soft

Participants

Anne U
Anne U is a Melbourne-based artist specialising in ceramic sculpture and furniture design. Through intuitive experimentation and improvisation, she pushes the technical and aesthetic boundaries of materials, embracing unpredictability as an essential part of her process. Anne has held residencies at Northcote Pottery Supplies and At The Above, where she presented her inaugural solo exhibition. Her work has been showcased in Melbourne Design Week, Craft Contemporary, and 1000 Vases Paris edition and has been featured in various creative campaigns and editorial publications, including in Vogue Australia.

Andrew Carvolth and Thomas Carvolth

Ash Allen
Ash Allen is a furniture designer whose exploratory practice is grounded in sustainability. Drawing on his industrial design background, Allen’s furniture often combines machined and handmade processes to engineer heirloom items with a minimal environmental footprint. His simple and elegant aesthetic challenges designed obsolescence.

Ben Styles

Carol Herbertson
Carol Herbertson is a Scottish-born, Adelaide-based fibre and textile artist. Having a keen interest in sewing, textiles and fashion from a very young age, Herbertson’s passion has followed through her life and lead her around the world. Understanding how things work is at the heart of her practice, whether this is a sewing machine, a car engine, or sheep’s fleece, things are disassembled to understand their inner working. Current pursuits look to learn as much as possible about and to refine the handspinning and weaving techniques of natural fibers.

Hannah Vorrath-Pajak
Hannah Vorrath-Pajak is a potter and visual artist based on Kaurna Country, South Australia. She works in porcelain, making wheel thrown functional ware and exhibition-based objects that engage with ceramic traditions, craft skills and history. Her work reflects on the significance of everyday objects – how they bring comfort, familiarity and meaning to daily rituals. After graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Ceramics) from the University of South Australia in 2017, Hannah went on to do a two-year Associate Training Program at JamFactory. After spending a further two years as a tenant, Hannah is now working from her home studio and teaches wheel throwing at JamFactory's ceramics studio.

Indigo Tolhurst
Indigo Tolhurst is a designer and jeweller based in Melbourne (Naarm/Birrarung-ga). She is interested in the intersection of function and sculpture, merging practical outcomes and art. Her work explores themes of light, nature, movement and metamorphosis. Indigo holds a Bachelor of Industrial Design with Honours from RMIT University, and has worked internationally and exhibited works in VIVID, Craft Contemporary and Fringe Furniture. Indigo’s jewellery works can be seen at @someotherworld_studio

Janice Cui
Janice Cui is an emerging artist based on Gadigal land, Sydney, where she is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Art at National Art School. Her practice traverses the liminal spaces between the seen and unseen, physicality and spirituality, external and internal landscapes. With a background in architecture and design, Janice brings a receptiveness to process, materiality and craft, creating work that meditates on the beauty and tragedy of existence.

Jay Jermyn
Jay Jermyn is a multi-disciplinary designer, artist and musician. His practice propose’s new ways of looking at the notions of self and its fragmentations within the contexts of nature, electronic dance music, ritual and the built environment. Jermyn has exhibited his work at Melbourne Design Week (2022, 23); Brisbane Art and Design Festival (2021); Oigall Projects, Melbourne (2021). In 2022 he was the artist in residence at Home of the Arts, Gold Coast (HOTA), and launched design brand Objects For Thought (OFT) with co-designer and collaborator C.J.Anderson

Jordan Fleming
Melbourne-based designer and artist Jordan Fleming works with metal, plaster, pigment, and timber to create sculptural and experimental furniture and lighting pieces characterized by humor and vivacious, wonky asymmetry. Having a background in cabinet making and interior design, Fleming established her own furniture design practice in 2018. Fleming’s works have been exhibited in Melbourne Design Week (2020, 2021, 2022), At The Above Gallery (2021), and Australian Design Centre Workshopped19 (2018). Additionally, her work has been profiled in design magazine Artichoke, architecture and design blog Yellowtrace, and Frankie magazine as the winner of their 2018 Good Stuff design awards.

James Shaw (UK)
James Shaw is a designer and a maker exploring the material landscape in a hands on way. His work aims to interrogate the material, systemic and formal approaches to the creation of objects. Frequently his work considers the resources around us challenging the notion of ‘waste’ to create new beautiful materials. James has exhibited internationally and past awards include being nominated for the Design Museum Designs of the Year Award and winning the Arc Chair Design Award. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The V&A, The Montreal Museum of Art, The Design Museum Ghent and The Museum of London among others.

Lena Rowe
Coalescing between the fields of science, fashion and object design, Rowe’s work explores a bio-based future. Working with the fabric of the natural world, through harnessing microbial matter, she creates tangible and processual pieces that foster symbiotic relationships between human and nature.

Miriam Sims and Sophie Turner
Sophie Turner is a floral designer whose practice draws from the transformative rhythms of nature, finding beauty in transience and the softness of the everyday. Moving fluidly between gardens, forests, and creeks, Sophie’s work reflects a transient sense of home, rooted in quiet acts of gathering and arranging. Her designs celebrate the ephemerality of place, weaving familiarity and care into fleeting forms. Miriam Sims is an interdisciplinary designer with a curiosity for how domesticity can inhabit public space. She explores the intersection of the design and the natural with an eye for small, meaningful details and a fascination with impermanence. Moments of home emerge in her practice through connections to place, whether it’s the ocean, parks lining the city, or silver gums unexpectedly punctuating suburbia. Her work considers how design interventions can contribute to intimate rituals of belonging.

Patrick Scott

Sam Ward
Sam is a ceramic artist and designer based in Melbourne (Naarm/Birrarung-ga). With a background in graphic design, Sam explores geometric ideas within his work, pushing the organic expectation of the ceramic medium to be more architectural and punctuating. Combining a range of wheelthrown and hand-built geometric elements, Sam's work often ruminates on ideas of collaboration, conversation, and connection; often sculptural, sometimes functional. This interplay between structured form and creative spontaneity defines Sam's artistic vision, inviting viewers to explore the boundaries between form and function, and to experience the joy of creation through his eyes.

Seb Nocelli
Sebastian is a multidisciplinary designer with professional experience in object, sculpture, and jewellery. His practice is inspired by the fantastical, embracing an experimental and expansive approach to design through wearable, functional, or sculptural elements. His work in soft explores the intersection of design and hospitality, expanding his practice into new realms of object creation. Influenced by the art of garniture and culinary presentations in 18th and 19th-century cuisine, his design philosophy emphasises slowness as a luxury to be savoured.

Ryan Mueller
Ryan Mueller is a designer specialising in environmental, branding and product design. Injecting a sense of authenticity and appreciation for existing things and experiences in all he does.