Stumped

Designed by Trent Jansen

Curator: Broached Commissions Location: TiTree Park, East Tower Residential Apartments, Flinders Street

The Melbourne Cricket Club played some of its first games at the foot of Batman’s Hill, the location at which Melbourne Place is now located. To commemorate this important moment in Melbourne and Australia’s sporting history Lendlease commissioned a commemorative set of cricket stumps. Trent Jansen has imagined the stumps as being forced in a makeshift mould using local timber.

Trent Jansen is one of Australia’s leading applied arts and furniture designers and a founding member of Broached Commissions (est. 2011). Jansen approaches each project he undertakes from a base of deep research and an experimental approach to materials in order to forge a narrative that underpins the work. In doing so, Jansen’s sculptural objects are both deeply imaginative and timeless in nature. Many of the designer’s pieces are created in collaboration with Australian First Nations artists or respond to aspects of early Australian history in order to critique the influences of design in Australia today and propose new forms that celebrate Australia’s diverse and multicultural nature.

It is this historic and narrative-driven approach which led Broached to commission Jansen for Melbourne Quarter, where the designer has reflected on the sporting history of Batman’s Hill as the place of the Melbourne Cricket Club’s first games. Here, two cricket stumps are playfully envisioned as emerging from a make-shift timber mould, perhaps created from a tree fallen by early colonial settlers.

Trent Jansen is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert and exhibits internationally with Gallery All and Galleria Rossana Orlandi. Since 2008, Jansen’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing; JingArt, Beijing (2021); Design Miami Basel (2015) and Design Miami (2018); and Salone International de Mobile, Italy (2008).