From leather grown from fungi to fibreboard made from hemp, Plant Life: The Nature of Design explores humanity’s evolving relationship with the plant world through design, from ancestral craft knowledge and devotional making, through industrial exploitation and the rupture of the petrochemical century, to the designers building a regenerative material future today.
Plants have always been our most essential material collaborators – the source of shelter, sustenance, utility, beauty and meaning across every culture and era of human making. This exhibition traces that relationship from its deepest roots to its speculative futures, presenting furniture, architecture, decorative arts, craft, photography and film drawn from the NGV Collection alongside new commissions, recent acquisitions and key international loans.
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The exhibition moves across time rather than through it – stepping between contemporary innovation, industrial history, colonial trade and living First Nations traditions to reveal how plants have shaped design, and how design might yet return the favour. It opens with near-future projects that treat plants as active infrastructure: Joris Laarman’s Ply loop chair bonded with plant-based resin engineered for full disassembly; mycelium furniture from Aifunghi; and works by Crafting Plastics and Kate Scardifield exploring plant-derived biopolymers and algae biomaterials. A new commission from RMIT University, Industrial designer Judith Glover, material scientist Tien Huynh, microbiologist Mohamad Arekha Bentangan and bio-designer Alexi Freeman have collaborated to develop Mycelium Wildfire Jacket exploring the potential of fungi-grown materials for future protective clothing. The prototype is fabricated from mycelium leather developed through a collaboration between RMIT designers and material scientists. This section also presents drawings, film and architectural fragments from the winner of the inaugural AlMusalla Prize: a pavilion mosque by East Architecture Studio, constructed primarily from reclaimed date palm waste. Its woven facade stretches 200 kilometres of palm fibre across the structure, a distance equivalent to the pilgrimage route between Jeddah and Mecca. The walls of the original structure rise to 12.5 metres from the compressed waste of 150 date palms.
The exhibition then moves into the histories that made the present thinkable – the twentieth-century industrialisation of timber through bending, laminating and moulding; the global trade networks that turned rare timbers into markers of wealth and authority. Here, new acquisitions come into dialogue with historical works from the NGV Collection: Anton Gerner’s Tree cabinet, worked in burr elm salvaged from London’s Great Storm of 1987, reads a tree’s resilience back through its surface; Broached Commissions’ Recall monolith cabinets surface a century of global timber trade through veneers from the Elton Group archive, their patterns derived from the work of typographic designer John Warwicker. Fernando Laposse’s Conflict avocados – avocado dyed daybed Resting place and associated film – makes the politics of plant extraction visceral and personal, tracing the intersection of the avocado industry, illegal logging and indigenous forest custodianship in Mexico.
The exhibition concludes – and begins again – with First Nations practices and living craft traditions that have always understood plants as kin: sources of knowledge, custodianship and disciplined technique rather than raw material. Devotional carving, bamboo and lacquer mastery, ancient textile practices such as Shiringa bio-leather from the Puruvian Amazon, Bull Kelp vessels from Tasmania, and Indigenous fibre weaving speak across time to the bio-material futures with which the exhibition opens. Plant Life is an invitation to look at the designed world differently – to see, in every object, the plant that made it possible.
