The National Gallery of Victoria is bringing plant-based design to the public with Plant Life: The Nature of Design, a new exhibition opening free at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on 28 August and running until 7 February 2027.
The show gathers more than sixty works across four chapters, and puts its focus on the everyday categories most dependent on plastic – seating, lighting, furnishings and buildings – showing plant-based alternatives that people can actually use.
Much of what’s on display is being made in ways most visitors may not have seen before. Aifunghi’s furniture is grown, cultivated from fungal networks in hemp hurd and compostable at the end of its life. Joris Laarman’s Ply Loop Chair replaces the formaldehyde resin that has bound plywood for a century with a plant-derived one. Crafting Plastics’ Sensbiom 2.1 is a plant-based plastic that turns pink under ultraviolet light. Alongside the furniture sits work from Formafantasma, EAST Architecture Studio and Australian practitioners including Kate Scardifield, Ed Linacre and Broached Commissions.
Developed with RMIT University, the exhibition includes a new commission – a Mycelium Wildfire Jacket made from fungi-grown leather, developed by RMIT designers and material scientists as a prototype for protective clothing. It also brings forward the long relationship First Nations practitioners hold with plant materials, in works made from bull kelp, tree bark, bamboo, and Amazonian yaré vine and shiringa leather.
The commitment runs to the fit-out itself: the show’s plinths and display surfaces are built from Plantbord, an Australian-made hemp-hurd board developed by Joost Bakker and Forest One.
Plant Life: The Nature of Design is free and on show at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 28 August 2026 to 7 February 2027.
