Plant Life

The Nature of Design

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square

Ground Level, NGV Design Studio

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28 Aug 26 – 7 Feb 27, free entry

Open daily 10am–5pm

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.

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 Peruvian 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.

New growth

Some contemporary production processes behind plant-based materials are being tested across many industries, including packaging, textiles, construction and automotive design. Underlying this is the proposition that plants can be reintegrated into design in ways that allow humans to live comfortably and in a more symbiotic relationship with the natural world. Read more

Ply loop chair Banet dining chair naked Mycelium wildfire jacket Polar shelf Tree family 5:45pm 18/02/2020 bench seat Catifa Carta PaperShell chair Wiggle side chair Cabbage chair (mixed) Flax chair Artek Forest Collection Mat collection of plant-based chairs MACA trays and vessels

Living structure

Construction and demolition waste accounts for approximately forty percent of Australian landfill each year. Most of it is conventional building material, as the end of life of these products was not considered as part of their creation. Read more

Sensbiom 2.1 Urgent is the rhythm On Weaving 100RCP in ‘Natural Skin’

Planted cloth

Plants were the primary source of textiles for most of human history. Cotton, linen, hemp, jute – each was developed through centuries of botanical knowledge, agriculture and accumulated craft and manufacturing techniques. Read more

Traditional áo dài and trousers Yukata with frogs Irregular check pojagi wrapping cloth Man’s bamboo underjacket Set of 37 Eucalyptus-dyed, Border Leicester x Merino woollen yarns Resting place daybed The avocado legacy

Forests and industry

Extractive botany describes the systematic use of plant knowledge to identify, harvest and trade biological material for economic gain. From the sixteenth century, European colonial expansion practised this on a monumental scale. Forests across England, France and the Netherlands were cleared for agriculture and shipbuilding over several centuries. Consequently, severe domestic timber scarcity drove a growing demand for the precious hardwoods of the Americas, Africa and South-East Asia. Read more

Tree cabinet English guitar (cittern) Artona chair Hiroi chair Vanille chair Bamboo chair Leg splint Side chair Banksia chair Broached recall medium monolith (mahogany and coco burl) Accanta teacup table

Enduring relationships

The works here come from living traditions. Woven forms, bark containers, drawings of Country, objects from the Amazon and from Australia – each holds knowledge developed across thousands of years from paying close attention to plants, seasons, soil, water and other species. These traditions share a set of foundational propositions: that plants are not resources but relatives, that Country is not a backdrop to human life but a living system of which humans are a part, that making is a form of relationship, and that design begins with reading and listening to place. Read more