Rigg Design Prize

The Rigg Design Prize is the highest accolade for contemporary design in Australia - a generous legacy of the late Colin Rigg (1895-1982), a former secretary of the NGV’s Felton Bequests’ Committee. Previously known as the Cicely and Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award, the invitational prize was established in 1994 to recognise contemporary design practice in Victoria. Awarded as an outcome of an exhibition, The Rigg was conceived as an opportunity for invited participants to present their ideas and practices to a broad public audience.

In 2018, for the first time in the award’s 20-year history, the revitalised NGV Rigg Design Prize included 10 shortlisted interior designers from across the country each responding to ideas around domestic living in Australia. Hecker Guthrie, who would go on to receive the award, envisioned a custom-made space inspired by the one modestly unassuming object in our domestic lives - the table. Bruce Rowe was invited to collaborate with Hecker Guthrie on the project.

The idea of terracotta as material and the objects of everyday domesticity were the beginnings of a dialogue between a table, the activity that takes place on and around it and domestic space. In response to that thinking, a range of simplified and symbolic domestic objects were designed and made for the Hecker Guthrie space. Using one of humankind’s oldest and most common materials - terracotta clay - symbolic silhouettes of over 200 objects of domestic life were crafted. Resisting refinement, the objects were roughly cut and reduced to their symbolic essence to reinforce their connection to the everyday. A pencil, books, coat-hangers, a mattress, a painting, a toilet, a tap, food on a plate, a chair…all objects easily recognised in a material we all inherently understand.