A lifelong student of Country, kin and craft
Lucy Simpson in her studio, image courtesy of The Design Files.
Lucy Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay wirringgaa, designer and maker, and the Creative Director and Principal Designer of Gaawaa Miyay, a First Nations, process-led studio she founded in 2009.
Grounded in the philosophies of First Nations design, her multidisciplinary practice spans fibre, textiles, glass, ceramics, object design, interiors and public art, connecting narratives of Country through function, materiality and the transfer of knowledge.
Lucy belongs to the freshwater Country of the Walgett, Lightning Ridge and Angledool areas of north-west NSW, and lives and works on Wangal Country in Sydney. “Design and making have always shaped how I understand and communicate with the world,” she says. A decade ago, at the British Museum in London, she made a conscious commitment “to myself, to Country, to the old people, and to craft” after encountering a string gulay (dilly bag), twined, looped and knotted from bark and taken from her family’s river system.
More than a century old, it was the first fibre object from her region she had encountered in this way. “Its beauty, complexity and sophistication moved me to my core. Through its form and materiality, I could read the generations of relationships embedded within the object.” The encounter reaffirmed her responsibility to learn, practise and sustain this knowledge, “keeping familial process and kinship in perpetual motion.”
Water, drought and responsibility run through her work. For long water: fibre stories at the Institute of Modern Art, she wove abandoned fencing wire and mesh gathered on Country into Gungandhi, a sculptural work inspired by the crocodile being, made while the rivers of her Ancestors had run dry. With Canberra Glassworks she cast freshwater mussel shells and grinding stones in recycled glass for her solo exhibition Baayangalibiyaay. She has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, including the Jackson Bella Room commission Holding Ground, the Powerhouse, Bundanon, the Australian Design Centre and State Library Victoria, and internationally in India, the UK, the US and at World Expo 2025 in Japan. Her public work includes Held for Sydney Festival and Water Story for St George Hospital.
A graduate of UNSW Art and Design, Lucy was named an Australian Design Honouree by the Australian Design Centre in 2015 and is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney, where her research explores First Nations design as a conduit to baayangalibiyaay, the interconnected wellbeing of people and place.
For Lucy, craft is inseparable from Country. “Craft is a product of Country and experience. For First Nations peoples, it carries the knowledge, relationships and practices that have sustained our communities since the beginning.” Its future, she believes, depends on thriving communities, respect for cultural authority and recognition of First Nations knowledge as living, evolving and essential. “As makers, we carry a responsibility for what we create, what we protect and what we pass on.” Above all, she says, its rightful place in Australia’s cultural life must be “recognised, respected and honoured.”