Bethan Laura Wood’s design practice is built on research and knowledge of the manufacturing process. As the recipient of the 2023 MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission, Wood has created two new works inspired by her research into NGV historical collections, drawing on the colours, patterns, ideas and materials of the Regency era (c. 1811–20), as well as Wood’s own research and interest on the themes of knowledge, gender and learning.

Early sketches created by Wood responded to this prompt and illustrate the development of her project from research and conceptualisation through to schematic and final design. Wood has developed ongoing collaborative relationships with master craftspeople and manufacturers. The custom-designed timber veneer that lines Kaleidoscope-o-rama bookcase, 2023, was fabricated at the ALPI wood veneer factory in Italy, a process documented via photographs and video. The ALPI artisans used a scale model by Wood to fabricate the materials.

The commission of this project is made possible through the MECCA x NGV Women in Design Commission. The NGV warmly thanks MECCA for supporting the acquisition of this work.

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Hoda Afshar’s The Fold is a project informed by archival material. Afshar is working in a tradition sometimes referred to as the ‘archival turn’, referring to contemporary art that engages with archival material, forms and theories. Afshar’s project originated during research at Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, where she encountered an archive of thousands of photographs of Islamic women and men taken by French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934). Continuing Afshar’s decade-long research-based practice of exploring how photography was a tool of colonialisation through its representations of Islamic women, The Fold takes visitors into an investigation of de Clérambault’s archive to unpack his ideas about fabrics, covering and fetishism.

The photographic test prints are a record of the long period of research and testing that informed the laborious darkroom process Afshar developed to reproduce the archival images used in the large-scale installation of around 900 black-and-white photographs. The process of fabricating the large-scale photographic panels, printed onto silvered mirror, is recorded in an accompanying film.

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French artist Jean Jullien is the creator of RIFIFI: Jean Jullien for Kids, currently on display on the Ground Level, Children’s Gallery in NGV Triennial 2023. In collaboration with NGV Curatorial, Exhibition Design and Multimedia departments, Jullien has created a special installation for children taking the form of an immersive underwater world.

The set of sketches captures the initial ideas developed by the artist in the early stages of the project. Sketching is a vital component of Jullien’s practice. For RIFIFI: Jean Jullien for Kids, he took a spontaneous approach to creating concepts and used the immediacy of drawing to quickly and impulsively express ideas and imagery. The sketches show Jullien’s work in its rawest form, showcasing his unique, instinctive approach to creating images.

Based on Jullien’s sketches, NGV exhibition designers created maquettes (small-scale models) of the three-dimensional objects in the exhibition to visualise what the final forms would look like and to test out making methods and materials. Both the maquettes and sketches were then used by external fabricators to realise the final form of the sculptures. Through this material, we can trace the artist’s process of creation from ideation to final form.

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