Fiona Lynch Opens Permanent Design Gallery in Melbourne

Melbourne-based interior designer Fiona Lynch is opening a permanent gallery Work Shop in Collingwood, coinciding with NGV Melbourne Design Week. A curated showcase of experimental design, fine art, and objects, Work Shop will display work from Australian and international artists and designers, including commissioned and original pieces. By identifying commonalities across mediums and materials, Work Shop aims to unpack the relationship between art and design.

Informed by Lynch’s early career in fine art, the gallery will serve as a testing ground for her eponymous interior design practice; somewhat of an experimental lab that gives audiences an unveiled insight into the creative process.

“Prior to studying interior design I studied Fine Art at RMIT in Melbourne,” says Lynch. “This unique path has always been reflected in my work and the way we approach design. Work Shop will afford my studio and I the opportunity to explore this further… examining the dialogue between art and design in a way that challenges and inspires.”

Related: Melbourne Design Week 2019 Announces It’s Largest Programme To Date.

The opening exhibition, titled Ideas to Intuition includes contributing artists such as New York-based lighting designer Mary Wallis, Australian contemporary artists Makiko Ryujin and Jiaxin Nong, and British porcelain artist Olivia Walker. The works, chosen for an innovative approach to their respective mediums, will be displayed alongside original designs from Lynch’s own studio.

“In this age of instant gratification, it’s very easy to get caught up in the end result, disregarding the creative process required to arrive at a resolved outcome,” says Lynch. “For our first exhibition we’ve called on our contributing artists to investigate the tension between the constructed and deconstructed, the resolved and incomplete, the built and undone, encouraging the viewer to discover beauty at all stages of creative evolution.”

Ryujin’s Burnt Wooden Vessels presents a series of complex, textured forms, their formative process representing the paradoxical forces of control and chaos coming together. Ryujin meticulously carves bowls out of chunks of the tree trunk before taking to them with a blowtorch, intentionally warping the wood in a celebration of the beauty in imperfection.

Mary Wallis’ sculptural, intricate forms are an exercise in using material to shape and command the immaterial; light. With its intrinsic ability to craft mood and atmosphere, Wallis explores the crucial role light plays on the manner in which we engage with space and design, and its effect on our sense of place.

Olivia Walker’s Living Ceramics Series results from construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Walker’s process sees carefully shaped porcelain vessels undergo a form of material decay, before being rebuilt with a growth-like texture comprised of hundreds of individual pieces of clay. Speaking to the influence of material processes on art and artist, Walker’s vessels appear alive, imbued with the sense that they could either grow or deteriorate in plain sight.

Throughout Jiaxin Nong’s contemporary paintings, the relationship between the conceptual and the physical is explored through her own concepts and method, with brisk brushstrokes that overlap and intertwine. The pieces showcased at Work Shop specifically explore expressions of movement and conflict that cannot remain static, rather continuously shifting and fluctuating.

Work Shop and Ideas to Intuition will debut on March 15 as part of the Melbourne Design Week program, remaining open to the public until March 24 and by appointment thereafter.