Crafting Plastics featured in Plant Life: The Nature of Design at NGV

Crafting Plastics is proud to be part of Plant Life: The Nature of Design, a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne exploring humanity’s evolving relationship with the plant world through design.

Bringing together furniture, architecture, decorative arts, craft, photography and film, the exhibition traces a relationship that reaches from ancestral making and living First Nations traditions through industrialisation and global resource extraction to today’s emerging material technologies.

Rather than presenting this history as a simple timeline, Plant Life moves between different periods and practices, revealing the many ways plants have shaped the designed world - as sources of food, shelter, fibre, colour, structure and material.

The exhibition opens towards the future, presenting projects that approach plants as active participants in new material systems. Alongside mycelium-grown furniture, plant-based resins and algae biomaterials, works by Crafting Plastics explore the potential of plant-derived biopolymers as an alternative to conventional petrochemical materials.

Our work with NUATAN® forms part of this broader conversation around bio-based materials and the possibilities of designing with biological resources. It reflects an ongoing question at the heart of Crafting Plastics: how can we rethink the materials surrounding us - not only in terms of what they are made from, but also how they are produced, used and returned to material cycles?

The exhibition then turns to the histories behind our current material landscape, from the industrial transformation of timber through bending, laminating and moulding to the global trade in rare woods. Works by contemporary designers enter into dialogue with objects from the NGV Collection, revealing the complex cultural, economic and ecological relationships embedded in seemingly familiar materials.

At its conclusion - and beginning - Plant Life returns to First Nations practices and living craft traditions that have long understood plants as more than raw materials: as sources of knowledge, kinship, custodianship and technique. Fibre weaving, bamboo, lacquer, devotional carving and bio-based textile practices point towards ways of thinking about materials that are deeply rooted in relationships with living systems.

For Crafting Plastics, being part of Plant Life places NUATAN® within a much wider history and future of plant-based making - connecting contemporary material research with the knowledge, practices and ecological relationships that have shaped human making for millennia.

Plant Life: The Nature of Design
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/plant-life/