Epistolary is a digital exhibition and self-guided tour of the city featuring a collection of ‘love letters’ to Melbourne. Through an evolving gallery the exhibition explores what makes local places and spaces unique, and includes online workshops that provide an opportunity to create and share your own love letter to places you care about.
Epistolary is an intimate way of re-discovering Melbourne after an extended lockdown period, and a proposition for how we can learn to care and connect with place: through creative and collective expressions of love. Write your own letter to add to the love.
EPISTOLARY LAUNCH
March 26th 2021, 12pm – ongoing
Love letters go live! Head to the Epistolary website to view the first love letters to Melbourne and add your own to to the evolving gallery, which will be updated throughout Melbourne Design Week.
RMIT WORKSHOP – Designer love: Expressing care for place
March 29th 2021, 10am-12pm
This invitation only RMIT University online workshop is led by Tarryn Handcock and Paul Yacoumis with Alice Lewis and Lisa Carroll. During this session, RMIT’s School of Fashion and Textiles first year students consider how designers can play a role in ways we care and connect with the world around us, and respond to the question, ‘is this love?’
PUBLIC WORKSHOP – A Lovers’ Discourse: Write a love letter to Melbourne
March 31st, 6pm-7.30pm
In this public online workshop led by Tarryn Handcock and Paul Yacoumis with rute chaves and Amandine Thomas, we ask: Why do you fall in love with particular places? What’s the most creative way you can express your love for a city? Join in conversation with the panel of artists and designers as they guide you through creating your own love letter to the world around you, and playfully approach caring and connecting with place.
Tarryn Handcock
Dr Tarryn Handcock is a cross-disciplinary designer, artist and academic in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University. Her work investigates fashion spaces and places, including relationships between people, place and dress. Through her work she is interested in the capacity for design to inspire storytelling; recent projects explore discourse, duration and dressing practices at an urban scale. She is also a life-long letter writer.
Paul Yacoumis
Paul Yacoumis is a part-time musician, writer, science nerd, social critic, coder, and armchair philosopher. He currently works at the intersection of data science, innovation, and public policy. The common thread: A dedication to exploring and improving the human condition, and inspiring renewed wonder and critical thinking in an increasingly fragmented world. He also likes making pretty things.
Lisa Carroll
Lisa Carroll is a textile designer with deep connections to both traditional crafts and cutting-edge digital technology. She is deeply influenced by her experience of growing up in an isolated country town in Victoria, where her innate appreciation of the natural environment was formed. Lisa’s work links the past and present, using contemporary design tools to reframe traditional textile practice, where motif, colour and technique combine to create a new art form.
rute chaves
rute is a research-based artist and designer performing experimental material investigations, exploring alternative methodologies and critical approaches for making in a multispecies’ world. Their studio work focuses on collaboration, kinship and open source processes.
Alice Lewis
In an expanded landscape architecture practice, Alice Lewis explores interdisciplinary and performative approaches for engaging the generative force of citizen action to cultivate ongoing awareness and care for societies and ecosystems.
Amandine Thomas
Amandine Thomas is a French-born, Melbourne-based illustrator and art director. Through a playful and lively style, her award-winning work explores the themes she is passionate about, such as our environment – and the many ways in which it can inspire and amaze us – or the connections we foster with others, with ourselves and with the world around us.