+ urbanart + Dianne Beevers + Dianne Beevers

After training as a painter and art educator Dianne Beevers taught in art schools in Newcastle and Melbourne, and worked as an exhibition curator, before studying design. As a practicing artist, she has shown paintings, prints, sculpture, ceramics and installations, in some fifty exhibitions in Australia.

Her contemporary furniture designs reflect her background as an established installation artist. Aligned with exploratory processes and concept-driven design, she assumes the freedoms of an artist in renegotiating the accepted hierarchies of materials and technology associated with furniture fabrication. She established 'dianarchy design' in 2000.

She teaches History and Contextual Studies in the International Unit for Public Art at RMIT University, involving Cultural Exchanges in Xianyang, People's Republic of China (2000) and Sile, Turkey (2001).

The memo lamp series, begun in 1999, marks a transition to furniture design, and withdrawal from teaching, which supplied a vast paper archive of notes and memoranda. Paper constituted a 'natural' resource, a poetic medium for furniture designs. Ironically files are rendered inaccessible, their role reassigned to art. Laminated post-consumer waste paper represents a positive, if finite, contemporary option for furniture design, offering both structural and expressive potential in sustainable design. This is particularly relevant, if ironic, in Australia, where so much copy paper derives from rapidly diminishing old growth forests.