Melbourne-based Portuguese artist and designer Marta Figueiredo experiments with materials and methods to create objects that challenge a uni­functional approach to design. “I try to make my objects bring openness and include everyone,” she says. “To challenge thinking that an object is going to be used in a certain way and is for a certain person.” This is evident in her interactive sculpture, Elementary Abacus (2020), a giant toy, table, and musical instrument that uses simple forms to invite multisensorial exploration. Created in response to the sensory overload experienced by autistic and synesthetic friends and family members, this playful sculpture embodies Figueiredo’s desire to create artworks that enable unexpected experiences
Figueiredo studied architecture at the University of Porto and worked as an architect in the U.K. for seven years before moving to Australia in 2013 and founding her art and design practice in 2016. Her first pieces, the Prima Familia (2018) are totems developed through a relationship with the recently reopened Burel Factory near her hometown in the valley of the Serra da Estrela mountains. “The wool that I bring from Portugal is very connected to my origins,” she says. “It comes from the Bordaleira sheep, a local, Portuguese breed. My family on my mum's side are from the mountains and I always had beautiful blankets made of that wool.”

When the factory began producing the wool in a vivid colour palette, Figueiredo used this to create her strikingly geometric and surprisingly anthropomorphic totems. “When you're in the presence of them, they feel like little beings,” Figueiredo says. “They make you feel like you did as a child, when you looked at a parent, especially the bigger ones. When you’re an adult, there’s nothing bigger that is warm.” Partly inspired by the graphic forms and experimental process of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 Das Triadisches Ballett, the totems express a sense of playful absurdity that animates Figueirdo’s practice. “I think the essence of playfulness is to create objects that take us out of our daily life, out of our routine,” she says.

For Figueiredo part of this break with habit involves a shift in thinking about the by–products of design. In 2021 she created Windgate, a skyscraper–inspired, ‘musical artefact from the future’, and, in the process, collected a large amount of resin foil particle waste. Experimentation with this by-product led to the creation of the multiple award-winning Stardust Lamp (2021) and inspired further research into plastics recycling. “With materials, a lot of the time, things happen in sequence. I'm in the path of doing one thing and then a question or an interest that I have starts me in a new direction.”

Figueiredo’s plastics research gave life to the Assembly Chair (2021), a modular chair–­table–stool cut from a single sheet of recycled high–density polyethylene (HDPE). Creating such objects, Figueiredo says, promotes the importance of circularity because designing with non-composite materials is essential to enabling future recycling. Pursuing this direction, her most recent piece, Creatures of Light (2022), transforms her wool off–cuts into a lichen-inspired interactive sculpture that moves beyond function to encourage thinking about the benefits of circular design. Lichens, she says, are an indicator of climate change, and of life. “They can live in harsh, volcanic environments, but they cannot survive the city.” This demonstrates, Figueiredo says, that we can do things differently. “With my objects I try to make people think about different ways of seeing life. It’s a way of saying, look guys, this can be done.”