Hunter & Folk: What a diverse list of designers and venues for this year’s Sydney Design Week. What are some of your highlights?
Stephen Todd: Don Cameron at Sally Dan Cuthbert is highlight.Don trained at Central Saint Martins in London and graduated at the turn of the millennium. He was trained in filmmaking and after graduating was commissioned to direct ground-breaking creating music videos for groups including Blur, Garbage and Pet Shop Boys. He started working commercially across the Channel and began photographing extraordinary, post-WWII Brutalist monuments, churches, and bunkers. These photographs in turn informed Don’s first complete range of furniture; monumentally sensual chairs, tables, desks, lighting, and a sofa system carved from solid walnut, welded steel and sumptuous suede upholstery.
Hunter & Folk: Hi Sally, can you tell us more about Don Cameron's latest collection?
Sally Dan Cuthbert: Don Cameron is an established Australian, multi-disciplinary artist who works across photography, film and design. For 20 years, Cameron’s almost obsession with Europe’s monumental, 20th century concrete structures, first captured as atmospheric, photographic objects in his 2020 solo exhibition, Communion, are revisited in a series of beautifully crafted design objects in Translations. With a deep knowledge and understanding of all facets of design, Cameron has transformed an existing building into a photograph, with the shapes and forms, in turn, translated again, this time through the medium of functional sculpture. Steel, timber and nubuck are meticulously handled to form an editioned series of sophisticated lights, desk, sofa elements and coffee table. Translations is an explicit example of how architecture, art, design and sculpture merge, imperceptibly, one into another to become the important complements to living.
Hunter & Folk: Your gallery reveals the grey area between art as design and design as art. Perfect for this year's design week theme. What are your thoughts on this?
Sally Dan Cuthbert: Yes, the gallery opened to provide a permanent platform in Australia for the presentation of visual and functional art. Coming from an advisory background of more than 30 years, I don’t see art and design as distinct disciplines. For me work which is instigated by an artist, designer or architect’s hand is in some form, art. This is the way both my clients and I always approach collecting. Important collecting principles are the same and include: historical knowledge of the collecting area; status of the artist; and visual examination.
