A room is never just a room, and the things in it are never only things.
For Women and Fiction, Anna Varendorff of ACV STUDIO brings together a new body of work that sits between furniture, sculpture, experiment and domestic equipment.
Varendorff has spent more than two decades working across art, jewellery, sculpture and design. Trained as a metalsmith and later completing a Master of Fine Art at Monash University, she has exhibited in Australia and internationally since 2004, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Salone del Mobile and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2016 she founded ACV Studio, extending the language of her art practice into handmade functional objects and small-run design. The studio’s Glass Half Full Vase received a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2018, while her tubular metal forms have since developed into a recognisable vocabulary of their own. In 2026, that language was pushed to architectural scale through the inaugural Melbourne Art Fair × NGV Design Commission, U lights and vases, now entering the NGV collection.
Varendorff makes things that are furniture, but also experiments in form. They begin with a familiar proposition, a chair, a cabinet, a table, a light, and then move deliberately away from the shape we expect those things to take. Function remains important, but convention does not.
Metal, wood and paint recur throughout the work: ordinary materials that have been used to make household objects for generations. Varendorff is drawn to forms that feel almost rudimentary or universal; dome, a curve, a curl, a line, and asks what happens when they are made to perform a task around the house.
The resulting objects can appear disarmingly simple. That simplicity is deceptive.
A curve that looks as though it could have been drawn in seconds may take repeated prototypes, specialised machinery and several pairs of hands to realise. “My child could have thought of that” is, for Varendorff, a compliment. She likes things that retain the directness of a child’s drawing: forms that feel immediate before you begin to understand how difficult they were to make.
This is particularly true of metal. Bent, heated or placed under stress, it can crush, warp or shear in ways that cannot be undone. Much of Varendorff’s work happens at the edge of that capacity, testing how far a material can be pushed toward an imagined form before the material itself begins to argue back.
That tension places the work somewhere between industrial forming and the handmade. A machine might bend a section of pipe into a perfect curve, but that curve still has to become an object. It must be cut, welded, joined, ground, finished and handled by people, often several of them. However precise the machinery becomes, the hand remains embedded in the finished thing.
This negotiation between imagination, material and making is central to Varendorff’s practice. She does not simply impose a drawing onto matter. Each work develops through a sequence of resistance, adjustment and problem-solving, until something that first appeared almost naïve becomes technically exact.
Women and Fiction continues ideas developed through Varendorff’s recent major commission for the NGV, but brings them back to the scale of the interior. The monumental becomes domestic. The architectural becomes bodily. Forms conceived at institutional scale return to the dimensions of a room, a hand, a chair, a table, a life.
These are objects made to be lived with. They hold, support, illuminate, contain and occupy space. But usefulness is only part of what they do.
They are simple but not simple to make. Familiar but just slightly strange. Functional, playful, awkward, exact.
And, like the best household objects, they become stranger the longer you live with them.
For Women and Fiction, Anna Varendorff of ACV STUDIO brings together a new body of work that sits between furniture, sculpture, experiment and domestic equipment.
Varendorff has spent more than two decades working across art, jewellery, sculpture and design. Trained as a metalsmith and later completing a Master of Fine Art at Monash University, she has exhibited in Australia and internationally since 2004, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Salone del Mobile and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2016 she founded ACV Studio, extending the language of her art practice into handmade functional objects and small-run design. The studio’s Glass Half Full Vase received a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2018, while her tubular metal forms have since developed into a recognisable vocabulary of their own. In 2026, that language was pushed to architectural scale through the inaugural Melbourne Art Fair × NGV Design Commission, U lights and vases, now entering the NGV collection.
Varendorff makes things that are furniture, but also experiments in form. They begin with a familiar proposition, a chair, a cabinet, a table, a light, and then move deliberately away from the shape we expect those things to take. Function remains important, but convention does not.
Metal, wood and paint recur throughout the work: ordinary materials that have been used to make household objects for generations. Varendorff is drawn to forms that feel almost rudimentary or universal; dome, a curve, a curl, a line, and asks what happens when they are made to perform a task around the house.
The resulting objects can appear disarmingly simple. That simplicity is deceptive.
A curve that looks as though it could have been drawn in seconds may take repeated prototypes, specialised machinery and several pairs of hands to realise. “My child could have thought of that” is, for Varendorff, a compliment. She likes things that retain the directness of a child’s drawing: forms that feel immediate before you begin to understand how difficult they were to make.
This is particularly true of metal. Bent, heated or placed under stress, it can crush, warp or shear in ways that cannot be undone. Much of Varendorff’s work happens at the edge of that capacity, testing how far a material can be pushed toward an imagined form before the material itself begins to argue back.
That tension places the work somewhere between industrial forming and the handmade. A machine might bend a section of pipe into a perfect curve, but that curve still has to become an object. It must be cut, welded, joined, ground, finished and handled by people, often several of them. However precise the machinery becomes, the hand remains embedded in the finished thing.
This negotiation between imagination, material and making is central to Varendorff’s practice. She does not simply impose a drawing onto matter. Each work develops through a sequence of resistance, adjustment and problem-solving, until something that first appeared almost naïve becomes technically exact.
Women and Fiction continues ideas developed through Varendorff’s recent major commission for the NGV, but brings them back to the scale of the interior. The monumental becomes domestic. The architectural becomes bodily. Forms conceived at institutional scale return to the dimensions of a room, a hand, a chair, a table, a life.
These are objects made to be lived with. They hold, support, illuminate, contain and occupy space. But usefulness is only part of what they do.
They are simple but not simple to make. Familiar but just slightly strange. Functional, playful, awkward, exact.
And, like the best household objects, they become stranger the longer you live with them.