MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

WOOD: CHERRY

Vivienne Wong is a Melbourne based furniture maker and designer who established her workshop at the beginning of 2020. Previously a soloist dancer with The Australian Ballet for 14 years, Wong has no formal education in design, having instead trained and worked with a handful of independent furniture makers over the last four years, exploring and self teaching along the way.

‘When we were told to think about the words, touch, reflection and strength, they all just seemed visceral things that I’d spent a lot of time contemplating. I wanted to approach this from a personal perspective. I was looking at ways I could draw on my experience as a dancer to see how I could adapt that into a piece that had a sense of dialogue.’ As a result Wong began researching proxemic communication, which looks at what is disseminated non-verbally in face-to-face situations. ‘It looks at your spatial arrangement to one another person, to express a thought, or a meaning, or an intent.’