By Alexi Freeman

While traditional materialism is rooted in the present, Speculative Materialism – from the Latin ‘speculat’ meaning “observed from a vantage point” – looks to the horizon. Rather than designing materials to last for time immemorial, what about redesigning materials to degrade and be regenerated cyclically over time?

Craft + Design Canberra’s current exhibition Speculative Materialism: Making for the Future, explores the evolving roles of materials through the focused lens of creative practice.

Co-curated by Waratah Lahy and Artistic Director Jodie Cunningham, the exhibition features works by 11 regenerative artists, confronting the complexities of materiality in a world where mass consumption threatens our planet's health.

Through diverse artistic disciplines – from jewellery to sculptural tapestries to 3D-printed ceramics – these artists pose a timely question: What role can materials play in shaping a more sustainable, regenerative future?

Some works intercept and repurpose materials destined for landfills, challenging our consumption and waste patterns. Others highlight the regenerative potential of biomaterials in aquatic environments, including substrates designed to stimulate coral reef rehabilitation.

Speculative Materialism invites us to rethink our relationship with materials, demonstrating how creative thinking and design innovation can mitigate contemporary climate challenges.

Naarm-based artist Narelle White explores temporality in her work Earth to Earth: a suite of artefacts handcrafted from an experimental blend of beach sand and porcelain.

Designed to gradually erode in the gallery’s ambience, these ceramic sculptures embody her deep engagement with the natural world and the transience of materials.

"My aim, through experimentation and material poetics, is to consider how we relate to matter and the ecologies that sustain us," White explains.

Her process involves gathering geological samples from significant places and blending them into unique clay-bodies. White treats these materials as “wilful co-conspirators” emphasising their agency as they transform and eventually disintegrate.

"If art making is world-making, my work reminds me that as we transform matter, we transform ourselves,” she says.

By celebrating decay, White’s sculptures question our attachment to permanence and invite us to find meaning in transformation and ephemerality.

Minka Gillian is a Central Coast-based interdisciplinary artist and creator of Mind Garden: an immersive installation comprising a compelling array of over 100 hand-woven, crocheted and tapestry-esque sculptural artefacts heavily inspired by Tibetan Medical Thangkas.

By repurposing plastics intercepted from domestic waste – including needle caps collected by her diabetic mother – she imbues new life into discarded materials, crafting them into forms resembling internal human organs in a phantasmagoria of vibrant and mind-boggling configurations.

“My work examines the nature of our bodies and our relationships to the synthetic and organic world around us, both physical and psychological,” Gillian explains.

Seamlessly blending theoretical underpinnings with artisanal exploration, Gillian’s practice provokes a dynamic conversation between the human body and the material world.

She adds that, “each colourful woven structure transforms mundane, utilitarian materials into biomorphic objects imbued with stories and fragments from my past.”

Ngunnawal, Ngambri and Gadigal-based artist Beth O’Sullivan (sub)merges design technology and ecology through her artefacts titled Coral Scaffolds I & II as part of her collaborative Ceramic Coral Reef project – addressing our need for coral reef rehabilitation.

O’Sullivan’s transdisciplinary art practice advocates for eco-conscious materials, scaffolded by her grounding in environmental science and enhanced by her understanding of human and non-human relationships.

“Reef ecosystems worldwide are facing unprecedented impacts from anthropogenic climate change, making consistent and sustainable assessment essential,” O’Sullivan explains.

To this end, O’Sullivan has developed an innovative, 3D-printable substrate of calcium carbonate biofabrciated from sea water – a fit-for-purpose material for coral settlement. Using computational design and digital fabrication, O’Sullivan demonstrates the potential for upscaling these substrates as research tools for lab and fieldwork.

This proof-of-concept represents a visionary step toward reef restoration, leveraging design’s potential to aid marine biology and behavioural ecology in responding to critical environmental challenges such as rising global ocean temperatures.

Since the 1987 UN report Our Common Future, sustainability has washed into the mainstream, permeating discussions about the environment, production, consumption and disposal.

But as waving the green flag becomes an increasingly ubiquitous form of virtue-signalling, sustainability’s potency has become diluted.

Co-author of Cradle-to-Cradle and regenerative designer William McDonough said sustainability often boils down to being “less bad." But Speculative Materialism – underpinned by regenerative design practices – offers a fresh approach, encouraging an imaginative and proactive rethinking of how we can reuse, transform and recycle materials.

At its heart, Speculative Materialism seeks to make something good, harnessing the potential of waste and overlooked materials to heal the environment rather than simply mitigating the collateral damage.

Embodying a philosophical concept and an artistic framework this exhibition offers a profound opportunity to contemplate our relationship with materials. It asks us to move beyond human-centred views and reframe materials as active collaborators in reshaping our connection with the natural world.

The diversity of artefacts featured in Speculative Materialism: Making for the Future demonstrates that the possibilities for reimagining how we work with materials are limited only by our imaginations.

While the jury is out on whether any speculative materials presented in this exhibition will replace incumbent materials industrially, it undoubtedly contributes valuable discourse on where materials come from, how we engage with them and where they end up at end-of-life.

Exploring sustainability, regeneration and materiality through the lens of creative practice, this exhibition offers an alternative and much-needed vision of how we can reimagine today’s materials to create a more harmonious, symbiotic and ecologically balanced tomorrow.

Speculative Materialism: Making for the Future runs at Craft + Design Canberra rom Nov 1 - Dec 14, 2024. Entry to the exhibition is free | No bookings required. Curated by Waratah Lahy and Jodie Cunningham, with contributions from Christian Sirois.

Artists: Minka Gillian | Nicole Jakins | Living Seawalls | Halie Rubenis | Niklavs Rubenis | Narelle White | Molly Desmond | Daniel Leone | Julie Pennington | Beth O'Sullivan | Alexi Freeman