MAKE Award: Biennial Prize for Innovation in Australian Craft and Design
10 October - 22 November 2025
Australian Design Centre
Sydney NSW
We are delighted to announce the selected finalists for the 2025 MAKE Award: Biennial Prize for Innovation in Australian Craft and Design.
The MAKE Award: Biennial Prize for Innovation in Australian Craft and Design is an Australian Design Centre initiative founded in 2023 with the support of a generous philanthropist. It is the richest non-acquisitive prize for craft and design in Australia. The winner will receive a cash prize of $35,000 and a second prize of $10,000 will be awarded.
Australian designer makers were encouraged to submit a work that demonstrated innovation in technique or material use and is an extension of their usual practice.
A total of 197 entries were received from artists working in object design and material practice across the fields of ceramics, glass, furniture, metal, jewellery, textiles and fibre.
The judges have selected 36 finalists.
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SOFA1 is a sofa made from 3744 golf balls and tensioned cord. It’s the latest expression of GolfWeave - a body of work that uses golf balls as beads, and principles of triaxial weaving to create human scaled, functional objects.
The golf ball has been a material that Jake has returned to again and again in his practice. It’s a building block perfectly suited to his method; bound by sporting regulation to be no greater than 42.6mm in diameter, 45.9 grams, spherically symmetrical, made from plastic and rubber and built to withstand a beating! These little balls are discarded by the hundreds of millions every year.
In GolfWeave, the balls are chosen for their imperfections. Scuffed, stained, or faded, they’ve fallen out of circulation and are usually sold in bulk as ‘hit-aways’, no longer desirable for play and often lost to nature.
Each ball is turned into a bead and groups of balls are woven under tension with cord, using the principles of triaxial weaving. Carefully placed distortions in the lattice generate curvature, and those curvatures combine to create form. This form is given rigidity through constant tension applied in the making process, with each ball being neatly compressed into its neighbour.
Referencing the classic sofa silhouette, SOFA1 reflects the evolution of technique in GolfWeave, and shows a progression from object-as-artefact and towards object-as-furniture. The result is instantly recognisable for what it is, and functions as such. SOFA1 carries all the same musculature and definition of a cushy sofa and adapts them into a triaxial reality. This is made possible through controlled implementation of negative curvature - a technique newly refined within Jake’s practice and most evident in the swept-down fold that separates and defines the seat from the backrest.
While much of this work is bound in the importance of the waste crisis and mathematical rules that govern surface geometries, the resulting object is, quite simply, fun.
The golf ball has been a material that Jake has returned to again and again in his practice. It’s a building block perfectly suited to his method; bound by sporting regulation to be no greater than 42.6mm in diameter, 45.9 grams, spherically symmetrical, made from plastic and rubber and built to withstand a beating! These little balls are discarded by the hundreds of millions every year.
In GolfWeave, the balls are chosen for their imperfections. Scuffed, stained, or faded, they’ve fallen out of circulation and are usually sold in bulk as ‘hit-aways’, no longer desirable for play and often lost to nature.
Each ball is turned into a bead and groups of balls are woven under tension with cord, using the principles of triaxial weaving. Carefully placed distortions in the lattice generate curvature, and those curvatures combine to create form. This form is given rigidity through constant tension applied in the making process, with each ball being neatly compressed into its neighbour.
Referencing the classic sofa silhouette, SOFA1 reflects the evolution of technique in GolfWeave, and shows a progression from object-as-artefact and towards object-as-furniture. The result is instantly recognisable for what it is, and functions as such. SOFA1 carries all the same musculature and definition of a cushy sofa and adapts them into a triaxial reality. This is made possible through controlled implementation of negative curvature - a technique newly refined within Jake’s practice and most evident in the swept-down fold that separates and defines the seat from the backrest.
While much of this work is bound in the importance of the waste crisis and mathematical rules that govern surface geometries, the resulting object is, quite simply, fun.
October 15, 2025
