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Deep Time Real Time: The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
10 February - 17 May 2025
Deep Time Real Time: The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition explores the relationship between design and planetary systems through two opposing temporal scales – ‘deep time’ and ‘real time’.
As global citizens, we struggle to reconcile this geological timescale with our everyday lives. This affects our time-based thinking, limiting our ability to make decisions on regenerative actions and to develop collective societal and design responses to the complex challenges of our planet.
Today, technology offers new ways of seeing and knowing information that enable us to better understand the entangled, inter-relational and hidden conditions of our world.
Technology is, however, never a neutral actor. An inherent conflict lies in the fact that many of the most innovative technologies are designed and used for military applications, or the exploration and extraction of resources. This uneasy foundation makes it imperative that we critically question how these tools and practices are utilised – and for whose benefit.
Indeed, through creative ingenuity these very same technologies are being re-designed, hacked and re-deployed to support the repair, regeneration and preservation of ecologies. These adaptive and opportunistic processes are enabling new time-based thinking and spatial practices to emerge.
Deep Time Real Time reveals the agency of time-based thinking and foregrounds a research-led approach to design and creative practice. The exhibition is centred around a large-scale installation by architecture practice Simulaa, comprising a ‘timeline’ of digital, geological and material samples that visualises the journey of materials through time.
A series of architects, designers and artists have been invited to respond, creating a collection of time-based creative and research works presented through the lenses of ecology, energy and technology.
Deep Time Real Time invites visitors to consider the complexity of these intersecting concerns, and to situate themselves in relation to the distant past and the far future.
Deep Time Real Time features creative works and research from Fayen d'Evie, Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen, Alicia Frankovich, Emma Jackson, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Nicholas Mangan and Cameron Allan McKean, Joel Sherwood Spring and Simulaa.
Creative direction by Fleur Watson. Co-curated by André Bonnice, Anna Jankovic and Fleur Watson. Exhibition design by Simulaa. Graphic design by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen. Access consultancy by Access Lab & Library (ALL).
This exhibition is produced by RMIT Culture in partnership with the RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design and with the assistance of The Swayn Gallery of Australian Design. Also supported by the Victorian Government, with core specimens supplied by the State Drill Core Library.
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PRICK! Needlework Now
RMIT Gallery
10 February - 10 May 2025
PRICK! Needlework Now brings together works of art by Australian and international artists who use stitching as a fundamental part of their art practice. Slow and meditative, using a needle is fiddly and time-consuming work. Often overlooked in contemporary art practice, needlework has only recently received renewed critical attention. Whether the surface is textile, paper, flat or three-dimensional, pricking, piercing and puncturing take centre stage.
Needlework is fundamental to visual cultures across the globe; the materials are easy to access, are often inexpensive and the outcomes can be breathtaking. This exhibition presents the expanded ways a needle can be used as an artist’s tool. PRICK! Needlework Now includes artists from Australia, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam, celebrating each artist’s unique technique and approach to this delicate, complex and precise medium.
PRICK! includes works by Maggie Baxter, Aaron Billings, Jayeeta Chatterjee, Carly Tarkari Dodd, Melinda Harper, Michelle Hamer, Talitha Kennedy, Kate O’Boyle, Octora, Louise Rippert, Gurjeet Singh, Louise Saxton, Mien Thao Tran, Kasia Tons and Lisa Walker.
Curated by Helen Rayment.
This exhibition has been produced by RMIT Culture at RMIT Gallery. PRICK! Needlework Now has been supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation and is part of the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme.
