Design
Three exhibitions at Melbourne Design Week explored how furniture and other objects can go beyond their standard uses, offering something more. By Lara Chapman.
Melbourne Design Week 2025
Would a hug from a sofa calm you down? Can a chair build lasting relationships across cultures? What if a clock could tell a story about living with endometriosis? These are some of the questions asked at this year’s Melbourne Design Week.
Furniture has always had prescribed functions that help us to do specific tasks – to sit, store, eat, sleep. This year’s design week features many wonderful examples of functional, useful and beautiful furniture in the 100-plus exhibitions across the city and rural Victoria. Each of these objects has a fascinating material history and technique embedded into their forms. Individually each is compelling, but seeing all this furniture at once across a vast 10-day program from May 15-25 is also terrifying.
While I admire the work and relish the sense of community at events like these, I wonder: in a time of climate crisis, increasing social polarisation and high cost-of-living, do we really need new furniture designs? Should we focus our creative energy elsewhere? Can a new design object be something other than simply a consumer good to be bought and sold? What more can furniture do?
Design anthropologist Trent Jansen, one of Australia’s best-known furniture and object designers, has been grappling with questions like these throughout his career. Walking into his retrospective exhibition Trent Jansen: 20 Years of Design Anthropology, showing until July 5, at the cooperative gallery Useful Objects, you are greeted by furniture that is both strange and oddly beautiful. A hairy armchair that is almost spider-like in its appearance (Pankalangu, 2017); a five-legged bench with a scale-like pattern, created from its internal skeleton of a discarded screen door that is snugly sandwiched between leather (Ngumu jangka warnti, 2020); stools crafted from folded old road signs, their instructions to drivers now obscured (Sign Stool, 2004).
While these works function as chairs and benches and stools, their unusual and intriguing forms prompt us to wonder if they are something more. For Jansen, the answer is yes. He has built a practice of using design objects to research and tell forgotten or invisible stories, many of them uncomfortable and rooted in colonialism. The narratives embedded in the work are often shaped through long-term collaborations with First Nations makers and craftspeople and are accessible through a QR code to a catalogue in the exhibition.
His Pankalangu series, for example, which draws from the Western Arrernte story of a mythical creature that lives in the bush and moves only with the rain, was developed in consultation with Elder Baden Williams and other senior custodians at Hermannsburg. A furry wallaby-pelt armchair, fluffy bowls and Jansen’s beautifully detailed walnut and copper cabinet covered in scalloped scales reflect this story, exploring a little-considered cultural confluence between colonial settlers and Indigenous people in their shared fear of what might lurk in the bush.
As well as employing furniture as a narrative device, the exhibition shows how Jansen uses furniture to foster cross-cultural collaborations and long-term relationships. This is an aspect of his practice that he says has grown in importance over the years. The Ngumu jangka warnti series, for example, was co-created with Johnny Nargoodah, a Nyikina/Walmajarri man who Jansen met at a workshop. They got to know each other sourcing timber on Country and sharing approaches to making.
Following this, they visited a scrap yard together, found some mesh screens and began experimenting. Drawing on Nargoodah’s knowledge of leather as a saddle-maker and Jansen’s research-led process, they built a working rapport that has continued for 15 years. The result is the skeletal and ghostly leather furniture series that draws from the Walmajarri phrase ngumu jangka warnti – “all made from rubbish”.
For Jansen, furniture provides an opportunity to connect with and learn from others. A chair is a chair, but it is also “a coming together of two people forming relationships, getting to know each other, celebrating each other’s way of doing things”. He considers this as often more important than the outcome. Showing this sculptural and conceptually driven furniture at events such as Melbourne Design Week (MDW) also allows, he says, the telling of “stories that are from marginal places, stories that don’t often reach the mainstream”.
Deep Calm by Sibling Architecture – a practice led by Amelia Borg, Nicholas Braun, Qianyi Lim and Timothy Moore, who work across cultural, commercial and community projects – reveals a very different approach. The exhibition is in a room next door to the practice’s office. To reach it, one must enter through a door off Swanston Street in Melbourne’s busy CBD, squeeze into the tiny lift of the multifunction building and travel to the fifth floor. It takes some commitment to find the exhibition, but once you arrive the atmosphere changes entirely. A gallery host in soft pale pink, eggplant purple and olive green pyjamas, designed by SUKU Home, greets you and asks you to take off your shoes.
Then you enter a pink-infused room. The floorboards are painted pastel pink, the window panes and glass door are covered in a light pink film that filters a rosy light into the space, and giant, mostly pink sausage-like cushions curl around the room on a colourful carpet that massages your feet as you walk across it. You’re invited to lie down and nestle into one of the sausage’s folded nooks. “Make yourself comfortable,” the host says as they tuck you in a little, pushing the velvety texture closer around your body so you are fully embraced in a firm but cosy cushiony cuddle.
“This exhibit explores the calming effects of deep pressure, often felt through hugging, holding, or gentle squeezing,” reads the program text. “Known to promote relaxation and reduce anxiety by stimulating serotonin release, this sensation underpins a range of therapeutic tools, including weighted blankets, toys and hugging machines.” Deep Calm grew from Sibling Architecture’s broader inquiry into the under-researched field of sensory design and proprioception. The project, a member of the team explains, grew from some of Sibling Architecture’s recent projects designing and building schools for students who are neurodivergent or face learning difficulties, where sourcing appropriate furniture proved challenging.
Their year-long research to get to Deep Calm isn’t presented in the exhibition. Instead, Sibling Architecture has opted for an experiential approach that is light on contextual information, inviting us to viscerally question the omission of touch and physical sensations in design. Can furniture and architecture foster dignity and comfort? Can it lower our heart rate and decrease anxiety? What functions and groups of society have traditionally been overlooked in design?
At Magma Galleries in Collingwood, Australian–Portuguese architect and multidisciplinary artist Marta Figueiredo’s Crip Time similarly explores how everyday objects affect our emotional wellbeing and mental health. Her project Crip Time Clock, usually at the University of Melbourne, is both a functional timepiece and a performance that invites reflection on and empathy with the challenges of living with chronic illness.
The metre-wide white circular clock, mounted on the wall, features a 12-hour video loop of Figueiredo physically moving weighted clock hands, from which viewers can read the time. Her minute-by-minute struggle symbolises the tension between societal expectations of productivity and labour and the realities of living with chronic pain. It is informed by her experience of endometriosis as well as research by Dr Elisabetta Crovara, a human geographer who studies how remote work reshapes space and time for those living with chronic conditions.
For MDW, Figueiredo pairs the clock with powerful hour-long performances in which she enacts the struggle of conforming to time, her body grappling with and resisting a manually operated clock laid out on a rug on the floor. She uses props, including a hot water bottle and bed, and a ticking-time soundtrack to engage the audience in her deeply personal, intimate and usually private endeavour.
A handful of designers at this year’s MDW generously and gently demonstrated that the objects we surround ourselves with on a day-to-day basis have the potential for more. Their functions can extend from simple tasks to objects that can help us navigate, understand and feel more seen and safe in the complex world in which we, and they, live.
ARTS DIARY
FESTIVAL Dark Mofo
Venues throughout nipaluna/Tasmania, June 5-21
EXHIBITION High Colour
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until January 11
FESTIVAL Rising
Venues throughout Naarm/Melbourne, June 4-15
CULTURE Woodend Winter Arts Festival
Venues throughout Dja Dja Wurrung Country/Woodend, Victoria, June 6-9
COMEDY The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
Cremorne Theatre, Meanjin/Brisbane, until June 8
LAST CHANCE
VISUAL ART Lindy Lee
National Gallery of Australia, Ngambri/Canberra, until June 1
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Human furniture".
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