As a young person, Marlo Lyda grew up between inner-city Sydney and a property in the Central Tablelands region of New South Wales. Lyda was exposed to both “horse sweat, Bathurst burr and morning dew” of the country, and work weeks spent in the city while her mother grew her furniture and lifestyle showroom Spence and Lyda.
Growing up, Lyda was exposed to design through accompanying her mum on trips to international design fairs such as Salone del Mobile in Milan and Maison and Object in Paris, but it wasn’t until she stumbled across a 2017 graduate exhibition from Design Academy Eindhoven students that she learned what design could be. A year later, Lyda moved to the Netherlands to study in the Man and Wellbeing department at one of the world’s leading design schools. During those studies, Lyda would engross herself in late-night discussions with multinational peers for whom English was a second or third language, which is where she noticed “design was even a love language between us all.”
For Scraptopia, Lyda took on the role of novice alchemist, turning scrap copper into vessels.
Image: Marlo Lyda
When asked about her current approach and process, Lyda says, “Making has always been my truest form of literacy; it’s how I search for what is ‘essential’ in materials and thoughts. I truly believe there is an innate intelligence hidden within our hands, and our body by extension.”
A perfect example of Lyda’s design ethos is Remnants, a collection of coffee and side tables presented during Melbourne Design Week 2022 at Villa Alba in Melbourne. As Lyda explains, “Materials are precious and should be treated with tenderness, even those dug out from a skip bin.” While the offcut portions of stone are usually discarded, Lyda saw this as inspiration to develop a design solution, celebrating “the little, the cracked and the irregular.” While many designers start with a blank piece of paper and access to a world of materials, Lyda sees the importance of the discarded and overlooked. “The point is that I don’t see material scarcity in the modern age as a limitation, [because] intentional resourcefulness can in fact be quite liberating,” she says.
Conceived from the skip-bin of a stone supplier, the Remnants Collection creates tables from pieces of stone that are too small or cracked for common use.
Image: Marlo Lyda
The polarity of spending time between the city and countryside is evident in Lyda’s work, of constantly observing what is happening in nature and translating this back into hand-made objects using industrial materials and methods. What will Lyda’s next collection be? It will depend on what she might observe in nature, and then make “twisted configurations in the scrap yards until closing.”
It’s your ultimate design dinner party – which four guests are you inviting and why? A tinker, Paul Cocksedge. A technician, Studio Drift. A thinker, David Harrison. And my dear friend, fellow designer Leo Maher.
Favourite artwork? Have you ever seen a deep-sea glass sponge? You should. They transform silica filtered from the ocean into an incredibly intricate structure made almost entirely from glass.
Favourite quote about design? “I’m sick of people calling it ‘waste.’ They’re ‘existing materials.’” Robbie Neville from Revival Sustainable Building and Construction
Source
People
Published online: 19 Jul 2023
Words:
Dale Hardiman
Images:
Marlo Lyda,
Peter Van Alphen
Issue
Artichoke, March 2023
