What Does Design Owe to Plants?

By Alexi Freeman

 

Before humans encounter design, they encounter nature.

Upon entering Plant Life: The Nature of Design, visitors are immersed in a billboard-sized photograph of an underwater kelp forest.

Macrocystis pyrifera’s branches sway through the blue-green depths – an apt introduction to an exhibition reconsidering the living world not as an endless source of raw materials, but as a system within which we’re entangled.

Across more than 60 works, Plant Life traces humanity’s evolving relationship with biological materials through furniture, architecture, garments, craft, jewellery, photography and film.

Organised across five chapters, the exhibition spans the materials that built our world to those reshaping its future.

An accompanying symposium extended the conversation, bringing together designers and researchers to question the extractive production models that have dominated the industrial era.

The proposition initially seems straightforward: if our reliance on synthetic materials is derailing us towards an increasingly damaged natural world, perhaps biological materials can get us back on track.

However, Plant Life goes deeper.

As NGV senior curator Ewan McEoin observed during the symposium, “It’s all very well and good to say plants are better than synthetic materials.”

But what happens when a plant becomes a sought-after design material? Where does it come from? Who holds the knowledge to work with it? How much can be produced, how quickly, and at what ecological cost?

And what happens when a material is no longer seen as separate from the living systems, places and people behind it?

Designers in this chapter experiment with mycelium, plant-based polymers, and agricultural waste, working with the properties of biological matter rather than eliminating them.

Mycelium grows unpredictably. Plants have seasons. Waste streams fluctuate. For designers accustomed to the uniformity, control and scalability of industrial materials, working with biology introduces a nuanced set of problems – and possibilities.

This chapter turns from material possibility to the history of extraction that enabled the modern material world.

Timber was among humanity’s earliest commodities, but industrialisation and colonial expansion denuded forests, making their resources increasingly distant sources of wealth.

For Broached Commissions creative director Lou Weis, this history is embedded in the systems that transformed nature into property as “the land was captured by bundles of rights.”

And, he argued, “design’s main function is to glorify the legal industrial systems, not to change them.”

Through this lens, every material carries a history of decisions about land, labour, economics and power.

Industrialisation didn’t only change what we made things from; it made material origins harder to trace.

This hints at why biomaterials cannot be celebrated as inherently virtuous. If they become the next global commodities, their popularity could reproduce the extractive systems that make petrochemical materials so profitable and problematic.

Artist and furniture maker Damien Wright resisted the temptation to divide materials into binaries: “nothing is all good, and nothing is all bad.”

His bench seat combines 10,000-year-old river red gum with mass-produced polypropylene chairs, bringing deep geological and cultural time into collision with plastic – one of the most ubiquitous materials of contemporary life.

Donna Cleveland’s film Black by Nature Lãnh Mỹ A Silk documents a rare Vietnamese dyeing tradition in which mặc nưa resin is oxidised to produce the world’s blackest naturally-dyed textile.

“It is slowly made through a relationship between plant chemistry, the river, the water, the sun, repeated labour and much tacit knowledge,” Cleveland said.

“What you see in the film is not only a dye process, but a knowledge system.”

Here, technology is embodied knowledge held in the hand, eye and body — accumulated through observation, repetition and practice. Knowledge that cannot be reduced to a scalable recipe or accelerated without losing something essential.

Filmmaker Emma Håkansson’s documentary on shiringa — a rubber harvested from living trees in the Peruvian Amazon — demonstrates material production as inseparable from Indigenous knowledge, community control, forest conservation and the ecological limits of a particular place.

Håkansson argued that a new material doesn’t necessarily need to replace an existing one at industrial scale.

Instead, “the idea of having slowness not as a failure of a new material, but actually as an inherent value and luxury to the new material” opens another way of thinking about production and consumption.

As she put it, “the fashion industry does not only design clothes, it designs supply chains, and in turn it designs environments.”

A material can be plant-based without its production being reciprocal, local or regenerative.

During the Plant Life Curator Tour, McEoin described the final room as “the beginning of the exhibition, not the end.”

The First Nations works are more than technical examples from the past. They belong to living knowledge systems in which plants, people, animals, seasons and Country are understood through relationships.