As part of Melbourne Design Week, multidisciplinary designer Emma Elizabeth will transform discarded luxury leather into a collaborative exploration of reinvention at Abbotsford Convent.
Titled LOST HiDE, the exhibition brings together around 15 designers and more than 30 works created from reclaimed leather hides salvaged from high-end commercial furniture makers, SWISS Design.
The exhibition will be housed within the former Convent’s old storeroom, once used by the nuns to store provisions and not typically open to the public.
The LOST HiDE project began almost accidentally when Elizabeth spied piles of unused leather offcuts and surplus hides while visiting SWISS Design.
“I just said, ‘Can I have it?’,” she recalls. “And then I thought, I’m going to do an exhibition.”
Leather carries an inherent cultural weight associated with luxury, durability and permanence, Elizabeth points out. “It already has a legacy,” she says. “Anything you make out of it already has a future.”
The exhibition’s title emerged from Elizabeth’s musings on the state of the world.
“There’s a lot of lost people, lost material, lost community,” Emma Elizabeth says. “Everyone’s a little bit lost.” In this context, the “lost hide” becomes symbolic.
Each hide bears unique markings, imperfections and irregular forms, forcing designers to respond intuitively.
“You never really know what you’re going to get,” she says.
Across furniture, objects and experimental pieces, the participating designers in LOST HiDE have worked with material’s inconsistencies, allowing the natural character to guide the outcome.
The result is an unconventional furniture exhibition that spans contemporary design and functional beauty.
LOST HiDE
14 — 24 May
Le magasin