The new moda
The Sunday Age
Sunday June 7, 2009
The fairytale continued for some of Australia's budding design talent at this year's Milan Fair in April, reports Jeanne-Marie Cilento in Italy.Just four years ago, Brodie Neill was exhibiting prototypes at Milan's Salone Satellite. In April, in the fairgrounds at Rho Pero, the story was somewhat different.Neill's Scuba lounge floated above the pale floor of design house Domodinamica's all-white stand in Pavilion 8. Forming a long, sinuous dash of brilliant red, its sides ripple like the manta ray that inspired the design. Among the crowd gathered eagerly around the biomorphic monolithic form were Neill and the handsome, besuited figure of Paolo Castelli, the scion of the family design business.For both men, this was a celebratory moment in Milan after the year-long process that had brought the Scuba lounge into production. "Brodie showed me eight designs and I loved them all," said Castelli. "But it was the Scuba that grabbed my heart. I felt it was so strong."Neill was first taken to Bologna where the Castelli family has studios and workshops that produce the designs by hand. "We have a saying in Italy: 'le ginocchia sotto il tavolo', meaning literally knees under the table," says Castelli. "It is important to sit down to dinner with someone when you do business. We found Brodie such a confident, joyful person. He was able to be a friend, not just a designer, which is important for us."The London-based Neill wanted to create a design that was visually dynamic and sculptural for Domodinamica. "Paolo needed a graphic spearhead for the rest of the collection just as the E-Turn seat was for Kundalini," said Neill."The Scuba curves like a big membrane that folds and undulates, encompassing everything from the seat to the structure. Initially, when I was in Bologna I was left in a room with a big drafting table and Augusto, Domodinamica's chief engineer. He didn't speak any English and I don't speak Italian. We ended up communicating together through drawing and sketching. When I last saw him, we were alone in the warehouse and we just sat on the prototype and congratulated each other."The design was both a critical and commercial success in Milan and Castelli is already planning a Scuba collection. Both highly creative and industrious, Neill returned last month from New York's International Contemporary Furniture Fair where he designed an installation for Alexander McQueen. He has limited-edition pieces at the Apartment Gallery in London, and was specially commissioned to design the crystal-encrusted Jet Table for Swarovski's Paris exhibition in 2008 and Time Magazine called his @ chair one of the most influential designs of that year.ADAM GOODRUMAdam Goodrum met Giulio Cappellini, the eponymous head of the famous Italian design house, while he was in Sydney. Their relationship began under famously inauspicious circumstances when Cappellini sat on Goodrum's prototype of the Stitch chair and it broke.When Cappellini met Goodrum the next day to see his portfolio of work, he not surprisingly selected two other pieces for potential production. But in the following year at Milan's 2007 furniture fair, he had changed his mind and decided to take on the Stitch chair. Cappellini has discovered or nurtured the careers of many of today's design stars such as Tom Dixon, Jasper Morrison, Marcel Wanders and the Bourellec brothers."Giulio Cappellini is a gentle, earnest man who is passionate about design," says Goodrum. "I feel very fortunate to be chosen by a man of his calibre. The whole process of working with the company has been fantastic. They wouldn't alter a millimetre without asking me. Italy has a great philosophy of good design, ethics, sophistication, courtesy and gentleness."Now that the slim and robust stool is launched, Cappellini wants the Sydney-based Goodrum to design a whole Stitch "family". The original Stitch chair with its graphic colour and strong linearity, combined with the ingenious folding mechanism, has been a success worldwide. It is sold from Brazil to Bulgaria and features in Cappellini's global flagship stores. Currently exhibited at the London Design Museum, the Stitch chair is already winning design accolades.ABI ALICEAbi Alice, a painter and sculptor also working from Sydney, has had a similarly happy experience working with Alessi. However, her road to Milan and her success with Alessi were more circuitous than Goodrum's. She first met Alberto Alessi at a workshop at the University of New South Wales in 1995 when she was studying fine art. But it wasn't until 2004 that she met Alessi again in Italy, a meeting that led to the production of her first piece two years later."The designs stem from the geometry of my paintings," says Alice. "With all of my work there is a common thread - the link between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. When I think about creating something I tend not to think of it as a design or an art object. I always strive to create a pleasing and harmonious form or composition."Her collaboration with the company is one that now encompasses her drawings, paintings and designs. Her first project with Alessi was launched in 2006, a shimmering centrepiece called Resonance. In 2008, she designed two other pieces, the Harmonic basket and Resonance fruit holder, all in laser-cut stainless steel."When I started working with Alessi I was doing my Masters degree and not a high-profile name," said Alice. "It was wonderful Alberto Alessi had an interest in my creativity and wanted to work with that. There didn't seem to be any limitations about what I could do. However, to go through this project with Alessi for the first time was quite daunting. As an artist you do everything yourself. But now it feels like an ongoing collaboration.''Alessi's exhibition of colourful and quirky products was held in the company's graphic standalone pavilion under the fair's crystalline roof. Abi Alice's silvery bowls were beautifully arranged like a stainless-steel bouquet, with the new Pianissimo basket with its delicate overlapping folds at the centre. Alice joins Alessi's long list of top designers such as Zaha Hadid, Ron Arad and Marc Newson.TRENT JANSENTrent Jansen has been travelling in Europe for the past 18 months and is enjoying a stable base in Milan during his three-month Australia Council residency. His relationship with Moooi, the company that launched his Pregnant Chair, began in 2004. He did an internship for six months with Dutch design guru Marcel Wanders at his studio in Amsterdam.Several years later when the award-winning young designer was back in his Sydney studio, Jansen sent Wanders some of his designs. "I got up the courage to send him a portfolio of four years' work I had done," said Jansen. "Then he came out to Australia for an event at Space. He said he liked my work and wanted to do the Pregnant Chair."The wooden chair has a base that holds a "baby" chair inside that can be lifted out. Jansen explores personal relationships in his work and this was a study of the mother and child bond. A keen advocate of sustainable design, his philosophy is to create pieces evoking an emotional response, encouraging them to be treasured rather than seen as disposable items. His Kissing Pendant lamps that magnetically come together made him the joint winner of last year's Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery award.Jansen looks at design not in terms of fashion or utilitarianism, but as a pursuit that can have a much wider impact on the world. He designed and curated the Oxfam Footprint Exhibition in Sydney in March. Passionate about using design for humanitarian needs, he is speaking to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva while he is based in Europe about developing programs to help displaced people."Humanitarian design can come in so many forms," says Jansen. "It can include designing shelters or developing industrial projects that can provide clean water. Or creating livelihoods using design so people have an income and move on from whatever war or natural disaster has taken them way from their homes. I feel like I can use the skills I have and the network I am part of to help." M
© 2009 The Sunday Age