In Conversation: Designing with companions/company

Join Zoë Sadokierski and Timo Rissanen on YouTube Live as they discuss their collaborative design project 'Precarious Birds', their reaction – mostly grief – to the precarious circumstances of endangered bird species in the Sixth Extinction.

The project aims to give form to accelerated and irrevocable losses, but also to draw out stories of seeming resurrection and hopeful recovery.

 Zoë Sadokierski is an award-winning book designer, writer and senior lecturer at the UTS School of Design, where she is part of Spec Studio, a collective of design researchers exploring narrative approaches to ecological communication. She is former president and a founding member of the Australian Book Designers Association. In 2015 Zoë established Page Screen Books, an independent publisher of artists' books and visual essays.

Timo Rissanen is a researcher, educator, artist and designer working across fashion, art and sustainability. His artistic practice focuses on labour, politics and love through installation and cross-stitched poetry. Timo co-curated ‘Fashioning Now’ 2009 with Alison Gwilt and ‘Yield’ 2011 with Holly McQuillan and has co-published Shaping Sustainable Fashion (2011) with Gwilt, and Zero Waste Fashion Design (2016) with McQuillan. He is a founding member of the Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion and is currently Associate Professor and co-director of the Material Ecologies Design Lab at UTS.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Fernando Do Campo: To Companion A Companion’ from 7 May – 31 July 2021.