Feature... Design Through The Decades
Claire's mother Alison Laycock (third from left) at work in JamFactory's former Textile Studio at Payneham Road. Photo courtesy Alison Laycock.
An inter-generational fascination with things has led interior, spatial and object designer Claire Marwick-Smith on a roving journey exploring the process of making, which - in a curious way - will come full circle as she designs an upcoming JamFactory exhibition.
Words by Farrin Foster.
Farrin is an Adelaide based writer and journalist.
Claire Markwick-Smith’s home is furnished with stories of her past.
The interior, spatial and object designer inherited her parents’ capacity to appreciate the narrative weight of objects and, when making her own space, she also took possession of some of the objects themselves.
“I'd grown up in a house full of things,” says Claire. “Now I actually have lots of furniture pieces that my parents had when they were my age – in their first house – that come with a story.
“And little relics from their past houses, crockery is a big thing. They’re all things that I've always admired.”
Less directly, Claire’s career has also been imbued with this inter- generational sense of aesthetics. In her practice as an interior architect, Claire has added a deep understanding of materials and space to her instinct with objects to design people’s experience of place.
Even with years of early success in her career, Claire found herself always inexorably drawn back to working more closely with objects.
“It just got to a point where the curiosity was getting too much,” she says. “So, I went part-time in my job and applied for a residency at George Street Studios and really immersed myself by committing to learning how to work with steel.”
Claire’s residency culminated in an exhibition of chairs and other furniture items she designed and fabricated.
The experience combined with another seminal residency — this one a week-long lesson in ad hoc, cross- disciplinary making and invention at Domaine de Boisbuchet in France — to simultaneously make sense of and extend her philosophy as a designer.
“I'm really interested in construction methods and materiality and not intervening with that too much in order to achieve an outcome,” she says.
“I think it's really beautiful if you can see little glimpses of how a finish was created even if it's a little bit rough in some way... I guess it’s just honesty in a process. I don't like to cover things up and I don't like materials pretending they’re other materials.”
Claire Marwick- Smith. Photographer: Jonathan van der Knaap.
She now works fluidly across object, interior and spatial design, a skillset that is informing her role as exhibition designer for upcoming JamFactory exhibition, French Exchange.
Focussed upon the long-tail impact of the Domaine de Boisbuchet residency on select JamFactory Associates who have attended the same program Claire undertook, the exhibition celebrates a unique site of creativity.
“It's the wildest experience,” says Claire about the residency. “I did a workshop in printmaking and the two teachers had never taught printmaking in their life. We had to find machinery from around the property and make the machinery for printmaking. It was a lesson in resourcefulness.”
Claire’s design for French Exchange will directly reflect that resourcefulness. The five featured artists will be making custom works for the show and Claire’s design will see those housed in a particularly fitting context.
“We're making the exhibits for these five artworks out of found objects and by products from around JamFactory,” says Claire. “We're going to apply the same process at JamFactory as at the site and strike that balance between resourcefulness and refinement.”
As well as returning her to formative experiences on the grounds of Domaine de Boisbuchet, Claire’s work on the exhibition also folds her story back in more tightly with that of her family going back two generations.
Her role as a guest exhibition designer is her first collaboration with JamFactory, where her mother studied textile design in the ’80s and where — before the facility’s transformation into an arts institution — her grandmother worked as a jam maker in the ’30s.
In the space that she shapes at JamFactory, subtle markers of decades of history will flow through the display — ready to wash over every visitor.
French Exchange: Reflections on the JamFactory Boisbuchet Scholarships is showing at JamFactory Adelaide from 9 December 2022 - 5 February 2023