We tend to meet design at its end point. The resolved piece of furniture or beautifully imperfect vessel, but so often the finish reveals nothing about the hundreds of small decisions and failures that brought it into being.
The messy middle part of creative practice was the territory we set out to explore in The Alchemy of Making, the panel I had the pleasure of hosting at Made by Morgen as part of Tactile Dialogues: Fragments of Matter at Melbourne Design Week. Gathered in the Brunswick workshop were a curator, an executive director and a group of makers working across timber, glass and emerging materials.
These are the insights that have lingered.
Listening to the material
Furniture maker Nick McDonald, founder of Made by Morgen, and his studio’s designer, Marinos Drakopoulos, spoke about the deeply manual nature of working with solid timber and the humility it demands. Wood, they reminded us, is never inert. It breathes and moves, expanding and contracting with the seasons long after it has left the workshop. Rather than fighting this temperament, the Made by Morgen approach is to design for it: their tables are built in a way to accommodate timber’s seasonal flex, allowing the material to do what it will always do. It’s a philosophical shift that encourages listening to a material, rather than trying to dominate it.
Through their deep understanding of craft and material, the team opened the conversation to work with new materials by Other Matter, substituting them on pieces from the range, including the leather on the barstools and chairs, and as a marbled surface on the exquisite Quarry cabinet.
Substitution as a creative act
From Other Matter, Calum Hurley offered a glimpse of where materiality is heading. The studio’s mission is to replace petrochemical-based plastics with healthier alternatives. Calum walked us through Other Matter’s newest developments – among them a marble and a new bio-based leather alternative – framing the studio’s entire practice around the idea of substitution. Not imitation, but rather a careful reinvention of familiar materials so that beauty and responsibility no longer have to be traded against one another. To sit at the forefront of this work, in Australia and internationally, is to treat sustainability not as a constraint on craft but as its next frontier.
Fifteen years and six hours
If one line captured the whole talk, it came from Billy Crellin of Studio Dokola. Glass, he explained, is among the least forgiving materials a maker can choose – molten, unstable, requiring total presence. As one of his extraordinary candelabras was carried into the room, I asked him how long a piece like that takes to make. His answer: fifteen years and six hours.
It’s a cheeky and honest accounting of craft. And a reminder of the lifetime of practice that goes into making.
When an object becomes collectible
As the curator who drew the show together, Ryan Fernandes turned to a question that hovers over collectible design: what makes an object move from functional to collectible? An object, he suggested, is an expression of its maker; and whether it’s mass-produced or painstakingly artisanal, what ultimately matters is whether it means something to you. Value, in other words, is made not only in the workshop, but in the relationship between an object and the person who chooses to live with it.
The most valuable lesson of all
On the value of relationships, Craft Victoria’s executive director Nicole Durling reminded us that relationships are what underpins it all. Between maker and material, mentor and apprentice, object and owner. And by respecting these relationships we can continue innovating through the tradition of craft.
What struck me, listening to all the speakers, is how much richer an object becomes once its process can be fully appreciated. Which is exactly the conversation Tactile Dialogues set out to invite – an exchange that showcases the journey behind it all. If there’s one thing to remember from the show, it’s to slow down, and look a little closer. An object will tell you more than you think.
