At Melbourne Design Week, Abbotsford Convent will host Industry, a new exhibition by designer and maker Isabel Avendaño Hazbún, with Raven Mahon.
A textile designer by training, Hazbún has a lifelong connection to making.
“My family are all in the fashion industry,” she explains. “My grandfather was a tailor, my grandmother a fashion designer.”
That lineage led her to textile design, then weaving, and eventually into furniture.
At the core of Industry is a fascination with unconventional materials and a passion for circular design. Hazbún works with discarded tyre inner tubes, collecting them directly from mechanics and bike repair shops and transforming them into woven structures, rope, and connective elements within her furniture.
The result is a series of speculative works – furniture, lighting, homewares, textiles and sculpture; some finished, some still concepts – where the entire ecological impact of the object is considered.
The material’s elasticity becomes a functional asset, allowing pieces to be bound and tensioned without conventional fixings. “I’ve been using lashings and knots, and the pressurised elasticity of the rubber to connect elements,” she says.
Alongside rubber, Hazbún reclaims sawdust from manufacturing processes, reprocessing it into a malleable, fabric-like substance.
Dyed with natural pigments such as eucalyptus, turmeric and pomegranate, the sawdust is mixed into a paste and moulded into forms. These will also be part of the the MDW show.
Despite its experimental nature, Hazbún’s work remains functional.
“It has to be used,” Hazbún says. “If not, it’s not furniture.”
Hazbún wants audiences to reconnect with the act of making, something she believes is often obscured. “You just see the end product. You don’t know how it’s made, who makes it.”
When asked to describe Industry in three words, Hazbún chooses “punk, considered, handmade”.
“I think it’s pretty punk, actually. It’s a pretty punk show for furniture.”
Industry
14 — 16 May
North Magdalen Laundry