Yellowbox eucalyptus vessel
Many works in Plant Life use plant matter as structure, fibre, dye or surface. Yellowbox eucalytpus displays it as an image. Australian designer and maker Jessica Murtagh has hand-drawn a yellowbox eucalyptus – leaves, buds, small gold-tipped flowers – onto the frosted glass of this commemorative vessel. At a moment when eucalyptus forests face increasing pressure from drought, fire and land clearing, Adelaide-based Murtagh strives to record a member of the species with precision and care as a call for its preservation. Glass and gold have no plant origin, but the long tradition they belong to, the decorative vessel as display for natural beauty, is itself a form of reverence and documentation.
Set of spoons
Spoons are among the earliest objects made by humans. To carve one well you need to know a tree – its hardness, its grain, the way it responds to a blade. Born in England, Martin Corbin arrived in Australia in 1981 and spent years familiarising himself with the twenty-five timbers, including she-oak, bracelet honey myrtle, red gum, banksia and macadamia, that comprise this set of spoons. These trees are deeply significant in First Nations material culture, which is shaped by knowledge systems tens of thousands of years older than the Western craft tradition Corbin worked within. Together, these spoons sit at the threshold between extraction and knowledge. They ask, quietly, what it means to work with a country’s trees.
Banet dining chair
Producing this dining chair generates approximately five kilograms of carbon dioxide – roughly one seventh of an equivalent plastic chair. Created by the Dutch designer Bart Schilder together with Aifunghi, its inner core is composed almost entirely – 94 per cent by weight – of hemp fibre (the woody core of the plant) fused by mycelium into a rigid shell during cultivation. Once grown, the composite is dried and heat-treated, killing the spores, so the chair core contains no living fungi. Hemp is a seasonal crop harvested within four months, far shorter than a tree, maximising yield over a production year. Mycelium grows in days. Every component returns to soil at the end of its life.
Yukata with frogs
Indigo is one of the oldest dyes in the world. Extracted from the leaves of Indigofera tinctoria and related species, it has been cultivated and traded across Asia, Africa and the Americas for thousands of years. In Japan, indigo dyeing, known as aizome, developed into one of the most sophisticated plant-based colour traditions in the history of textiles, the dye vat itself a living bacterial culture, maintained daily. The deep blue of this yukata (a light, casual summer kimono) is the result of repeated immersion and oxidation, the colour building with each pass through the vat. The pattern is created using shibori resist techniques – binding and gathering the cotton so that the undyed areas become the image.
On Weaving
On Weaving is a bio-regional architecture project that looks at date palm waste in Saudi Arabia as a design and construction material. It was commissioned by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation for the inaugural AlMusalla Prize, presented at the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025. Each year fronds are pruned from date palms and regularly burned in open fields. More than 140 million date palms globally generate approximately 48.8 million tonnes of pruning waste each year. This design presents a contemporary of the musalla (an open or semi-enclosed ephemeral space for Muslim prayer) with frames, screens and woven surfaces made from date palm waste. Plans, sections and axonometric views by Lebanese Emirati studio East Architecture reveal a space conceived as both structure and textile, whereby pattern, shade and enclosure form a temporary area for devotion.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.