Making Place: Falling Leaves—A Project in Sustainability

Making Place: Falling Leaves began with the development of an Australian-made collection of sustainable, commercial-grade wallpaper and textiles, supported by a Brisbane City Council grant.

I designed the Falling Leaves collection and worked closely with Australian manufacturers to realise it. The wallpaper was produced using water-based inks on sustainably forested paper, while the commercial-grade textiles were woven from bamboo and wool, selected for their natural and antibacterial properties.

I wanted the collection to embody its ideas rather than simply speak about them. Supporting Australian manufacturing mattered, as did the materials and processes used to make it.

The completed collection then became the basis for Making Place, an exploration of how pattern, objects and surface participate in constructing a sense of place.

I photographed the collection inside a squatted, decaying Queenslander, where damaged timber, graffiti, peeling surfaces and exposed structure became part of the work. The collection was subsequently presented at Artisan, a contemporary craft and design gallery, and Space Furniture, an international furniture and interiors retailer—placing the work within two very different public contexts.

The patterns and objects remained the same. What changed was the way they were encountered.

Against the deteriorating surfaces of the Queenslander, the work entered one kind of conversation. Within a gallery and a contemporary retail interior, it entered another.

Making Place used that displacement to explore the relationship between designed objects and their surroundings, and the extent to which context changes what we see—and what we think something means.