The Making of Material

Documentary / With Mark Tuckey & Grace Moore / 2025

Kind: documentary

A 13-minute documentary short film directed by Grace Moore, following agroforestry timber from paddock to workshop to furniture. Premiered at Melbourne Design Week 2025, presented by the National Gallery of Victoria at Mark Tuckey's Thornbury workshop.

In the foothills of the Otway Ranges, Andrew and Jill Stewart have spent thirty years turning a degraded sheep farm into something else. Yan Yan Gurt West was 3 percent woody vegetation when they started. It is 18 percent now: 55,000 trees planted across 230 hectares, 113 bird species recorded, carbon neutral without reducing a single lamb turned off. Andrew won the Bob Hawke Landcare Award for the work. Agroforestry scientist Rowan Reid helped them begin.

The film traces what happens when timber from those trees enters Mark Tuckey's workshop and becomes a three-piece furniture collection designed by Bronwen Main. It is interested in provenance as a design question: where a tree grew, what grew beside it, who tended it, and what its harvest made room for. The furniture carries that story with it, tree to board to room.

Imagine if all construction timbers in Australia were grown this way. Regenerating degraded farm soils, improving livestock health, providing biodiversity habitat, shaping resilient landscapes that stitch together bioregional communities. The Making of Material explores that possibility through objects you can sit on.