Carloyn Briggs, and with designs by Anthony Clarke.
The Nurses and Midwives Art Exchange includes works by nurses and midwives who have worked through the pandemic accompanied by works created by local artists, with public programming by Ruth De Souza.
Collectively produced by: Kelly Hussey-Smith, Grace McQuilten, Helen Rayment and Andrew Tetzlaff, and with the support of Jill Bennett, Renata Kokanovic and a community advisory.
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Agent Bodies
RMIT Gallery
8 April - 14 August 2022
Agent Bodies questions the various ways that contemporary creative practices engage with themes of human agency, performance, identity, and the body.
Considering new propositions of what a body is, what it has been, and, perhaps most importantly, what it could be, this exhibition interrogates how human bodies, other bodies, and the space between bodies are today contextualised and understood. These excesses of the body highlight the ‘extra-human’ nature of contemporary identities.
Many of the artists included in Agent Bodies recognise bodies as fluid, hybrid, permeable, and ambiguous. They explore how bodies dictate the shape of time and space, but also how the shape of time and space can influence bodies. They reflect where the body is, where it isn’t, and the various states in between. In this way this project has an affinity with radical forms of queerness, intersubjectivity, and intersectionality. Considering agency within its social context, this exhibition includes works that question the performance of identity, bodies in motion, and various states of bodily integrity – birth, sex, and death.
Working across a diverse range of media, the artworks in Agent Bodies share an interest in interrogating the various freedoms and constraints enacted upon bodies in our historical present.
Artists: Anonymous, Brook Andrew, Georgia Banks, Leigh Bowery, Cassils, Megan Cope, Juan Davila, Matthew Davis, Alicia Frankovich, Lucian Freud, Claire Lambe, Mike Parr, Sam Petersen, Yhonnie Scarce, The Killing, Anne Wallace, and Ah Xian.
Curators: Mikala Dwyer, Drew Pettifer.
Victorian Premier’s Design Awards Showcase – Celebrating 25 Years of Design Excellence
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 23 March 2022
The Victorian Premier's Design Awards Showcase for the first time shines a spotlight on a quarter of a century of award-winning design in Victoria. Established in 1996, these awards have recognised and rewarded Victorian designers and businesses that display excellence in the way they use design. The exhibition explores through five themes: THEN, WHO, HOW, NOW and NEXT, the designers, their design practice, the outstanding work and its impact, not just here in Victoria, but on a global scale.
The Victorian Premier’s Design Awards Showcase – Celebrating 25 years of design excellence is curated by Ian Wong.
Participants
Ian Wong
Ian Wong is an award winning designer, collector, curator and senior lecturer at Monash University.
Ian has been invited to curate exhibitions about his research on Australian Design in; Milan, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Suzhou,Sydney, Adelaide, Launceston, Melbourne and his home town of Shepparton. Exhibitions have included EVERYDAY Australian Design, 100 Objects | Australian design in the home, I-CONIC Australian Design, 60 Years of Good Design, BlackBOX – Design and Innovation | Melbourne Australia, Innovators – Australian Design and Innovation, Zmood – Designing Holdens, and 150 Years of Design in Victoria.
The Ian Wong Collection has been a work in progress associated with his research and currently has over 2100 objects designed by Australian designers.
Products designed by Ian as a director of EJO Design have ranged from one-off objects like the RMIT University Ceremonial Mace to brain scanning equipment, Antarctic sleds, and million-dollar high-speed agricultural sorting equipment. Ranges like the pak range for Silvan Australia have recently been reported as the ‘hills hoist’ of rural Australian farm life. This range continues to create significant commercial success for Silvan. Ian’s first product for Silvan, the trukpak, designed in 1989, is still a very successful product and most farms in Australia would have a product designed by Ian.
Ian is currently Director of the Monash Art Design and Architecture Industrial Design Centre (Kunshan) and Program Director – Master of Industrial Design at Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University. This double Master’s degree is delivered at the Southeast University-Monash University Joint Graduate School Suzhou in China.
In 2021 Ian was awarded a GOOD DESIGN AUSTRALIA – GOLD AWARD for Design Research.
Ian is President of Melbourne Movement and the China representative and Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia.
The creative industries encompass disciplines as diverse as games development and graphic design; fashion and film-making; independent theatre and industrial design; comedy and craft. They include activities that are commercially-driven and community-based, experimental and export ready, and everything in between. Collectively, these industries contribute $22.7 billion to Victoria (or 8% of the total economy) and they contribute immeasurably more in terms of social and cultural value.
In bringing together these diverse but interconnected sectors, Creative Victoria fosters new opportunities for innovation, collaboration, cross-promotion and economic growth, both across the creative industries and in the broader community. We work to raise the profile, reach and impact of Victoria’s creative industries, support the career development of local artists and creative professionals, and ensure that all Victorians benefit from creative and cultural opportunities – from school kids to diverse communities to businesses.
Creative Victoria also oversees the state’s major creative and cultural organisations, collections, and facilities, valued at $7 billion, ensuring that that these rich assets can be enjoyed by all Victorian people as well as visitors to the state.
Presented by Creative Victoria as part of Melbourne Design Week.
Fortified
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 23 March 2022
A robust blend of South Australian talent, Fortified combines the new guard of JamFactory artists and designers with the next generation of producers evolving from and challenging the Barossa Valley’s long-held identity.
Dedicated to the reinvention of craft, Fortified is the collaboration between nine JamFactory-trained, craft-based practitioners and their chosen Barossa producer. Together they strengthen ties between the city and the rolling hills to produce works that distil the character, artistry and generosity of the Barossa region. Individual practices are bolstered by these creative partnerships, forging new design directions and brilliant outcomes.
Participants: Ivana Taylor, Matt Pearson, Drew Spangenberg, Ashlee Hopkins, Dean Toepfer, Jordan Gower, Danielle Barrie, Alexandra Hirst, Alison Smiles.
Presented by JamFactory as part of Melbourne Design Week.
Self Portrait
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 25 March 2022
Self Portrait presents 22 self-portraits by Australian creatives, telling us who they are in this moment. Creatives were encouraged to think about their personal and professional selves, representing themselves in a single object.
Over the past five years, Friends & Associates has presented six exhibitions that have asked creatives to think about issues ranging from environmental degradation to intellectual property theft. For this exhibition they were asked to only think about themselves.
Contributors include: Jonathan Ben-Tovim, Kristin Burgham, Andrew Carvolth, Rosanna Ceravolo, Dale Hardiman and Mark Dineen, Danielle Brustman and Jonathan Ellery, Tom Fereday, Jordan Fleming, Ross Gardam, Jon Goulder and Henry Williams, Tom Hancocks, Den Holm, Claudia Lau, James Lemon, P.A.M. (Perks and Mini), Fiona Lynch, Elliat Rich, Makiko Ryujin, Cordon Salon, Skeehan Studio, Studio Tops, ACV Studio and Damien Wright.
Participants: Jonathan Ben-Tovim, Kristin Burgham, Andrew Carvolth, Rosanna Ceravolo, Dale Hardiman and Mark Dineen, Danielle Brustman and Jonathan Ellery, Tom Fereday, Jordan Fleming, Ross Gardam, Jon Goulder and Henry Williams, Tom Hancocks, Den Holm, Claudia Lau, James Lemon, P.A.M. (Perks and Mini), Fiona Lynch, Elliat Rich, Makiko Ryujin, Cordon Salon, Skeehan Studio, Studio Tops, ACV Studio, Damien Wright.
Presented by Friends & Associates as part of Melbourne Design Week.
AA Prize for Unbuilt Work 2022
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 25 March 2022
The AA Prize for Unbuilt Work promotes debate and generates ideas about architecture in Australia by rewarding compelling work in its conceptual stages. Presented by Architecture Australia and ArchitectureAU.com this exhibition showcases the 40 shortlisted entries for this year’s prize.
From big-picture thinking and provocations to schemes with conceptual depth and rigour, the AA Prize for Unbuilt Work shortlist demonstrates the many ways that architects and designers can explore, advocate and address the serious challenges we face in the world today.
The 2022 jury included Julian Anderson, Mel Dodd, Justin Hill, Lee Hillam and Katelin Butler.
Presented by Architecture Australia and ArchitectureAU.com as part of Melbourne Design Week.
Knitted Architecture
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 25 March 2022
Knitted Architecture investigates the use of digital design and 3d knitting technologies as an architectural system. Seamless knitting technologies, which ‘print’ 3d forms stitch by stitch (pixel by pixel) allow the designers to produce whole pieces of extruded textile tubes. Combining the scale of architecture with whole garment technologies used in textile design, each piece expresses shape using different yarns and threads that have the ability to perform as structures – offering curvaceous elasticity and strength. These works are prototypes of textile ‘skins’ that once combined with emerging digital design and advanced fibres such as carbon fibre and Dyneema yarns could feasibly offer ways to rapidly knit high-strength, light-weight forms for columns, shade structures and other architectural elements with material efficiency and minimal waste.
Participants:
Dr Jenny Underwood
Jenny Underwood is a textile designer and the Associate Dean, Fashion and Textiles Technology, in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University, Australia. Her research is practice-based and inter-disciplinary focusing on textile design making practices, parametric design and digital technologies to develop methodologies for responsible design innovation and enhanced material experiences.
Dr Leanne Zilka
Dr Leanne Zilka is a registered architect and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. Her architecture practice, ZILKA Studio and her academic position at RMIT University in the School of Architecture and Urban Design is a multidisciplinary one that brings together architecture, fashion, textile design and material research that develops new ways to improve the built environment. By looking at materials not familiar to architecture, we can harness material and technology advances that can be used in buildings and cities to improve performance, function, and capacity that address pressing issues around climate change. Leanne’s practice looks to land new technologies and materials in novel architectural propositions working in the digital fabrication realm. Hacking into fashion fabrication technologies such as whole garment knitting machines but creating architecturally scaled elements.
Leanne’s research and practice has been recognised nationally and internationally through awards, a recently published book titled ‘Floppy Logic’ by international publisher Actar, featured in the 2018, 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, 2019 Tallin Architecture Biennale and most recently was part of the 2021 National Gallery of Victoria ‘Sampling The Future’ exhibition.
Presented by Dr Jenny Underwood and Dr Leanne Zilka as part of Melbourne Design Week.
Post Digital Objects
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 25 March 2022
Post Digital Objects is an exhibition and series of events exploring the future of digital data, memory and healthfulness. The exhibition showcases material artefacts and creative processes to give insights into the research and development possibilities for designing meaningful hybrid objects for health and wellbeing.
Building on the Data Heirlooms creative practice research collaboration between Emma Luke, Chuan Khoo, Kate Geck and Dr Judith Glover, the exhibition is an exploration of speculative possibilities and new territories for post-digital design practice and the internet-of-things (IoT). Drawing from the designer’s collective backgrounds in product design, jewellery, interactive art/design, electronics, ceramics and textiles, the works are realised through bespoke microelectronics, jewellery fabrication, generative design, 3D printing, digital textiles and augmented reality. These projects explore the potential for objects at the intersection of the digital and material to become part of meaningful human narratives. By foregrounding preciousness, personalisation, and longevity it seeks to ‘make good’ digital objects that foreground holistic, ethical and sustainable ways to interact with future IoT objects for health and wellbeing.
Located at the RMIT Design Archives the exhibition forms the backdrop to a series of panel discussions to contextualise how to design within a new ethical paradigm – ‘how to make good’. Through bringing together the Wearables and Sensing Network (W+SN) and industry experts we seek to facilitate conversations and foster new connections between designers, technologists and researchers to promote collaborative capabilities and explore how design can positively transform our ways of life in a post-digital future.
Participants:
Emma Luke
Emma is a designer/maker and academic at RMIT University. With a background in jewellery and watch design she is currently completing a PhD focused on aesthetics and post-digital wearables. Passionate about ambient interventions that challenge digital obsolescence, and the loss of lasting cultural narratives Emma’s work explores the encoding of value through; data, materiality, aesthetics, and personalisation to inform the development of holistic wearables for health and wellbeing.
Kate Geck
Kate is an artist interested in network culture, who is working in Narrm/Melbourne on unceded Wurundjeri land. She works with code, installation and textiles to create augmented surfaces and interactive experiences. Her practice-based research is focused on ways to materialise the seemingly immaterial nature of data and networks. Invoking the language of the internet, her glitch and emoji laden aesthetic critiques a hyper-mediated age, creating sites of respite and resistance that think through alternative agendas for networked technologies.
Judith Glover
Judith is a researcher, educator, and Industrial Design practitioner at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. She is currently exploring the possibilities for new design research, service, and product innovation under the umbrella of Design and Sexual Health Innovation (Dashi) This involves cross-collaborative research between Design, Engineering and Health fields. She is the co-director of the Wearable and Sensing Network at RMIT University and is interested in developing holistic models of Meditech and Wearable tech Innovation that brings Design methodologies and User-Centred principles to the early stages of technological and product innovation.
Chuan Khoo
Chuan (MFA RISD, PhD candidate RMIT) is an artist, designer, and educator. Key to Chuan’s creative practice is his multi-disciplinary media background, in particular interaction design, electronics, and digital media, as seen through a critical design lens. Working across both design and art, his practice reflects a necessary dualism that interrogates the twin edges of technology – the darker side of its velocity and the ethereal nature of digital ties that may not bind. A learner and educator at heart, Chuan has 15 years of teaching experience across Interaction and Experience Design, ubiquitous computing and electronics prototyping.
Jaclyn Pokrovsky
Jaclyn is a designer-maker and industrial design lecturer at RMIT University. With a deep passion for making Jaclyn’s multidisciplinary practice has a strong focus on narrative, materiality, and fabrication. Forever inspired by the prospect of new material knowledge and processes, her work inspires creativity and intrigue. Jaclyn’s has teaching and making experience across; slip casting, jewellery, batch production, object design, fabrication, 3D modelling, and design research. She believes that the very act of making and the inherent understanding of “imperfection” that comes with it, is instrumental to her considered and unique approach to the design process.
Dr Mehrnoush Latifi Khorasgani
Mehrnoush is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Architecture and Design Swinburne University. Her research focuses on the design of smart skin to study potential impacts of surfaces on microclimates and design of creative responsive skins for buildings, using computational design and digital fabrication techniques. Her creative practice, research and teaching spans the fields of architecture, virtual and augmented reality, thermal comfort and microclimate design. Her research interests focus on the design with, and for, microclimates.
Bin Dixon Ward
Bin’s practice is based in jewellery making, offering the viewer/wearer a sensory engagement and an experience of the artefacts of the built environment. Though attempting to understand the complexities of the world in which we live, Bin’s jewellery seeks to reveal connections between the body, the built environment, and the digital-making environment.
“Through making jewellery, I apply spatial thinking to engage in contemporary discussions relating to the role of digital technologies in material culture, and the relationship between the maker and the machine. It is through these technologies that the complexity of these relationships can be revealed.”
Bin Dixon-Ward brings a distinctive lens to contemporary jewellery and a new way to understand and engage with the urban fabric and the role of digital technologies in jewellery.
Arthur Georgalas
Arthur is a designer passionate about exploring emerging technologies in virtual & augmented reality (VR/AR) and how they can be integrated into the real world. A passionate woodworker, Arthur blends his experience with Digital Design techniques to enhance traditional woodworking practices. Arthur’s design expertise concerns Computer-Aided Design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) and VR where he is commencing postgraduate studies within the School of Engineering at RMIT University. During the last 10 years, Arthur has been a co-director and lead designer of a custom wooden boat plans business conducting R&D, designing, and selling plans using CAD and online business platforms.
Aaron Nguyen
Aaron is an industrial designer with a passion for creative problem solving. He has experience in Accessibility Design and CAD/3D modelling and a deep love for automotive design. A 2021 graduate from the RMIT, Industrial honours Design program (Honours First Class). Aaron was the National Winner of the 2021 James Dyson Award (Australia) for his work on the LUNA Modular AFO an Ankle Foot Orthosis (AFO). A system for children with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP).
Mengke Lian
Mengke is a multidisciplinary designer. With a background in product design and graphic design, she worked as a research assistant at the Tsinghua University. She recently graduated from RMIT University’s with Master of Design Innovation and Technology (MDIT) as a Valedictorian. Mengke is a curious explorer and observer who aims to collaborate with researchers from different backgrounds and to integrate design into different contexts.
Mengke Lian’s Syne is part of the Safety Sensescaping research project led by Dr Olivier Cotsaftis at RMIT University School of Design. Safety Sensescaping is supported by Peninsula Health and WorkSafe’s WorkWell Mental Health Improvement Fund.
Jake Williamson
Jake is a recent honours graduate of the Industrial design program at RMIT With a background in cabinet making. Jake’s hands on experience creating unique, custom-designed cabinetry, and precision joinery brings a keen eye for detail to his industrial design work. With a keen eye for photography and illustration, he incorporates his passion for running, cycling and the outdoors into many of his projects. Much of Jake’s work reflects these pursuits both through his design philosophy and process.
Cameo Zhang
Cameo is a recent graduate from RMIT University’s Bachelor of Industrial Design (Honours). A passionate product/ service / systems designer Cameo’s work provides human-centred solutions that are both innovative and well-considered. Her recent project Grow is a project focusing on maternal mental wellbeing and human connections. The service design includes a pair of smart rings and an assistive app that accompanies expectant parents when they are transiting into parenthood. Cameo believes that successful design outcomes are not only practical but also deliver engaging experiences. With a great interest in interaction design and design for wellbeing, she is exploring possibilities in emerging human emotions with tangible things.
Presented by Emma Luke, Kate Geck and Judith Glover as part of Melbourne Design Week.
Exchange: Recent First Nations Engagement and Collaborations with JamFactory
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
16 - 25 March 2022
Presenting a selection of creative collaborations and workshop outcomes, this exhibition showcases the vitality and diversity of First Nations artists who have worked with designers and skilled makers at JamFactory in various ways to produce design objects across their four specialised studio areas – furniture, ceramics, metal and glass. These works offer new ways of engaging with First Nations material, culture and storytelling and speak to the rich possibilities of deeper, ongoing exchange.
Participants: Raylene Bonson (Bábbarra Designs) and Daniel Emma, Roslyn Orsto (Tiwi Design) and Dean Toepfer, Keturah Zimran (Ikunjti Artists) and Caren Ellis, Warmun Art Centre, Rammey Ramsey, Mabel Juli, Patrick Mung Mung, Ninuku Arts, Nyanu Watson, Monica Puntjina Watson, Angkaliya Nelson, Tjala Arts, Deborah Burton, Beverly Burton, Barbara Moore.
Presented by JamFactory and part of Melbourne Design Week.
