The Melbourne Design Market is a bi-annual market held in July and November in an underground car park in Melbourne’s Federation Square. Created in 2004 by Kathy Demos, the market functions as an extension of design showrooms and studios featuring furniture, fashion, jewellery and homewares. Fifty new and established designers are selected for each market based on the strength of their work. Hosted on a Sunday, the market also features food, music and coffee.

The Melbourne Design Market is on 9 November at Melbourne’s Federation Square car park. Find more information on the MDM website.

This article is part of the Melbourne by Design takeover on Central Station. For more Melbourne themed features, please visit here.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

//////

Discover more events in our weekly bulletin here.

Melbourne is the antithesis of the Bilbao effect although there are plenty of its recent buildings by local architects shouting for some attention. Unlike its New South Wales neighbour with its postcard ready Opera House image, Melbourne is a city of ‘Ten Thousand Things’. It is the archeology of smaller scale spaces that are the ballast of the city. The laneways carving through the grid of the CBD are strangely familiar to a Glaswegian but in Melbourne they are an example of what can happen with a growing population and forward thinking licensing laws. Inside the laneways there is confetti of independent retailers, galleries, cafes, restaurants, kiosks and connections to rooftop bars and basements clubs. These are pedestrian focused spaces that create a human scale to a big city and which is predicted to double its current 4m population over the next 40 years. You will find wedding shoots down graffiti laneways and a backcourt culture, which has spread out from the city to the inner suburbs although with a bit more grit. It is a pluralist’s city with a diversity of cultures, food, fashion, architecture, art and music shaping a heterogeneous landscape of things to do.

Laneway bar

Melbourne was initially dominated by British and Irish settlers up until the 1950s when the first wave of Greeks and Italians arrived en masse and pockets of the city still feel characteristically Italian or Greek. Asian migration was disallowed under the White Australia policy, which wasn’t dismantled until the 70s. The first Asian migration wave was from Vietnam, but soon others arrived from Malaysia, The Philippines, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Brunei, Hong Kong and, most recently, in very large numbers and often as students, from China. This fusion of cultures is having a unique impact on the evolving identity of the city. Common ground between East and West is where we are beginning to find a distinctive language in Melbourne whether it be with food, fashion, design or architecture. The work of the local architect Sean Godsell who has just completed the new MPavilion is an example where he has looked for an expression in his work that places him in the region, in Australia and in Asia, using devices common to both East and West. He has abandoned the corridor in most of his work, which immediately de-Westernized his plans, and developed instead his own versions of the Eastern divided plan, where space is articulated by sliding walls and doors.

MPavilion by Sean Godsell

The universities play a huge part in the cultural and social life of the city but unlike many other cities they are physically helping to reshape the city. RMIT University is in the heart of the city, spread across streets and laneways it has over 150 buildings that are part of the life of the city. Huge investment into this infrastructure over the last 30 years has seen a commitment to design with each new facility procured with a focus on design quality and enhancing the public realm. In other words this is not an introverted world of learning but an integrated urban campus where university and city trade off each other. The top end of Swanston Street in and around the state library of Victoria is a great place to start to explore the architecture of RMIT and the dispersed amenities for the students. Sean Godsell’s new RMIT Design Hub is the backdrop for “Predestination”, a sci-fi thriller starring Ethan Hawke and just released in Australia. There is usually an exhibition to be found in the Hub building or next door at the archive where the legacy of RMIT graduates work is being collected.

Melbourne University has typically been North of the RMIT campus. The origins of the campus are more European in its layout but it is expanding beyond its traditional boundaries to become a significant part of the North of the City with huge investment into a new sustainable technology research and development precinct around the Parkville Campus. Like the University’s biomedical precinct where biomedical scientists work with hospitals to translate research progress into useful and sometimes life saving applications – the Carlton Connect Initiative will provide a place where researchers can work with industry and Government to translate research in areas such as water, energy and urban futures. In addition, the new Melbourne School of Design opens its doors on 1 December; a building designed by local architect John Wardell in collaboration with Boston based NADAAA. The building houses the best architectural collection of books in Australia, a new digital fabrication lab on the ground floor and a major new public gallery space which will launch a curatorial programme in March 2015.

Melbourne School of Design by John Wardell and NADAAA

Melbourne University also includes the Victorian College of the Arts VCA on the Southbank of the CBD. This is part of the arts precinct which is renowned as being one of the very best in the world with on the highest concentrations of top-class venues including the Arts Centre, Melbourne Theatre Company, Australian Ballet, Hamer Hall, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Melbourne Recital Centre all located within a stone’s throw of one another. The VCA announced its expansion earlier this year as part of the Arts precinct redevelopment, which would further open the college campus to the community of the city.

Just outside of the City at the Caulfield campus of Monash University you can also find MADA (Monash University Art Design & Architecture) while in Prahran you have Swinburne University offering yet more design related courses. It is as such not difficult to see how ‘design’ has become imbedded in the cultural life of the city. Many graduates continue to live in Melbourne or work with established designers and as such the city is bursting with creative talent and work to show. With a city looking to cater for a rapidly increasing population it is obvious what role design and young designers can play in shaping the future of the city.

PLACES TO EXPLORE

The Melbourne Arts Precinct
Just South of the Yarra River (also referred to as Ngargee, which is a Bunurong word for describing “gathering for celebration”) groups together, The Arts Centre including the recently refurbished Hamer Hall, The MTC Theatre, Melbourne Recital Centre, The National Gallery of Victoria, Malthouse Theatre, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) Iwaki Auditorium and Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

MPavilion
A more recent addition to the Arts Precinct portfolio is the MPavilion situated in the Queen Victoria Gardens. Conceived by its patron, Naomi Milgrom, the pavilion takes its cue from the Serpentine Pavilion in London and will host a series of curated events over the summer in Melbourne. The pavilion has been designed by Melbourne architect, Sean Godsell.

Coffee Houses
Long, short, black, white, filter, cold drip, single origin or house blend, are all part of a shared language amongst one of the world’s most culturally diverse populations. Coffee and cafés are part of the DNA of Melbourne. The quality and craft in coffee roasting, blending and serving has chased away the global brands and what remains and continues to grow is a coffee culture, which has shaped a new social infrastructure for the city. It is a culture, which has been actively encouraged and used in government policy to breathe life back into the inner city following the 1990s recession. They are a layer cake of carefully considered typography, signage, raw interiors, furniture, breakfast choices, sculpted beards and tattooed staff. In a world of homogenized streetscapes and retail offerings Melbourne’s café culture creates a unique atmosphere of originality, individuality and good taste.

There are too many to list and I would recommend browsing through www.broadsheet.com.au, which is an encyclopedia of things to do in Melbourne. Also watch out for Melbourne International Coffee Expo 13-15 March 2015.

Inner Suburbs
The inner suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood are also worth exploring; Gertrude Street, Brunswick Street, Johnston Street and Smith Street, connect together in a large urban promenade of small gallery spaces, local fashion designers, furniture makers, independent bookshops, 21st century furniture shops, food outlets and coffee shops.

St Kilda
St Kilda sits adjacent to the bay and is home to the cultural institution that is Luna Park, a 100-year old amusement park. You can catch a tram from the CBD and it is worth allocating a day to explore the bayside around St Kilda.

The Wilde, Fitzroy
The vibe is a bit British gastro pub but a good place to start a night out in Collingwood and Fitzroy. Complete with roast dinners, G&Ts, house-made tomato sauce and hand pumped English Ale. Plus they have a colonial themed function room called the Explorer’s Club that fits 60 people and comes with a projector and a free pool table.

RMIT Business School by Lyons Architect | photo by Nils Koenning

Swanston Street – Architecture
Walk the length of Swanston Street, from Melbourne University at the North and the recently completed Melbourne School of Design down through the city campus of RMIT University with its new Design Hub by Sean Godsell, Business School by Lyons Architect and Building 8 by Peter Corrigan, past the state Library and the offices of the City of Melbourne and you will get a sense of the diversity of the architectural offerings.

Federation Square
At the foot of Swanston Street you will find Federation Square a somewhat controversial addition to the city when it first completed just over 10-years ago. Now the square is at the heart of the social life of the city. Federation Square hasn’t been the site of any great political event, civic turmoil or ritual like other major squares around the world but it filled a huge gap in a city that had no real gathering space for its citizens. It fulfills a unique offering – the opportunity to accommodate 15,000 people smack bang in the heart of the city.

GALLERIES / MUSEUMS

The Lyon Housemuseum
The Lyon Housemuseum is a private house and private art collection located eight kilometres east of Melbourne in the residential suburb of Kew. The Housemuseum displays selected works from the Lyon Collection of contemporary art, which includes paintings, sculpture, video work and installations by many of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. The Housemuseum and the Lyon Collection are open for public viewing by appointment on designated visiting days each year.

Heide Museum of Modern Art
A short drive away from the city but a fantastic modernist house set in sprawling gardens and a Sculpture Park, once owned by art collectors John and Sunday Reed, this is both an important piece of Australian art history and a vital contemporary art gallery.

Gertrude Contemporary
Showcases up and coming Melbourne and international artists, but allows for development before the big reveal. Quite often you will find large-scale sculptures of mixed media.

TarraWarra Museum of Art
This is a bit of a drive but the scenery (both in the gallery and outside) is nothing short of amazing. The not-for-profit gallery features work from the Australian modernists to the current day; notables from the collection are John Brack and John Olsen.

Seventh Gallery
This multi-room, not-for-profit gallery is artist-run and features young, contemporary local artists from a range of disciplines and levels. Seventh is an ambitious gallery, which is growing in reputation.

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)
Catch the overnight ferry to Tasmania from Port Melbourne: Don’t come all this way and miss a trip to MONA in Tasmania. The experience starts in Hobart with the ferry ride from the wharf to the museum – the only way to arrive. Perched on a promontory of land the museum rises like a rusted ancient temple. After disembarking you climb a colossal staircase to the entrance of the museum, all angles and mirrored surfaces. You enter one of two Roy Grounds listed modernist buildings built in the 1950s and descend down into the cliff as part of a wonderful immersive, sensory experience.

DON’T MISS

White Night Festival | 21 February 2015 (7PM – 7AM)
White Night Melbourne is Australia’s most celebrated cultural event. Inspired by the international Nuit Blanche movement, White Night Melbourne is an all-night, free cultural event with visual art, illuminations, music, food, theatre, sport, fashion, film, design and performances on display. The event runs from 7pm to 7am, and is held within the centre of Melbourne, with activities in city streets, parklands, laneways, public spaces and cultural institutions.

This article is part of the Melbourne by Design takeover on Central Station. For more Melbourne themed features, please visit here.

More: Website

/////

My Creative Scene is an insight into different creative & cultural happenings in cities where our members and readers live. Browse through more insider guides here or contact us to write about the arts scene where you are.

Direct from the Victorian capital to Glasgow, Postcode 3000 is an exhibition at The Lighthouse. Running until 28 January, the exhibition explores the re-urbanisation of Melbourne’s city centre. If you happen to be in Melbourne, you can see the same exhibition until 18 January at Melbourne Town Hall’s City Gallery.

From where to get the best coffee to unmissable festivals, get into the psyche of the city with NORD architect, Alan Pert’s cultural suggestions in Melbourne here.

We’ll also be featuring showcased work from talented RMIT School of Art Print Image Students Ying Huang and Sean Miles along with Edinburgh born, Melbourne based artist Lena Abbas.

Melbourne Design Market

Finally, wrap up the week by learning more about featured events the Melbourne Design Market and the Independent Photography Festival.

//////

Looking for more blogs? Visit here.

The studio came about six months ago when a space opened up in the iconic Nicholas building. A hub for artists for many years I jumped at the chance to be a part of something really special. During that time I’ve concentrated on creating a rather strong aesthetic. I suppose you’d call it Victorian Gothic. Using a very monochromatic colour scheme I’ve tried to not only instill the artwork with a feel of a bygone time, bridging the gap between painted portraits, silhouettes and early photography, but to also give the space a feeling of something long since lost.

People are encouraged to enter the space, so its now not only a working studio, but also a gallery and a retail outlet for some of the other pieces I make. You are even encouraged to bring in old frames or pieces to use in creating something special. Having come from a strong retail background and working in the events field as an art director for the last ten years I was always conscious of creating something that wasn’t just a piece on the wall, but also something that had a history and perhaps a darker meaning. Whether it was an heart ornament, a painted book or a cushion all the pieces could sit comfortably together and hint at something else that was going on inside.

Many of the works are done with vintage fabrics and papers, frames with original distressed mounts and found objects. Most of the portrait work are of artists and authors of the time all of which held darker secrets and had scandalous private lives. The pieces can be taken as simple bizarre objects or take on a deeper more macabre meaning. Its interesting to gauge from the reactions from the public just what someone will either laugh at, me moved by or simply walk away from.

Its about plugging into peoples memories,some good and some bad under the illusion that its a literary theme. Its all packaged up as the romantic side of the Victorian Gothic era, but of course there is allot of suppressed sexuality, the supernatural elements, love gone wrong, religion, madness, monsters, murder, loss and life and death. All of the experiences we don’t like to talk about but make up who we in fact are.

So the studio although having a rather dark theme is handled in a fairly light manner. The customised voodoo dolls, the children’s torture toys, Rorshack cushions or even the gruesome hearts all give the viewer a chance to laugh.

More: Blog

//////////

‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Utopian Slumps was established in Melbourne, Australia in 2007 as a non-profit arts initiative by Melissa Loughnan after she’d studied curatorship at university and had come out of several institutional internships and mentorships. In 2010, the gallery was relaunched as a dealer gallery with a strong curatorial focus. This focus not only means that the gallery’s annual exhibition program is curated, but that owner and curator Melissa collaborates with other curators on group exhibition projects, including recent collaborations with Rebecca Coates, Helen Hughes and Jane O’Neill on jointly curated exhibitions in the space.

Retaining its of-the-hand aesthetic and commitment to the creative development and experimentation of its artists, Utopian Slumps represents a stable of thirteen early to mid career Australian and New Zealand artists.

Upcoming exhibitions:
Falling Down
Featuring work from three Melbourne-based artists: Ry Haskings, James Lynch and Dan Moynihan, grouped together around themes of the cinematic, the theatrical and the absurd.
Dates: 10 February – 3 March 2012

Figure and Ground
The exhibition will investigate the use of earthware in contemporary art practices, particularly concerning intersections between ceramics and collage, the human figure and abstraction.
Artists:  Marco Chiandetti, Sarah Crowest, Rebecca Delange, Misha Hollenbach, Claire Lambe, Sanne Maestrom, Rob McLeish and Stephen Ralph
Dates: 9 – 31 March 2012

—

Born in 1953 and grew up in Glasgow. First jobs were working on a government research farm outside Dundee at 14, picking raspberries and strawberries. Then at 15, working on Saturdays at John Smith’s bookshop in St Vincent Street. Then at 18, with hair down to my waist, the only place of employment was Butlins in Ayr, as a bar porter at the Pig and Whistle – earning £7 pounds for an eight day week (we worked for seven days and got the eighth day off). However, the first five jobs that taught me a lot were:

01.After training in Dundee for two years, at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (between 1971 and 1973), I was offered a job as a lighthouse keeper off the West Coast of Scotland. In order to do it, I would have to miss the end of year assessments. I had a very friendly drawing lecturer called Ian Fearn. I went to ask his advice. “You’ll always have another opportunity to go to art school,” he told me “but this will probably be your only chance to be a lighthouse keeper”. I followed my heart rather than my head, and it turned out to be a fantastic six months during which I learned all sorts of skills that have been useful in later life. Many years later, I wrote about these experiences for the ‘Diary’ section of The London Review of Books. I then turned that into a book, which was published as Stargazing: memoirs of a young lighthouse keeper (Canongate, 2003). Currently trying to turn it into a film or TV series – just need four great Scottish actors.

Peter Hill (top left) and the class of 71

02. I spent another eight years at different art schools in the south of England, before returning to my home city of Glasgow in 1981. I’d always enjoyed writing and making art when I was at art school. I continued this from a WASPS studio in the Trongate, and witnessed the growth of Transmission Gallery from an idea to a reality through the hard work of a great number of people. I began writing about Scottish art for various magazines and journals outside Scotland, including Artmonthly, Studio International, Design, Artscibe, Aspects, and the Artists Newsletter (now an). I owe a great deal to many fine editors, particularly Peter Townsend at Artmonthly, in terms of editing, proof reading, raising advertising revenue, picture editing, and general networking.

03. After spending a year painting and writing at the wonderful Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, I was invited to teach painting at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen while Ian Howard was on sabbatical. I learned a great deal about teaching, examining, and enthusing students from my colleague Alexander Fraser. I also gave my very first lecture in the art school lecture theatre, juggling two carousels of slides, and overcoming my initial nerves. This, especially, was an important hurdle to jump. Grand to emerge unscathed at the other side.

04. At the Cité in Paris there were hundreds of artists from over seventy countries around the world – painters, film-makers, poets, photographers. I was acutely aware from my time there that not only did most nations have their own governments, but also had their own art magazines. I decided to try and set up a Scottish art magazine, ALBA, and after my happy time in Aberdeen I moved to Edinburgh. This was mainly because I’d lived in Scotland’s three other cities at different times and I wanted to get to know the Edinburgh art scene. Bill Hare and Dr Duncan MacMillan at the Talbot Rice Art Centre were generous in offering me an office to work in and even a studio to paint in. One afternoon in the Plough Tavern in Bloomsbury, Peter Townsend from Artmonthly taught me more about running an art magazine than anyone else before or since. The physicality of the magazine could never had happened without the energy and enthusiasm of Arthur Watson and his staff at Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen. The six years of ALBA was a huge roller coaster ride, which sadly did not survive a massive downturn in advertising, a deep recession, and an even deeper, personal, depression.

05. I have been privileged to meet many great art school teachers and heads of school, from Samantha Ainsley in Glasgow to Tony Jones (in various cities around the world). I probably learned most from Professor Geoff Parr in Hobart, Tasmania, (where I worked in the 1990s) in terms of how an art school might be structured and built around a world-class weekly forum program. While there, he and my colleague Paul Zika, helped me to set up an international residency program between Scotland, Hobart, and Canberra. This saw many Scottish artists, including Kevin Henderson, Anne Morrison, Claire Barclay, and Stephen Hurrell, create some memorable art projects, on-going friendships, and in one case marriage (between Anne Morrison and Troy Ruffels – a Glaswegian married to a Taswegian).

Ambition: To set up an annual Pacific City of Culture, based on the European model, and stretching from Vietnam to California, Canada to Australia, Chile to the Russian Pacific. Perhaps it should start as a Superfiction.

Motto: Always follow your heart, not your head.

//////////

We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

The zine is always anonymous but is credited to an artist who uses the pseudonym Luke You. The zine follows the life of Luke You who usually writes the zine, however sometimes the zine is written by other people that Luke You meets and asks to write for the project. Issues of the zine have appeared in English, French, Japanese, Danish, Arabic, Spanish, Hungarian, Mandarin and Braille.

In 2011 YOU is celebrating ten years of zine making and 520 issue of the zine with the launch of YOU #520 and a YOU Zine Making Workshop at Sticky Institute as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. The launch and workshop will take place at Sticky Institute in Melbourne on October 8th 2011.