Plant Life: The Nature of Design
Joris Laarman, Ply Loop chair, 2025. Photo: Leonard Faustle
The National Gallery of Victoria’s upcoming exhibition puts the natural world at its centre. Plant Life: The Nature of Design explores the future of plant-based materials as an alternative to plastics and non-renewable materials.
As woodworkers, we don’t need convincing of the beauty and value of the organic and infinitely variable material we love to work with. This exhibition is not just about wood, however. From leather grown from fungi, to light reactive bio-plastics, and fibreboard made from hemp and bio-resin, the exhibition features the work of leading designers using plant-based materials.
Marep Pamle (art collective), Robert Meddy Kaigey, James Blanco, Helen Dick, John Tabo, Koki, cabinet 2019. Bamboo (Bambusa vulgaris), poplar plywood (Populus sp.), synthetic polymer paint, seeds. 1640 x 610 x 1300mm (overall). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased NGV Foundation, 2020 © the artists, courtesy of Gabi Titui Cultural Centre
Presented thematically and featuring more than 60 works, the exhibition brings together furniture, architecture, decorative arts, craft, photography and film drawn from the NGV Collection alongside a new commission by a bio-design team at RMIT University, and 15 recent acquisitions and key international loans. Developed in partnership with NGV’s Futures Partner, RMIT University, Plant Life traces humanity's relationship with the plant world through design.
Anton Gerner, Tree cabinet 2025 ebonised redgum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), poplar plywood (Populus sp.), elm (Ulmus sp.) maple plywood (Acer sp.), brass. National Gallery of Victoria, purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2025 2025.664 © Anton Gerner
The exhibition also acknowledges the longstanding engagement of First Nation practitioners with the natural environment through works made from bull kelp, grass weavings, tree bark, bamboo, Amazonian yaré vine, and leather made from the Amazon’s shiringa tree.
Damien Wright, 5:45pm 18/02/2020 bench seat (2020) polypropylene, red gum (E.camaldulensis), copper, 800 x 900 x 3560mm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2021 © Damien Wright. Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen
The exhibition reveals plant-based knowledge systems that were never interrupted by the petrochemical century. Emma Håkansson's documentary film SHIRINGA: Fashion Regenerating Amazonia follows communities in the Amazonian state of Acre who tap shiringa trees using traditional methods (without cutting the tree down), producing a plant-based leather sold directly to fashion designers and brands.
Suganuma Michiko, Bamboo root water container (1987). (Wagaenuri chikukon mizusashi 和賀江塗 竹根水指lacquer on bamboo (a-b) 182 x 183 x 159mm (overall). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with funds donated by Baillieu Myer AC and Sarah Myer, 2016 © Michiko Suganuma
The exhibition also brings together other work by First Nation practitioners from Australia and abroad that embody knowledge systems that have sustained human relationships with plant life across millennia. Based between Brooklyn and Medellín, Chris Wolston's Nalgona Chair is made from willow, cork and yaré – a vine that grows in the forests of Venezuela and Colombia, harvested through traditional knowledge systems by communities for whom the plant's continued abundance is inseparable from their own.
BROACHED COMMISSIONS (design studio) WOODCRAFT MOBILIAR, Australia (manufacturer). Broached recall medium monolith, (mahogony and coco burl), cabinet (2021), mahogany (Swietenia sp.), coco burl, plywood, patinated steel, earth magnets (a-e) 858 x 380 x 382mm (closed) (overall). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, Victorian Foundation For Living Australian Artists, 2021 © Broached Commissions
Highlighting the ecological cost of extraction – from the industrialisation of timber to global trade routes – the exhibition presents a series of works that show how beauty and consequence are not opposites but coexist together in material form. The Eames leg splint, manufactured in 1943, demonstrates this duality: the work is moulded from mahogany plywood, yet plywood as a material is bound with urea-formaldehyde resins, a compound that renders the product non-recyclable, and is now understood as a significant indoor air quality hazard and a reminder that even progressive material thinking carries its own unintended consequences.
Chris Wolston (designer), Nalgona chair 05 2019 {designed}; 2021, {manufactured}, Yaré (Heteropsis sp), Willow (Salix sp.), painted steel, cork, 1525 x 975 x 1095mm, artist’s proof, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with funds donated by Gordon Moffatt AM, 2022 © Chris Wolston
Martin Corbin's set of twenty-five spoons, each carved from a different Australian tree species – sheoak, mulga, myrtle beech, grey mangrove, macadamia, blackwood – creates an intimate botanical inventory that asks, without stating, which of these species remain in sufficient abundance to continue working with.
Alvaro Catalán de OCÓN (designer), Mary Dhapalany (weaver) PET Lamp Ramingining: Twin piece 2016 pandanus (Pandanus sp.), natural dyes, PET plastic bottle, 870 x 2200 x 1640mm (variable) (installed). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased NGV Foundation with the assistance of Vicki Vidor OAM and Peter Avery, 2018, © Alvaro Catalán de Ocón
Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV said: ‘This NGV-exclusive exhibition shines a spotlight on Australian and international designers who are using plant-based materials to radically transform our world. Moving away from abstract ideas and far-off possibilities, this exhibition powerfully reframes conversations around sustainability by offering real, tangible – and above all beautiful – examples of design created using plant-based polymers, leather, mycelium and more. Importantly, this exhibition also acknowledges the deep and long held knowledge of First Nation peoples, who have been creating with natural materials for millennia.’
Plant Life: The Nature of Design will be on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 28 August 2026 – 7 February 2027. Information via the NGV website: NGV.MELBOURNE