I wish I’d made that: Designers and makers talk homewares

Join us at Objectspace for an evening of reflection and creative insight with Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based designers and makers working with matters of the home – furniture, objects and beyond.

Hosted within Martino Gamper’s solo Endgrained, each speaker will share a piece of furniture or homeware they wish they’d made – something that has sparked inspiration, admiration or even creative envy.

Your speakers include Rebecca Snelling, Grant Bailey, Josephine Jelicich and Matan Fadida.

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Rebecca Snelling is a multidisciplinary designer and artist whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, and material-led object work. Anchored in sustained material research, her work engages conceptual design and formal concerns through processes of making and material enquiry. Alongside two decades of international design practice as founder and creative director of Snelling Studio, she completed a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at the Ilam School of Fine Arts, marking a return to a sustained fine art practice within her broader multidisciplinary work.

Grant Bailey has spent most of his working life as a prop and set maker, while also pursuing his practice as a bespoke furniture maker. He has a carpentry qualification, gained after serving an apprenticeship with an ‘oldschool’ builde. In the film industry, his skills have been in high demand: ‘I’ve made everything, from sad eyes for Mr Potato Head to a 1:1 model of James Cook’s Endeavour.’ Over his career the scope of Bailey’s production has widened to include collaborations with artists, designers and architects. He makes his furniture in his workshop in Grey Lynn, likening his practice to that of an artist. ‘I don’t want to run a joinery factory,’ he says. ‘I like to make things in my particular voice.’

Josephine Jelicich is a furniture maker with fine arts training. After graduating from Massey University in 2016, she completed the furniture maker’s programme at the Centre for Fine Woodworking in Whakatū Nelson in 2018. Now living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Jelicich has worked as a technician at various galleries, a woodwork teacher at The Warren workshop, and now works as freelance woodworker and furniture designer.

Matan Fadida is a multidisciplinary designer focused on creating a personal world through objects. He often works in the space between art and design, viewing everyday objects as sculptures while ensuring they retain their essential function. Fadida’s practice draws on a wide range of materials and techniques, drawing on his studies in product design and interest in the relationship between human and object. When he contributed to the Objectspace’s The Chair in 2023, Fadida described himself as an ‘amateur at everything’, dipping into sewing, metal casting and plastering depending on the needs of a given design – having got to know his practise since, we’d describe him as a dab hand at whatever he puts his mind to.

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