Niklavs Rubenis: Judge for Maker of the Year 2024

Collectively speaking, the judging panel for Maker of the Year, presented by Carbatec, brings an extraordinary range of experience and skills to the table. We’re pleased to announce that Niklavs Rubenis, designer, maker and educator has joined this year’s panel.

Judging one work over many others requires the consideration of not just technical and aesthetic aspects, but also material usage and a wider view of how people interact with and regard a piece.

From a trade education in cabinetmaking, through to a degree in visual art and a PhD that investigates the practice and intent of studio based craft and design, Niklavs Rubenis has looked at the act of making from all-round viewpoints.

Niklavs Rubenis, Side Tables (detail), 2015 (exhibited at Craft + Design Canberra & Nishi Gallery. Private collection). Silver ash, blue spruce.

As a maker and a teacher, his focus has moved from the ‘how’ to the ‘why’, and notably to the ‘why make more stuff?’ Progressing through a discipline and problem-based approach has led Nik to community-based solutions that acknowledge the social responsibility of designers and makers to consider the ethics of what they make.

Niklavs Rubenis, Side Tables (detail), 2015 (exhibited at Craft + Design Canberra & Nishi Gallery. Private collection). Edition of four. Silver ash, blue spruce.

In Nik’s words: ‘…trying to understand some form of sustainable action does go beyond surface decisions like ‘eco-friendly’ material, recyclability or the manipulation of a process to gain energy efficiency. This has been my motivation – to look beyond just the making of objects and to shift the thinking around my practice by considering an ethical stance in relation to how I design; and why, how and what I put out into the world.’

In addition to understanding where makers sit within a bigger picture, Nik also looks to the skills involved in making: ‘…from my perspective, perhaps one of the most valuable things invisibly embodied within just about every bit of stuff is a pragmatic and manual skill base – to make anything requires a degree of skill be it through the development of a process or an understanding of how a physical thing might come together. However, unlike a lot of that stuff we get blasted with every day, to make anything good and worthwhile takes a significant amount of time dedicated to developing and honing a skill. I would refer to this as a trade skill, a vocation that sits in the background propping up and contributing to our built environment.’ (AWR#98, March, 2018, ‘Traded Value, a review of work made by Canberra Institute of Technology apprentices.)

Niklavs Rubenis, In Transit, 2016 (exhibited as part of the solo exhibition Crafting Waste, Craft + Design Canberra). Bench seat and materials found on the side of the road.

In terms of materials usage, Nik has actively experimented with waste materials and brought them into public focus with projects that have been featured in exhibitions such as Crafting Waste, Craft + Design (2016) and Object Therapy (2016). The latter was a touring exhibition and project that explored creative transformation in conjunction with notions of value and repair. Nik also took part in ‘Transformative Repair’, a research project where exhibitions and films have highlighted the message conveyed through pairings of broken object owners and ‘repairers’.

In 2023, Nik was one of the editors in Design/Repair: Place, Practice & Community (2023), essays which look at the links between repair and experimental practices of design. This year, he was a collaborator in USED, a pilot exhibition at Poimena Gallery Launceston. Here, experimental ‘specimens’ and short films explored new materials made by artists, designers and craftspeople produced from reclaimed and reprocessed waste materials. This pilot project sets the foundations of a much larger exhibition scheduled at the Australian Design Centre in 2025.

Currently Nik Rubenis is the Coordinator of Design and Coordinator of Object + Furniture at the School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania.

Photos supplied by Niklavs Rubenis

Learn more about Niklavs Rubenis here

See here for more information about Maker of the Year, presented by Carbatec

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