A&A founders Arthur Seigneur (left) and Adam Goodrum with their Mother & Child cabinet, which required more than 16,000 ribbons of straw. Photograph by Andrew Curtis. When the Kissing Cabinet was unveiled at Tolarno Galleries during Melbourne Design Week in May, it eluded classification. The latest collaborative output from the Australian industrial designer Adam Goodrum and the French marquetry artisan Arthur Seigneur, it appeared as a towering blue-grey box until a gentle spin revealed a mesmerising interior of curvaceous forms and secret compartments rendered in the centuries-old craft of straw marquetry. On closing, the shapes converged to resemble a kiss, which left questions on the lips of many. Is it a kinetic sculpture? An extraordinary storage solution? In the end, does it really matter? The captivating work took more than three years to create and was snapped up by an individual collector for $280,000 before it was even finished, heralding a new era for collectible design in Australia.
Goodrum and Seigneur — known professionally as A&A — began collaborating in 2017, and their first piece, the kaleidoscopic Bloom cabinet, was shown at Milan in 2018 and acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Since then, A&A has been invited to create a piece for the Louis Vuitton LV200 project in celebration of the 200th birthday of Monsieur Louis Vuitton. Last year, each work in A&A’s Mother & Child collection, which was shortlisted for the Créateurs Design Awards in Paris, was acquired for a private collection.
As an individual designer, Goodrum has created pieces for international brands including Alessi, Cappellini and Normann Copenhagen. Seigneur, who moved to Australia from Paris in 2015, developed his straw marquetry skills working alongside Lison de Caunes, the artist widely credited with reviving the technique. As collaborators, Goodrum explains, their ethos rebels against the post-industrialist demand that objects be made faster and in multitude. But as a designer who, with Seigneur, is breaking new ground for the presentation and sale of collectible contemporary design in Australia, Goodrum says the term “collectible” doesn’t sit well with him. “It feels kind of presumptuous,” he says. “We’re just trying to create unique, one-off objects and to challenge ourselves. Maybe it falls more into the art space than the design space, but I think that’s a debate that surrounds collectible design.”
Characterised by artistic expression, exquisite craftsmanship and the scarcity created by limited production, collectible design has seen an upswing globally since the new millennium. International fairs such as Design Miami, launched in 2005, and PAD in Paris and London have helped to shape how contemporary design is bought, sold and discussed within the wider cultural landscape. London’s Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which has outposts in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, has been redefining the boundary between art and design for almost two decades. Esteemed auction houses including Phillips have dedicated parts of their decorative arts programming to contemporary designers since the early 2000s. In 2015, the curvaceous Lockheed Lounge by the Sydney-born designer Marc Newson sold at a Phillips auction to an anonymous phone bidder for £2.43 million (about $4.69 million); six years later, Ron Arad’s polished stainless-steel D-Sofa fetched £1.23 million (about $2.3 million).
While the strength of the collectible design market is evident on one side of the globe, it is still nascent on the other. But momentum is building, thanks in part to cultural institutions like the NGV, which opened its Department of Contemporary Design & Architecture — the first of its kind for an art gallery in Australia — in 2015, followed by its launch of Melbourne Design Week in 2017 and Melbourne Design Fair in 2022. Commercial gallerists like Sydney’s Sally Dan-Cuthbert and Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries have since expanded their collections to incorporate the work of designers, and galleries dedicated to collectible design are opening their doors.
Dr Simon Maidment, a former senior curator of contemporary art at the NGV, launched the gallery Useful Objects in Collingwood during Melbourne Design Week this year. Specialising in collectible design, he aims to support the work of contemporary Australian designers while contributing to the discourse that surrounds it. The gallery’s opening exhibition, “Desire x Design”, featured works from emerging practitioners such as Marlo Lyda and Joanne Odisho, as well as acclaimed established designers including Trent Jansen.
“I think the storytelling aspect of collectible design is key to my interest in it and that of various collectors and the makers themselves,” Maidment says. “But a common refrain I was hearing from designer-makers was that while events like Melbourne Design Fair are great and create a lot of interest, there was little opportunity to show their work in between.”
The Melbourne gallerist Sophie Gannon’s enthusiasm for collectible design was evident in 2017 when she began exhibiting the work of Australian designers such as Dale Hardiman. “Design wasn’t really happening in the commercial gallery space in Australia back then, but there were design galleries overseas that functioned exactly like commercial art galleries,” says Gannon, who opened her eponymous gallery in 2006. “When you live with great art, it gives a lot back to you, and it’s the same with design.” It took a while for Gannon’s clients to get onboard. “I’ve got very visually literate collectors — they understand visual art, they collect it, they travel overseas to see it — but when I first started showing design, it took them a while to get their heads around what it was, and that surprised me at the start,” Gannon says. “But I think the growth of collectible design in Australia has been multilayered and the support of places like the Powerhouse [Museum] in Sydney, the NGV and the Art Gallery of South Australia has given collectors confidence, because it’s being platformed by these cultural institutions in the same way that visual artists are.” Collectors now “love it”, Gannon says. “I’ve had people say, ‘I’ve got no walls left, but that’s fine.’ With collectible design they often don’t need a wall.”
The Tasmanian-born, London-based designer Brodie Neill has seen the Australian market evolve firsthand. His sinuous @Chair, first produced as a rendered design in 2008, was included in Time Magazine’s Design 100 list the same year, but he struggled to gain interest from commercial galleries in his home country. “Fine art galleries in Australia are now much more interested in showing designs,” he says. “I must admit, when I knocked on doors about 10 years ago, there was not really the appetite for it.”
Neill honed his design skills at the University of Tasmania and the Rhode Island School of Design, before establishing his studio in London in 2005. He has built a strong global presence with projects for brands including Mercedes-Benz, Swarovski and Alexander McQueen, as well as limited-edition pieces for galleries and private collectors. His sculptural designs demonstrate his commitment to sustainability, with pieces made from ocean plastic, reclaimed timbers and circular metals. His multicoloured Remix chaise longue, made from reclaimed and salvaged materials including plastics and woods, was created as a limited-edition design in 2008 for the Apartment Gallery in London, where it sold for £32,000 (about $61,000; final editions are now valued at triple that figure).
In 2016, Neill represented Australia at the inaugural London Design Biennale with a critically acclaimed installation, “Plastic Effects”, where he launched his Gyro table, made from more than half a million ocean plastic fragments. In 2022, he presented a new collection of work at Sotheby’s on London’s New Bond Street as part of the auction house’s ongoing design series. “It was an amazing platform, because for two weeks you had the collectors coming through,” Neill says. “It wasn’t an auction, it was a private sale, and I still have clients that I met through there that I’m working on projects with now.”
The Alice Springs-based designer and artist Elliat Rich describes the growing interest in collectible design in Australia as “highly rewarding”.
“When I first graduated, it was lucky to find any opportunity to show your work in a gallery setting,” says Rich, whose limited-edition works, represented by Sophie Gannon Gallery, are held in numerous public and private collections. “Even just the appreciation of the word ‘design’ has increased, and there is a cultural sophistication around design practice. I think collectible design is the front wave of that, breaking new ground and building new understandings. There’s a global progression that we are now fitting into.”
Rich’s 2018 solo exhibition, “Other Places”, presented by Sophie Gannon Gallery, featured Weaver, a suspended aluminium shelving unit cloaked in a “wig” of synthetic hairlike fibre that tucks behind a glass hook when opened, eschewing the notion that furniture design should be purely practical. “I think collectible design plays that role of delivering expression that sits outside those archetypal industrial expectations of ‘functional objects’,” Rich says. “Weaver is a work that looks beautiful, but the sensual experience of using that shelf is quite distinct. Anybody who’s tucked hair behind somebody else’s ear will recognise that gesture that is one of care and intimacy, so putting that into a design typology — into a shelf — all of a sudden opens up all these other ways of relating to an object.”
For Goodrum, the growing interest in collectible works reflects a lift in the standard of Australian design. “It’s quite amazing what’s happening at the moment,” he says. “In the beginning of my career, I almost wanted to focus on becoming an artist of sorts, but then for whatever reason I studied industrial design and fell more into product design. Through this close collaboration with Arthur, it’s an absolute pleasure to be working on pieces that are more artistic and to have more of that freedom to do things differently.”
The kinetic qualities of A&A’s Kissing Cabinet mark a leap forward for their creative collaboration. Goodrum says it’s an aspect they plan to explore further. And while A&A’s work intentionally fuses art and design, the pair are curious about how it functions in the homes of their collectors. “We installed the Kissing Cabinet in a house in Melbourne and the owner was incredibly keen to know how all the hidden drawers work, so I guess he plans to use it,” Goodrum says. “I don’t think he’s going to put his socks in it, but I’d like to think that it will be used to store an item that’s really special.”
