Design
Being a young designer today isn’t easy, but the National Gallery of Victoria’s Rigg Design Prize exhibition shows how emerging practitioners are facing up to the challenges. By Lara Chapman.
NGV’s Rigg Design Prize exhibition: a glimpse into the future of design
It’s been a big few weeks in the career of Alfred Lowe. First, his nearly one-and-a-half-metre tall ceramic and raffia sculpture, You’ve been on my mind, sister II (2025), was acquired by Artbank – Australia’s leasing collection – at Sydney Contemporary.
Less than a week later, on September 18, Lowe was announced as the winner of the 2025 Rigg Design Prize, an invitational award presented by the National Gallery of Victoria that’s worth $40,000. This is a remarkable achievement for any designer, but considering Lowe is a self-taught maker who only tried his hand at ceramics four years ago before leaving politics to pursue it professionally, it is particularly impressive.
The Aranda maker grew up in Snake Well in the Central Desert north of Alice Springs and now lives in Adelaide as a member of the Indigenous-owned APY Studio. His winning entry, You and me, us never part (2025), is a pair of his distinctively large, figurative and colourful vessels. “[It] is a declaration of love to my community,” says his artist statement. “These works stand side by side, holding their own space while joining in communion.”
Lowe’s quick rise to recognition may make becoming a craftsperson or designer seem straightforward, but his story is far from typical. In fact, this year’s Rigg Design Prize, which for 30 years has been awarded triennially to mid-career or established designers, deliberately focuses on young and emerging designers to acknowledge and support their steep entry into the profession.
Simone LeAmon, NGV curator of contemporary design and architecture and winner of the 2009 Rigg Prize, cites a lack of career pathways, rising material and workspace costs and decreased grant opportunities as some of the barriers that emerging designers face today. When the prize was established in 1994, it was a very different landscape. “Early career practitioners need all the support, all the encouragement and all the opportunity we can give them,” she says.
LeAmon invited 35 designers aged under 35 working across Australia to submit existing or new work for the 10th edition of the prize. Spoiler: almost all the designers submitted new work despite the cost and time commitment this required, resulting in the exhibition Next in Design. While designers can, and do, enter the industry later than 35, what is exciting about this focus is that it gives us a glimpse into the future of design through the people who will shape it for decades to come. Viewing the diverse works – spanning ceramics, glass, furniture, woodwork, metalwork, textiles, lighting and contemporary jewellery – side by side reveals some overarching interests, concerns and motivations of this new generation.
A significant number, for example, explore how to ethically produce goods in a time of climate crisis. Designers are increasingly turning away from using virgin materials, making salvage key to their practice.
Olive Gill-Hille’s shelving unit Memento, for instance, is constructed from what she calls “road-kill timber” or wood that is “FOG” (found on ground), rather than felled trees. Its uniquely gnarly yet smooth sculptural form is the direct result of her material-first approach, which looks to what’s at hand to inform what will be made, rather than the traditional design process that begins with a sketch and then sources the material to realise it.
Other notable projects that show deep, tacit understanding of materials and supply chains include Claire Markwick-Smith’s seven-part table series, which cleverly puzzles together variously shaped waste from Adelaide’s automotive production industry; Second Edition’s bathroom prototype and business model, which rescues materials from demolished buildings, reusing them in architectural projects; and Isaac Williams’s Rebirthed furniture series, in which he takes found objects such as discarded chairs and single-use pine pallets and transforms them into practical and beautiful pieces of furniture.
These objects don’t show off their material reuse or treat it as a compromise – there’s none of the kitschy “upcycling” visual language that was popular in the early 2000s. Instead, they demonstrate that more interesting and often better outcomes can be achieved through ethical, deliberate sourcing.
Another common thread throughout the show involves practices that conserve, build upon or pay homage to existing knowledge and craft traditions – another kind of resourcefulness executed in a different way.
Dallissa Brown, the youngest potter among the renowned Hermannsburg Potters, learnt ceramics from her relatives, including artists Dawn Wheeler and Kumantjai R. Ungwanaka. Her work, This is real life, a collection of eleven pots, honours her community’s craft and storytelling traditions while adding her own perspectives. Marlo Lyda similarly has taken craft techniques from her matriarchal line to create three standing lamps that are patchworked together from inherited fabrics. They are sweetly titled Pat, Fi and Dala after her grandmother and mother who taught her textile crafts.
Each object on display is deeply researched and contains more stories, techniques and rigorous thinking than is possible to capture in a single statement. Fortunately, these young designers are experts in documenting and sharing their practices online. After the exhibition I spent many enjoyable hours on their Instagram pages and websites, learning not only how they make things but also what drives them, who they collaborated with and how their research into topics ranging from endangered moths to modern Australian barbecues informed their entries.
Exploring their online presence, I also began to understand why LeAmon said it is not easy to be a designer today. These practitioners juggle many commitments – teaching, curating, consulting, running community-building events and founding and renting workshop spaces – to support their work.
Being a designer in 2025 means designing your own practice as well as the things you make. It’s not an easy or mapped road, but as these 35 designers show us, when you find a way to work that suits you, a career that centres on making objects can be beautiful, joyful and incredibly powerful.
Lara Chapman travelled to Melbourne with the assistance of the National Gallery of Victoria. Rigg Design Prize 2025: Next in Design is showing at the NGV until February 1.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "Next level".
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