Saturday 11 December
11am-4pm. City Library (253 Flinders Lane, Level 1 gallery)

Image: Cat Rabbit, Christmas Card, $5 at December Craft Hatch.

The Craft Hatch market is the perfect place to pick up a unique Christmas card, gift or stocking filler, like one of these screen printed Christmas cards by local label CatRabbit.

A market veteran with a practice encompassing soft toys and jewellery, CatRabbit has developed a dedicated following over the last five years. Every

Christmas the label produces a limited edition set of cards printed with the Japanese Gocco Screen Printing machine.

The Happy Christmas Bear card sells for $5 and is printed on recycled paper using the Gocco screen printing inks. The cards are sold in a limited edition of 100, so you can rest assured they are as rare as that special someone in your life.

The Craft Hatch market is a one stop shop for locally designed homewares, jewellery, clothing and accessories. Every market presents a newly curated selection of the best emerging craft and design.

Also exhibiting at Craft Hatch in December are: Ellka Design, Erica Bramham, FUNKYWOMBAT textiles & The Curious Girl, Genna Campton, Goldenink, Gwendoline Page, Handmade Life, Jaylene Falkner, Rose Megirian, Rebecca Martin & Aldis Kossdottir and Urthly Organics.

Craft Hatch markets are presented by Craft Victoria in collaboration with the City Library on the second Saturday of every month, 11am-4pm. Please note there will be no Craft Hatch market in January.

See more at Craft Victoria

Images R-L: Karim Rashid designs at the RG Madden stand, Modula fir treet at the Büro North stand, Glow in the dark Zip Zips at the Zip Zips stand.

Melbourne’s original pop up design market continues to be the place for style hunters to gather, be inspired and shop.

Since 2005 the Melbourne Design Market has been popping up twice a year for ONE DAY ONLY and transforming Fed Square’s underground car park into designland.

On Sunday December 5, 2010 there’ll again be a diverse collection of over 50 exhibitors from small design brands just launching to well-known and much-loved brands all showcasing their latest and greatest. Plus the cool sounds of DJ Madee River, fine fair-trade barista coffee from Bean Ground and Drunk and fantastic paella from the Beer de Luxe on-site kitchen all add to the party atmosphere.

So come along, experience Melbourne’s best design market and you can even knock over your Christmas gift buying in just one day.

MELBOURNE DESIGN MARKET 10am-5pm, Sunday December 5 at Federation Square undercover car park.

Enter via Russell Street extension or Riverside Walk.
Disabled parking and facilities nearby.
Entry is free.

More info here

The Melbourne Design Market is a one of its kind event that continues to be the place to be and be seen. For stallholders it provides the opportunity to get your new products and ideas out to over 10,000 stylehunters in just one day. Since 2005 the Melbourne Design Market has been popping up twice a year and transforming the Federation Square Car Park into a design show presenting some of this country’s greatest creative enterprises.

For shoppers the Melbourne Design Market is the place to see a fantastic array of merchandise, acquire the latest must-have pieces and enjoy the party-like atmosphere. For successful stallholders it’s a day of sales, orders, and most of all, meeting new clients and receiving valuable feedback on your business.

Do you have a new product or idea that you want to get to the people who’ll appreciate it? Then go to www.melbournedesignmarket.com.au now to look through the FAQs and make your application.

Distinguishing the Melbourne Design Market from all others is a rigorous selection procedure for prospective stallholders to ensure the quality and diversity of the products on offer. Given that it’s such a successful forum to launch new products, the market receives many more applications than can possibly be accepted.

APPLICATIONS CLOSE 5PM FRIDAY October 15, 2010

More information here

Toygiants is a celebration of toys: the culture, the passion, the obsession.

Brittany Veitch is a young artist and toy designer with an eye for the macabre. Recently graduating with first class honours in Industrial Design from RMIT University in Melbourne, as well as having a Diploma of Furnishing, she is a great example of the transdisciplinary practice of many designers today. Creating her work with different media and practices from drawing, CAD, sewing, animation, video, to performance art and puppetry; she explores themes that are always a little left of centre.

Brittany Veitch is a young artist and toy designer with an eye for the macabre. Recently graduating with first class honours in Industrial Design from RMIT University in Melbourne, as well as having a Diploma of Furnishing, she is a great example of the transdisciplinary practice of many designers today. Creating her work with different media and practices from drawing, CAD, sewing, animation, video, to performance art and puppetry; she explores themes that are always a little left of centre.

A fairytale childhood
Much of her childhood years were spent in her mother’s toyshop ‘Hobbit House’, as well as playing with the family’s menagerie of pets at their home, including a deer, alpaca, turtles and quails. Brittany’s creations are often inspired by animals and their involvement in fairytales, as shown in her ‘Maimed Fairytale’ and ‘From the Woods’ collections. Although she has always marvelled at her sister’s vintage Steiff collection of toys – ‘I am particularly taken with a velvet zebra’ – it wasn’t until 2005 while studying Industrial Design that she began to make her own toys. Encouraged by working in an experimental studio in an open, supportive environment, at university she felt  unrestricted by traditional industrial design constraints and developed what became the ‘Maimed Fairytale’ collection, ‘in which the wounds inflicted on the toys are inspired by passages from the early editions of childhood fairytales.’

Maimed Fairytales

Toys from the dark side
Brittany sees her toys as art pieces, and hopes to have them exhibited and collected, rather than mass-produced for commercial gain. However, she delights in current trends in popular toy design and cartoons which delve into darker places in the name of fun.
‘I like that there is an alternative to the saccharine cute, for instance, Nathan Jurevicius’s ‘Scary Girl’, Amy Winfrey’s web cartoon ‘Making Fiends’ and the likes of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez. Within my work there is recognition and admiration for other artists and practitioners, and a combination of these influences plays a role in how my work evolves.’

Creative inspiration
Brittany other creative influences range from Hieronymus Bosch’s vivid and complex imagery; to the way that Hiraki Sawa’s video art uses scale within environment to mix fantasy with the banal; the eerie sculpture and rogue taxidermy of Elizabeth McGrath; to video visionary Chris Cunningham’s clashes of the horrific and the comical; as well as animator David Firth’s wry-humoured flash animations of strange and disturbing stories. Brittany recalls viewing Firth’s work was what prompted her to create her own animations.

Designing across media: with a needle and thread in hand
Brittany generates and refines her concepts using both the computer and pen and paper, most often by sketching out ideas on paper and then refining the patterns using software such as Adobe Illustrator. However some of her sewing work is done more on the fly, where aesthetic and structural decisions of a project can be made as it progresses. Brittany chooses to hand sew most of her creations, such as the ‘From the Woods’ collection, as it is an integral part of the process and aesthetic of the pieces, but other toys use a combination of machine stitching and hand sewn detailing.
The ‘From the Woods’ collection has recently caught the eye of the frontman of Finnish band HIM, Ville Valo, who made a special request to meet Brittany during the band’s recent tour of Australia and went home with a family of seven deer from the collection.

From the Woods, 'Stomach Flap' Materials: vinyl and felt.

Brittany also enjoys the freedom of working in animation.
‘Animation as an artistic medium is a blast to work with because it requires patience and dedication…at the moment I am working on a hand drawn paper animation that explores the relationship between a mute girl and a lump of coal and [explores] themes of reticence, melancholy and how companionship is formed.’ Brittany has also provided illustrations for magazines, and participated in a puppetry show in the 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival. She also has a number of planned projects in the works, including a series of short videos of landscapes modelled in 3D CAD software, as well as a photography series exploring the cliché images of 1950s happy families using cast taxidermy forms disfigured with the plague.

PAPER JAM. Murderous office machinery versus office drones. Braden Keir, Ben Landau, James Secombe, Brittany Veitch.

Transdisciplinary practice
Brittany describes transdisciplinary practice as a ‘cross-pollination of skills and ideas. From this emerges a different way of thinking about design. I am comfortable being a transdisciplinary practitioner and will work on multiple projects focused on different skills and media as an effective motivational tool to produce a steady flow of work outcomes. Being able to switch from video to CAD to sewing is very liberating and enables a thorough investigation and exploration of ideas.’

Brittany’s advice for students planning on entering the design community, particularly that of industrial design, is to ‘get involved by entering competitions or by participating in collectives. Be active and open and never be afraid to experiment.’

Kate McCurdy

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© TOYGIANTS

Toygiants is a celebration of toys: the culture, the passion, the obsession.

While the Toygiants project has taken more than four years to complete, the content is the result of a lifetime of meticulous collecting. Selim Varol is the owner of one the largest toy collections in Europe, and perhaps the world, with more than 10,000 individual pieces to his name. After happening upon a shop window which displayed a number of the pieces from the collection, photographers Daniel and Geo Fuchs had to know more about Selim’s obsession for toys.
What followed was the start of a strong friendship between the Fuchs and Selim, one which Selim says has ‘greatly impacted the development and direction of [his] collection’. He describes the time they spent together photographing the toys as ‘imbued with an aura of childlike intimacy where no one else was permitted’. The end product of the book – and accompanying exhibition – however, draws the reader in and demands their involvement; by rekindling childhood memories of their own toys, or touching on the cult following of film characters and icons, or by simply blowing their minds through the sheer spectacle of some of the compositions.

Toygiants takes you on a journey through the fascination of toy design, from the more conventional dolls such as Barbie and Blythe, to the increasingly popular designer vinyl craze sweeping the globe. There are superheroes from the comic book worlds, such as Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Hell Boy, as well as the cast from Sin City, albeit characters from the feature film version of the graphic novel. Movie characters abound, from the usual suspects of Star Wars and Star Trek, to the more unconventional such as Uma Thurman as The Bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (as well as Tarantino himself), Al Pacino as Scarface, Bruce Willis as Die Hard‘s John McClane and Sly Stallone’s Rambo.

What really stands out in Toygiants is the opening ‘sequence’ of images, a politically charged and alarming display of toys that unbelievably do exist. The first toy to take the stage, is that of George W. Bush, in full US Air Force gear, complete with interchangeable hands so that he can give the thumbs up to the troops. What follows is a sinister exploration of a real life game of heroes and villains: an extreme close up of Bush is placed in a double page spread with Osama Bin Laden. More portraits of world figures follow, from the revolutionary Che Guevaro, Fidel Castro and Abraham Lincoln, to the more notorious faces of Saddam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler.
The Hitler sequence begins with an extreme close-up, followed by what may be deemed fantastic poses including the figure of Hitler playing with Star Wars ships, to having his head in the jaws of a dinosaur, to being subjected to the sadistic whims of mutants. The imagination and invention of the compositions of the group shots elevate the objects out of their packaging and the toybox, and brings them to life: whether it’s Andy Warhol in the barber’s chair (hair by Edward Scissorhands), or colour-coded designer vinyl toy group compositions on long fold-out pages, or the extreme close-up portraits that allow you to become closer to the toys than you thought was possible.

© TOYGIANTS

Toygiants also shows that the collector’s bug does not belong solely to Selim, as Daniel and Geo Fuchs are collectors in their own right. Using their camera to collect, ‘they do not view these extremely disparate collections in a conventional way, but rather see archiving, or placing an order of particular things that interest them, as photogenic landscapes,’ observes Dr. Eugen Blume, Director of the Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. He believes that their aim is to ‘conserve the world in absolute detail’, and that’s just what they have done with the world of toys in Toygiants. This is especially the case for the accompanying exhibition at the Rebel Arts Gallery, Hamburg, which includes an oversized 4 x 5.5 metre groupshot, as well as a selection of enlarged portraits. At this size, the toys command the exhibition space and become powerful images, and indeed works of art, in their own right.

By making the decision not to include captions to help illustrate each of the figures in the book, Toygiants does rely a little too heavily on the pop culture knowledge of its reader, and in some instances can distance those who may be new to this toy world. But when examined for what it is, a photographic collection of toys as you’ve never seen them before, this book is truly a collector’s item in itself.

TOYGIANTS Silver Edition contains invaluable extras such as interviews with Daniel and Geo Fuchs, as well as a removable poster of one of the group shots.

Kate McCurdy

© TOYGIANTS

Daniel and Geo Fuchs
TOYGIANTS Silver Edition
Gingko Press
Release date: 5 April 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58423-284-1
Format: 320 mm x 250 mm, Number of pages: 212 + 4 Fold-Outs, Hardcover in plastic cover with silkscreen, Removable poster: 305 x 960 mm
RRP: 45 euros / $49

Exhibition: Daniel & Geo Fuchs TOYGIANTS
Rebel Arts Gallery Hamburg in cooperation with artempus con-temporary gallery Düsseldorf
from April 26 – July 31 2008

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Further information
Daniel and Geo Fuchs

Gingko Press

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Mother of all evils 2008
3150mm x 2470mm
Synthetic polymer paint on vinyl

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Kate McCurdy

Beginnings
Beck Wheeler was born in Germany, and raised in the small suburb of Beach Haven in Auckland, New Zealand. A ‘quietly creative’ family, Beck grew up in a house of handmade clothes and toys, with a basement gallery showing off the best of Beck and her sisters’ work. After showing a keen interest in photography, art history, sculpture and painting in high school, Beck went on to study further aspects of jewellery, sculpture and painting at UNITEC in New Zealand, before moving to Australia in 2000. At the Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE in Victoria she focused on graphic design and illustration, and the now Melbourne-based artist has combined her talents for painting, sculpture and toy-making in storytelling. She has recently written and illustrated her own children’s book, How Absurd!

Hey, Hey, Which Way?
Her new exhibition Hey, Hey, Which Way? centres on darker themes of death and the afterlife, however, Beck’s playful take on morality has had a very positive reception.

‘People were laughing,’ Beck observed on the opening night at the Über Gallery. ‘I guess my work in the show has taken a humorous look at the idea of death. I don’t think people will think it is too dark. I have tried to make the artwork as light as possible, [it is] executed in fluoros and metallics so it’s pretty cheery colourwise which helps counteract the darkness of the subject matter.’

Beck’s upbringing by parents who followed teachings that merged Sufi, Buddhist and Hindu traditions, combined with a Catholic school education, seems to have had a profound effect on her outlook on life, and in the case of her current exhibition, what happens afterwards. Each piece in themselves is a meditation on death, the afterlife, and the meanings and beliefs that are held by everyday people. One of the pieces in Hey, Hey, Which Way? entitled ‘if nothing else you’ve made good fertiliser’ taps into the cynical and nihilistic views, as one figure refuses to consider that there may be more to it than dying, getting buried and ‘that’s it.’

In another piece, ‘i dreamt i knew the secret to life and death’, one figure describes to another how her father imagined death to be like a return to the womb, where everything seems as if it is underwater. The pieces form a discourse on life and death, where the figures ask the questions that their viewers have often asked themselves. However, the morbidity of the subject matter is easier to digest due to Beck’s playful approach, but also to the handmade and personal quality of her work.

Licked by Millions 2008
780mm x 980mm
ink, goauche and mixed media on watercolour paper

Mother of all evils
The exhibition is dominated by her new piece ‘mother of all evils’. Taking over a month to complete, it stands 1.6 metres tall, 3m x 2.3 and is the biggest ‘toy’ that Beck has designed so far. She has constructed a giant squid-like creature in black and white hand-painted vinyl, with smaller creatures at the end of each ‘tentacle’. Each tentacle appears to be crawling out from the centre of ‘all evils’, giving the effect of a slow-motion invasion of the world. This toy, like her many others, is instantly recognisable as Beck’s work; indeed, they all appear to have walked out of one of her illustrations.This is a fitting observation as Beck herself sees her toy making as ‘an extension to my illustrative work. Working in 3D was a natural progression from drawing characters.’

Mother of all evils 2008
3150mm x 2470mm
Synthetic polymer paint on vinyl

The appeal of handmade toys
One of Beck’s first toys was an attempt to bring to life the characters of a comic strip. ‘I wrote a little story about two superheroes, and made one out of a pair of socks and the other was knitted our of bright yellow wool. I didn’t have any sewing skills at the time so the eyes were glued on, and the rest was held together with a combination of glue and hand stitching.’ It took a few years before Beck learnt how to sew on her own sewing machine. However, she is still able to maintain her handmade look of her work, even when working with the same materials as mass produced toys.

Hey, Hey, Which Way? exhibition at the Über Gallery.

Trends in contemporary toy design
Beck counts cartoonists and illustrators Chris Ware, Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak and Winsor McCay among her many influences on her own illustrations. However, for her toys she points out that she doesn’t take much of her inspiration from contemporary toy designers, although she can understand the recent surge in popularity of ‘mutant’ and ‘quirky’ vinyl toys.
‘Most of my influences are from illustration and 2D character design. I think the current trend for handmade mutant-like toys comes as a rebellion to the super-cute, mass-made toys that come out of sweatshops. It used to be all you could buy for kids till people started to get excited again about making their own toys. I have been involved in a few books that teach people how to make their own quirky toys out of socks and recycled fabrics.’

This trend reflects the new interest in the design community, particularly those of the younger generation, in relation to self-publishing and producing, as well as a keen awareness of the environment and sustainability.
‘I think that out society is starting to become more aware of reusing our resources and rediscovering handmade is part of that,’ Beck observes. ‘I think it is a natural cycle to come back to the handmade look. Handmade and patterning seems to be everywhere at the moment. I think it is a backlash from the crisp geometric forms that were popular a while back. I also think the fact we are embracing sustainability in the design industry plays a part. People want to see the presence of a maker in the product they purchase.’

How Absurd! written and illustrated by Beck Wheeler is available now from her website.

Beck Wheeler
Hey, Hey, Which Way?
4 – 30 March 2008
Über Gallery
52 Fitzroy Street St Kilda, Victoria Australia

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