The Life of Metal: Making with Matter in Flux

Join exhibiting artists and designers Elliot Bastianon, Bobby Corica, Vedika Rampal, and Simone Tops, in conversation with curator Catherine Woolley as they explore how materials shape, shift, and participate in the act of making.

Taking its title from a chapter in Jane Bennett’s influential book Vibrant Matter, this discussion invites us to reconsider metal not as an inert substance, but as a vital material with its own rhythms, behaviours, and agency. From electroplated crystal growth and unfixed copper to patinated steel and oxidised silver, the artists will share how their practices embrace processes of erosion, entropy, and transformation to challenge conventional ideas of control, authorship, and permanence.

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Elliot Bastianon is a designer and artist working at the intersection of commercial furniture, research-driven projects, and sculpture. His practice experiments with processes in mineral growth, patination and electroplating to provide insights into the Anthropocene and conflicting time scales, and interrogates the power imbalance between human activity and environmental forces.

Bobby Corica is a contemporary silversmith and founder of jewellery label Sguscio Studio. Drawing from his Italo-Australian heritage and a background in biochemistry and molecular biology, his silversmithing practice pushes the qualities and limitations of silver, gold, and glass. His work often explores the meeting place of chaos and repetitive gesture in gold and silversmithing techniques.

Vedika Rampal is an Indian-born artist whose practice interrogates colonial museological frameworks and imperial legacies, utilising diverse materials including unfixed copper, acrylic, fabric, ceramics, and video. Drawing upon inherited memories, fictive imaginings, and archival research, her work reflects upon the duality of trauma and yearning, capture and resistance, loss and agency.

Simone Tops is an artist, designer, and founder of the creative workshop Studio Tops. Her practice considers materials as active agents in the process of becoming. Her work is grounded in material experimentation and is shaped by an intimate technical knowledge of glass, steel, and leatherwork.

Catherine Woolley is a curator and programs producer based on Bidjigal and Gadigal Country, Sydney. She has a decade of experience working across curatorial projects, community engagement programs, and education initiatives in the arts and culture sector. She is currently the Curatorial & Public Engagement Officer at UNSW Galleries.

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Presented in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Matters of Time: Contemporary Metal Practices’ at UNSW Galleries, 29 August – 16 November 2025.