Grace Mortlock, Andrew Toland, Clement Luk Laurencio and Kate Finning
Throughout the pandemic, we have forged intimate connections through wider networks to reach distant loved-ones – a letter in the mail, a DM online or a love song dedication on the radio. The unit With Love, proposes that we reconnect with space and with each other through writing and drawing. The corresponding public program, A Shared World seeks to use the infrastructure of the internet to uncover connections between the event’s guests and participants. Three guest speakers are invited to describe the quality of one joyful object in their interior world using either a personal, historical or functional approach to explain a broader narrative of that object. While the description takes place, the objects will remain off-screen and participants will draw their interpretations of the description (like life-drawing by words). At the end of the event, sketches will be uploaded to a shared online board for an informal exhibition. No matter the distance between us, the speakers and the audience will have shared in an intimate description of a space and interpreted this through drawing.
INVITED SPEAKERS: Grace Mortlock, Andrew Toland, Clement Luk Laurencio and Kate Finning
Grace Mortlock is co-director of Sydney architectural office Other Architects. The practice seeks ‘other’ approaches that challenge conventional wisdom, popular opinion and architectural trends.
Her recently completed Highlands House, an innovative project that utilises passive design principles and prefabricated construction, is currently shortlisted for a 2021 National Houses Award. Presently she is overseeing alterations and additions to the home of a significant Australian artist. Other projects include intricate memorial gardens at Macquarie Park Cemetery, and the revitalisation of a landmark late-Modernist inner-city apartment building.
In addition to her architectural expertise, Grace is a highly-regarded architecture and design thinker with experience engaging with large and diverse public audiences. She is an appointed member of the NSW State Design Review Panel and teaches regularly within the Master of Architecture program at the University of Technology
Dr Andrew Toland is a Senior Lecturer in landscape architecture and the Course Director of the undergraduate Landscape Architecture program at UTS. A transdisciplinary scholar of the natural and built environment, his research is focused on the capacity of landscape architecture to change how we view, understand and change our environmental realities.
Kate Finning is a graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London where she completed her AA Diploma under Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici. Kate’s built work and teaching centres on the architecture of housing and the domestic plan as a project.
Clement Luk Laurencio is the 2020 recipient of The Architecture Drawing Prize and is currently exhibiting in ‘Architectural Drawing: Not for Construction’ at a83 in Soho, New York. He is an External Design Critic at the University of Nottingham and has previously worked for Bernard Tschumi Architects in New York. Laurencio is a graduate of the Bartlett.
