Designwork 09 | as part of Melbourne Design Week
17 May 2025 – 07 Jun 2025
Designwork 09 is Sophie Gannon Gallery’s 9th annual exhibition of works by some of Australia’s best designers. This year’s exhibition features new work by represented designers Elliat Rich and Ashley Eriksmoen.
Ashley Eriksmoen’s practice straddles sculpture, contemporary craft, and critical design, veering away from narrow disciplinary boundaries in order to expose connections between natural resource extraction, consumer waste, deforestation and wildlife habitat reductions. She works predominantly in salvaged timber, appropriating discarded wood furniture to construct her works that present as hybridised forms of furniture, plants and animals. Eriksmoen was the winner of the Clarence Prize for excellence in furniture design (2021), the winner of the Australian Furniture Design Award (2022) and recipient of the Andrea Stretton Memorial Invitational Award at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi (2022). Her work is shown internationally, was included in the seminal exhibit Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking (Philadelphia, 2019) and the 2023 NGV Triennial (Melbourne). Her work is in many private and public collections including The RISD Museum (Providence, USA), Museum of Art in Wood (Philadelphia, USA), The National Arboretum (Canberra) and the NGV (Melbourne, Australia).
