DENFAIR 2017: Shaping Australia
DENFAIR 2017 saw creatives and enthusiasts in the realms of contemporary art, product design, lighting, contemporary furniture and design, textile and soft furnishings, and homewares descend on Melbourne to talk shop and collaborate. With more than 8,000 people attending the latest edition in Melbourne earlier this month, it can easily be said that the third edition of the design fair, was a resounding success.
The event put an emphasis on Australian brands, but also brought together talent from local and international names. DENFAIR opens participants up to a new way of experiencing design, with a content-driven show that puts the focus on practical takeaways and industry trends.
We have seen such a remarkable change across art and design in Australian over the last decade, with DENFAIR helping pave a new way for designers and design enthusiasts to immerse themselves in the industry. As an official partner of DENFAIR, for a second consecutive year, we were on location at the 2017 edition, gaining insider access into some of the designers and brands from this year’s event who are helping evolve the industry in Australia.
Design powerhouse CULT has become a household name within the Australian and New Zealand design community thanks to its commitment to promoting top talent through their motto of “Design first”. CULT (formerly known as Corporate Culture), was established in 1997, and since then, company founder and director Richard Munao has put together one of the more respectable collections of brand partners in Australia and New Zealand. In 20 years, the company has grown from its first location in Sydney to now include showrooms in Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland as well as distributors in Canberra, Adelaide and Perth.
Speaking to fluoro, CULT explained that the past 20 years have seen the company keep it simple when it comes to their favourite elements of design.
“Our style has matured to a place that is really unique,” they said. “There are many parallels with Danish design – we tend to favour clean lines, natural materials, sustainability and functionalism. But we have also developed our own style which truly embraces our landscape and local heroes, it’s relaxed, easy and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
CULT was at DENFAIR this year to launch NAU, a contemporary Australian design brand featuring furniture, lighting and accessories by a collective of Australia’s biggest names in Design – including Adam Goodrum, Adam Cornish, Gavin Harris and Jack Flanagan.
“New by necessity, our design culture stems from a place of isolation,” they said of NAU. “The 2017 NAU collection is sophisticated but relaxed and approachable. People consistently comment on the level of craftsmanship, comfort and how resolved the collection is for such a new company. All designs use a limited amount of components, minimal wastage and are functional and adaptable.
CULT explained that the inspiration for NAU stemmed from a “huge increase” in Australian furniture and lighting from the international market. The next logical step, they said, was to bring together their favourite brands and designers under one comprehensive name.
“We felt like now is the time to establish these designs as one brand, and promote Australian creativity to the world – and from this ambition, NAU is born!” they said. “ The feedback to NAU has been really encouraging so far, we previewed in Milan in April and launched at ICFF in New York last month and the retail and distribution demand has been overwhelmingly positive.
Also at DENFAIR was Ross Didier, a Melbourne native and internationally-recognised designer. His products have been sought out by Nintendo, Microsoft, Westpac, Hewlett Packard, Google, Belconnen Arts Centre, Nomad restaurant and the Australian Defence Force, becoming universal since he established his studio in 2000. Didier’s brightly-coloured, polymer Elfin stools can be seen in Times Square, and he also has his Obelisk sofas in the Denver Art Museum, Terra Firma tables and bespoke seating at Vue de Monde and Bombala lounge chairs outside the Sydney Opera House.
“I feel like I’ve been part of a quiet revolution,” he told us, “that started in the bedrooms across the world: small, cottage based start-ups playing alongside the sandpit of the international power-house brands. Small enterprises with big design ideas and creating brilliance.”
At DENFAIR this year, Didier launched a new seating collection called CAPPALA, which is the last entry in the outside BOMBALA range, and draws influence from a sculptural chair prototype he exhibited at Milan in 2005.
“It is an interesting transformation over 12 years,” Didier said of the collection, “seeing the original piece adapt from more art piece right through to a complete, sophisticated seating family that is upholstered and targeted for larger project specification. The narrative for this evolution plays on Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’, with the art piece being refined over the years to cater for market needs. It started with the flamboyant original – defined by the purity of idea, and evolves right through to the domesticated, pampered pet – retaining the original DNA but an original species in its own right.”
Didier and his team also showed the new GELAVA chair, which is sculpted entirely from moulded polyurethane and then fitted with tailored upholstery. Didier said that designing this chair was a local, homegrown effort.
“As a small company based in Melbourne,” he explained, “we decided to 100% design and manufacture locally using a variety of techniques from hand foam carving through to single complex tooling, and create a highly functional seating solution for a very wide range of uses.
“The organic shaping is extremely comfortable and provides excellent ergonomic support. The form is tool-moulded into shape using cold cured foam compound developed especially for this project, and providing a very high resilience with engineered structure so there is no need for any rigid internal framing or hard edges.”
“I am a big fan of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’,” he added, in reference to his inspiration for the project, “and a little madness in design is always good for my soul.”
Flinders Lane Gallery (FLG), a Melbourne gallery, saw DENFAIR as an opportunity to actively support Australian efforts, something that they say they have been committed to since they opened their doors in 1989. Bolstering the careers of emerging, mid-career and Indigenous Australian artists has become something of FLG’s M.O, with works of painterly abstraction, high figuration and sculptural formalism coming to define their practice.
“At DENFAIR, FLG selected a group of artists that confidently demonstrate their mastery of their chosen mediums,” said Claire Harris, director of FLG. “We were interested in presenting a cohesive and strong curated exhibition where the works could stand individually as well as come together to make a stronger statement. All of the artists created new pieces specifically for DENFAIR.
Artists featured at FLG have won an array of awards including the Wynne Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the Rick Amor Drawing Prize, the Contempora Sculpture Awar and the Fulbright Scholarship, the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship, Siemens Fine Art Scholarship. Many of the artists have been critically acclaimed as well, being featured in Art & Australia, Artist Profile, Australian Art Review, The Australian, Art Korea, The Age, & the Wall Street Journal.
“Australians have remained very consistent in their support of Australian artists over the last few decades,” Harris said of her commitment to homegrown talent. “During the years we have seen played out the various political, social and environmental concerns of the general populace, the arts being an early warning system of undercurrents within society.”
But Harris went on to explain that the arts community is rapidly changing, with technology drastically affecting the way that creatives produce and share their work.
“Their ideas can now be expressed across an increasingly broad media base,” she said. “Several of our artists work with computerised technology and digital manipulations. Even traditional realist oil painters can now create mockups of their ideas on the computer prior to painting them. We have artists working with algorithms and computerised plotters, cutters & routers, others creating highly complex photographic collages, video art and sculptures with LED lighting.
“Then directly related to the impact of technology is the backlash to it with a resurgence of traditional media; strong elements of hand-made skills and traditional techniques resurface with the use of pure ground paint pigments, tempera and even fresco, and the handcrafting & weaving of sculptural forms.”
German-born Melbourne-based lighting designer Volker Haug said that the changes he’s noticed in recent years come down to the simple fact that more people are entering the design world.
“There are many more lighting designers out there now,” he said. “Lighting has become more important feature to many designers as well as consumers and is being taken more seriously. There’s more competition – but I think it’s healthy competition.”
Haug, whose light fixtures often utilise unexpected angles, colours and materials, told fluoro that design, for him, was all about making the viewer feel a sense of wonder. “Well-resolved design should be a combination of aesthetic as well as functional elements, bringing a sense of enjoyment and happiness,” he said.
“As a non-traditionally trained designer,” Haug added, “I have become more aware of design over the years through working in the design world as well as learning a great deal from my team along the way. My approach to design comes from more of an artistic background, working alongside industrial and interior designers, as well as other artists and craftspeople in my team. The colourfulness of our team results in unique products.”
Haug, like many of the other artists we spoke to at DENFAIR, was quick to praise the exhibition for its continued contributions to the world of Australian and international design.
“I believe DENFAIR generally raises the benchmark,” he said. “I think it’s great that it brings together designers of all kinds, to present concepts, share ideas, and receive feedback from the industry.”
CULT was also quick to praise DENFAIR for its commitment to honest, effective design.
“DENFAIR has raised the bar for design events in our industry,” they stated. “[The founders] have done a fantastic job of cultivating an event that celebrates quality, authenticity and Australian design.”
For CULT and so many others, DENFAIR was about promoting not just an industry, but a community.
“These events are important for growing and maintaining an engaged and passionate design community; there’s huge value in all being in the same place at the same time and both supporting and inspiring each other, but pushing each other to be the best we can be.”
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