Marlo Lyda

Can a hated invasive tree species develop an economic value? Why are precious stone slabs ending up in Sydney’s skips? And, how does copper from e-waste react when submerged in homemade acid and electrified?  

These are some of the questions that Marlo Lyda – a Sydney-based designer, researcher and DAE alumnus (Man and Wellbeing 2017-21) – asks through her beautifully crafted objects and community-driven projects. 

The last few years have been busy for Lyda, having produced a number of award-winning projects. In 2023, Lyda was awarded the NSW Design (Early Career) Fellowship at the Powerhouse Museum and instigated MATTERS, a multi-year group show at Melbourne Design Week. This year, Lyda had her first solo show at Victoria’s Useful Objects gallery.  

Lara Chapman, a writer, editor and fellow Australian DAE alumnus (Design Curating and Writing MA 2017-19) met Lyda at her studio on Gadigal land to discuss how to build connections in the small, but growing, Sydney design scene. 

Lara Chapman: There weren’t many Australians at DAE when we studied there, how did you find yourself in the Netherlands? 

Marlo Lyda: After two years of studying design in Sydney I was feeling really frustrated by the lack of hands-on support I was receiving to use machines in the workshops, so I went travelling for a year and a half in Europe. Then, my mum [who owned a furniture showroom] wanted to buy a Camaleonda sofa in the Netherlands, so we met up.  

Coincidentally, Dutch Design Week was on so I suggested seeing it. I remember walking through the school’s Philips building and being like: “Oh!”. It was unlike anything I'd seen before in Australia. The ideas being presented resonated so strongly with me. 

I went up to someone and said “This is the most amazing show I’ve ever seen, who curated it?”. They told me “It's not an exhibition, it's a school. It’s a graduation show.” Applications for new students were closing in about three weeks so, as soon as I got back to Australia, I applied. Six months later, I was back in Europe starting at the Academy. 

LC: Your practice seems to revolve around the desire you just mentioned to get close to materials in a hands-on way. How did that feed into your graduation project Scraptopia? 

ML: Throughout my degree, I fell deeply in love with metal. I’d begun to see metal as my thing. I was fascinated that it could change states from solid to liquid and potentially even further. I learnt so much by working with it – making jewellery, creating my own foundry and casting and patinating the living daylights out of different metals. Then, I discovered that metal could be dissolved in liquid, shaped using electricity and recycled circularly. I thought “holy shit, that's magic.”  

At the same time, I got fascinated with e-waste, so there were two levels of research going on – material and societal. I took apart salvaged e-waste and put the copper into a super acidic liquid (it would burn holes in my trousers) and used electric currents to grow lace-like copper vessels that looked like artefacts from a future dystopian world where copper is rare. 

I had a great time making it because it was really hard to get the process right. 

“I see myself as a material-driven researcher – I get to fall in love with stories and I fall in love with materials.” 

LC: Since you've left DAE, you’ve worked with other materials including stone and timber, how has that journey away from metal happened? 

ML: The joy of Scraptopia was not just about my love of metal, what I also discovered was this sensation of this big, big, fat question: What is value? To us? To you? To consumers? How do we actually value the materials around us?  

I see myself as a material-driven researcher – I get to fall in love with stories and I fall in love with materials. So then coming back to Australia, it was about stumbling into that same sensation of reassessing what value looks like with the materials I found here.  

Part of my journey to new materials is a result of my process, I love having conversations with people and allowing them to be the primary way that my concepts unfold. 

LC: Was it a conversation that led to your first timber furniture series Tuning Camphor which you developed as a fellow at the Powerhouse? 

ML: Yes. The story goes that, growing up, I had family in the Northern Rivers [about eight hours north of Sydney by car]. Travelling in that area, you only really see one kind of tree – it’s a vibrant  green and makes these gorgeous tunnel canopies over the roads which everyone thinks are beautiful.  

Separately to this, I have a love of turning as a meditative craft. I had been talking with a turner in Sydney called Simon, he’s a young guy, a really lovely dude, and I was keen to do a project with him. 

One day I was chatting to Simon and asked out of curiosity, “What’s your favourite wood to turn?”. He said “I really like Camphor Laurel but everyone seems to hate it,” and something sparked. He went on to explain that it is a noxious weed so it smells pretty bad, but that in Asia camphor is historically revered and is quite sacred. It’s used in chests on the Silk Road, often ornately carved, and it has these amazing properties – it’s insect repellant; it’s got this beautiful colour and it's so buttery and smooth that nothing else turns better. It's an amazing wood. 

So I asked, “Where do you get this material from?”. When he told me the Northern Rivers, I thought, “Oh my god, it's that tree!”. I’d never been told it was invasive.  

LC: After this initial conversation, how did the project evolve? 

ML: I went up to the Northern Rivers and started having conversations with timber suppliers and ecologists. Everyone had something big to say about it. I learnt that the region is volcanic, the soil is super nutritious, so the land had been cleared for dairy farming and Camphor was introduced for shade but it proliferated like crazy.  

Camphor strangles everything around it, poisons eucalyptus and produces such intense oils that if they leak into streams, they damage native ecosystems. The problem is, if there’s no market for it as a timber there is no economic gain in harvesting it, so it just gets chopped down and burnt. 

All in all, Turning Camphor came about because I realised that what's required is a shift in perspective around a timber like this. It is not a flashy story, it is pretty humble, but it worked well and made sense. Through objects, you can start to show people that it is a beautiful timber with a lot of opportunity. 

LC: Context seems really important to your work, I’m curious how you found the shift back to Australia from the Netherlands. What was it like to return to this context? 

ML: I had a deep yearning to come home but it was also heartbreaking to leave Eindhoven because I loved the community. The group of people I had around me there were really incredible, they understood me and our brains had shifted in dramatic ways together. I think everyone that goes through Design Academy would testify to their peers probably being the most exceptional part of existence there. 

I’m so community driven so it was important to me to bring that sense of co-existing while creating here. It’s such a beautiful thing, but community is never given to you. In fact, school is the last time when community is given to you on a platter like that. When you move country, you have to put in such a conscious effort to articulate community. 

LC: One of the ways you’ve begun building community here is through MATTERS, a curatorial project that you initiated at Melbourne Design Week. It is informed by what you’d experienced at design weeks in Milan and Eindhoven, how did that begin? 

ML: MATTERS came about as a reaction to this feeling that there is such little time and intention given to the design process.  As designers, we’re told that you have to make new work all the time and what I saw a lot in Australia was just: ’BANG - idea here, product there’, with examples of drifting or research or process rarely exhibited. 

So, MATTERS was a playful opportunity and experiment to say, “Rather than designing in a quick rinse cycle, let's take three years and start with something small and then iterate”. On a personal level, It was also about trying to find a sense of community. 

In the end, Jordan Fleming and I invited 16 contributors, who already had an intrinsic sense of materials or were experimenting between disciplines, to participate in a group exhibition in a beautiful building in Melbourne which is very Milan-esque. 

We held the first edition, No Things Matter, in 2023, then Some Things Matter in 2024, and the final edition Everything Matters will be in 2025. The second edition kind of exploded. 

LC: How did it explode?  

ML: Everyone loved it. The concept really resonated with audiences. The contributors loved it too. We had a great time. We had a raging party – we almost broke through the floor of the second level! 

It's also been great for me to gain curatorial confidence through the process because I wasn’t a curator, I’ve entirely stumbled into it. I think it all came about because of a yearning to recreate what I loved about Design Academy in a weird way. It sounds pretty cliché, but it's kind of true – community, experimentation, laughter, alcohol – all good things.