Florescence

A new design collection for Melbourne Design Week by A&A. 

A&A is an ongoing collaboration between Sydney-based industrial designer Adam Goodrum and French straw-marquetry artisan Arthur Seigneur, who now lives and works in Melbourne.

On display in Gallery 2, the suite of three pods and one table is inspired by the process or period of a plant’s flowering, known as florescence.

Each pod is composed of three intersecting sphericons – a sphericon being a ‘paradoxical solid’ made from the combination of four half-cones. This shape-shifting form embodies the changes that occur when a flower opens or becomes sexually functional, known as anthesis.

Viewed from above, the pod is a perfect equilateral triangle. From the front, converging circular edges. And from the side, dimensionally spliced sphericons.

The transformational effect is amplified by the luminosity of the straw marquetry’s bloom-like geometric pattern, which mimics a flower’s sequential colour changes during anthesis.

Each pod has a removable lid and comes in a different colourway – red, yellow, blue.

Complementing these unorthodox shapes is the hemispheric ‘Lotus table’ with a flat top, similarly resplendent in an all-over geometric pattern of pink, red, purple, blue and black. The table echoes the lotus-flower design of A&A’s ‘Bloom cabinet’, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Eschewing editions in favour of highly collectible unique works, A&A were awarded Furniture Design of the Year at the 2022 Dezeen Awards and were finalists in 2020.