A collaboration between industrial designer and artist, A Heritage Reclaimed is a functional cabinet that uses wood marquetry to tell of a history that heritage guidelines failed to acknowledge.

With the right tools, craftspeople and context, a cabinet can be a conversation starter. A Heritage Reclaimed is one example, representing multiple timelines and perspectives, and offering political commentary through its form and aspect. It examines Australia’s attempts to erase its First Nations heritage, as well as the pursuit of First Peoples to recover it, questioning how far we have come from our colonial history.

This vision was achieved through a collaboration between industrial designer Maryam Moghadam and Ngarrindjeri and Wirangu artist Keedan Rigney, both based in Melbourne. The pair made their cabinet as part of the 2024 Melbourne Design Week exhibition Overlay, where 15 architects, interior designers and object designers were tasked with reimagining heritage aesthetics to better reflect our contemporary climate and context.

According to the exhibition’s presenters, Overlay explored the tension between preserving Australia’s heritage architecture – with its cast-iron balustrades and decorative stucco inherited from Europe – and the need to adapt homes for density, sustainability, community and connection to Country.

“Current conversations of heritage are often bound to the façade, concerned with complying with regulations,” curator CJ Cornish told Australian Design Review in May.

“Our aim with Overlay is to present a layered, more complete vision of heritage. We see the heritage influence as one that is wrapped up in nostalgia, but also caters to a colonial history. It’s a conversation that goes beyond the façade, one that flows from the interior to the façade, streetscape and wider community.”

Moghadam received this brief and felt that it was important to “allude to the real Australian heritage, which is the First Nations heritage” in her contribution to Overlay. In her short career so far, her design intent has been to create furniture with meaning. This is evident in another of her recent projects entitled ‘Cheeky stools’, which resemble bottoms in various skin colours, reconciling humour with functional design in the pursuit of playful user experiences.

“I’d like furniture to be made that is more than utilitarian. It is functional, but there’s also something else to it,” Moghadam tells inside magazine.

In the case of A Heritage Reclaimed, she worked with Rigney over one month to execute a shared vision and layer two perspectives. The cabinet’s façade is totally blank, but it opens to reveal two separate artworks.

The inside cabinet doors feature Moghadam’s illustrations of two First Nations people walking under the sun towards a church, one with a bucket in their hand, the other grasped by a forceful white hand. This represents “a glimpse at history” from a non-Indigenous person’s perspective, which Moghadam garnered from her own research, stories she’s been told and early education about the Stolen Generation.

Internally, the three wall panels display a triptych digitally conceived by Rigney and materialised by Moghadam through a process of wood marquetry. According to Rigney, the first panel on the left shows communities living harmoniously together and trading with one another, completely present in the fact their culture is “theirs wholly” at this time. The middle panel moves to a representation of colonisation and its impacts.

“Children are being snatched from their parents and taken to missions and schools to ‘become white’,” he explains. “The boys were thrust into labour positions and the women were forced to give birth with the intention of ‘breeding out the black’. Aboriginal people across the country were displaced, many of whom were too young to know where home is and who their family are, with the intention they never will.”

The right and final panel concludes with a “future where Aboriginal people displaced from culture and Country can return home, practice culture, learn language and find their family”. A sun rolls across the three panels, rising and setting from left to right – a motif Rigney says some viewers might interpret “all too optimistically”.

“The catch with this is many people might think we currently live in the panel on the right; however, the very real reality is we are still living in colonisation,” he says. “Colonisation didn’t ‘happen’, rather it is still happening.”

The artworks show “just part of the heritage that we don’t look at”, according to Rigney; a number of Moghadam’s design choices amplify this message.

The cabinet’s shape alludes to traditional bark shelters that First Nations people sometimes built on stilts to protect against floods and insects. Moghadam constructed the cabinet from native Australian timber and veneers, including spotted gum, jarrah, myrtle, sassafras, Huon pine, Victorian ash, Queensland walnut, blackbutt and blackwood.

“However, I wanted to mix new technology with the old traditions and I laser cut the veneer to make the shapes. But the surface on which the veneer is stuck is actually depressed through laser etching,” she says.

Vivid colours inside A Heritage Reclaimed all derive from the natural timbers, aside from some sections Moghadam dyed black and green. Meanwhile, in another modern touch, the cabinet’s façade is deliberately minimal and angular.

“The action of actually opening the cabinet [is] symbolic of the user taking action to uncover that deep, rich history,” she says.

Rigney concurs. “It was almost literally looking under the surface and finding out that you don’t have to look too hard to see that there are some horrible things that have happened in our not-so-long-ago, shared history,” he says.

A Heritage Reclaimed merges two disciplines and two perspectives from two different people – one First Nations and one not – into one object. Their distinct artworks are “separate but joined at the same time,” Moghadam says.

“Through his storytelling, I was also able to tell my own interpretation,” she says. “I wanted to capture a glimpse of history to accentuate what has happened, and why it’s so important to rethink the meaning of Australian heritage.”

This article originally appeared in issue 120 of inside magazine. Grab your copy here.