Better together
Collaboration may be the buzzword du jour — all those shared secrets, strange bedfellows, and celebrity co-designs redressing weary culture — but no matter how fresh and fabulous the sell, it’s still just hoary old commerce cloaked in sparkly new costume.
What distinguishes the following joint efforts and identities from the business-as-usual blend of minds and money is a willingness to cross-pollinate knowledge and networks; a want to throw personal practice into the vast, non-commercial vortex of collective debate, development and even potential deconstruction for the full surrender of one’s ‘true’ self to the other.
Vogue Living salutes these defiant co-respondents – the collaborators who embrace risk, rope their egos to the post of collective pursuit and run the gauntlet with the rules. They are the new braves, the quiet brokers of change who consistently and concertedly test the truism: ‘two heads are better than one’.
Sarah K x Liane Rossler
SUPERCYCLERS
supercyclers.com lianerossler.com.au
Sarah K, the self-abbreviating founder of waste-converting design collective Supercyclers, remembers meeting creative all-rounder Liane Rossler (cofounder, former designer, and director of Dinosaur Designs) in Hobart’s design store Arp (then owned by K), and querying “why modernists like us weren’t also addressing sustainability in any kind of interesting way”. It was the question that sub-texted 10 years of ensuing talk and curatorial testing across such ground-shifting Supercycler shows as Plastic Fantastic, Ghostware and Yours to Care For (2010-2013).
Yes, the pair pursue separate design projects — Rossler presiding over the similarly collaborative Superlocalstudio and K currently making Supercycler magic of marine debris with Kate Jones of New York jeweller Ursa Major, but a near familial regard and grounding has kept them in constant connect. “We are the same age and we are both from architect families,” explains K.
