Dean Toepfer

DEATH AND LIFE

20.02.2025 – 05.04.2025

Death and Life marks designer Dean Toepfer’s debut solo exhibition, an evocative exploration of transformation, renewal, and the dualities of human experience. Specialising in furniture, objects, and lighting, this exhibition sees Toepfer using reclaimed parachute silk as the central material in this body of work. Through a meticulous journey of design and craft, he breathes new life into this discarded material, creating luminous sculptural forms that seamlessly merge functionality with poetic resonance.

Parachute silk, with its history of bearing lives and ensuring safety, embodies a compelling narrative of strength and impermanence. Once vital, the material eventually expires, becoming unfit for its original purpose. By reclaiming and transforming the silk, Toepfer draws parallels between the life cycle of materials and the human experience of endings and beginnings. The fabric is no longer discarded but reborn, offering a visual meditation on metamorphosis, resilience, and renewal.

For Toepfer, this exhibition is more than material exploration; it represents a deeply introspective journey. It reflects his evolving perspective on life’s transitions, both personal and universal. The death of loved ones, the end of relationships, and the fading of ideas or dreams can leave behind profound loss and uncertainty. Yet, as Toepfer suggests, these endings often serve as catalysts for growth and reinvention. The works on display embody this philosophy, using light and form to symbolise the potential that emerges from life’s transitions and transformations.

Thematically, Death and Life aligns seamlessly with Toepfer’s broader design practice, where materiality, process, and investigation intersect. His commitment to exploring the life cycles of materials reflects his belief in their capacity for renewal and reinvention. Through these works, Toepfer invites viewers to reflect on their own journeys of transformation, offering a space to consider how symbolic endings of ideas, chapters, or connections might inspire growth, healing, and new beginnings.

Toepfer’s creations transcend their physical forms, standing as both objects of beauty and symbols of transformation. They illuminate the potential for life to emerge from loss and for meaning to be found within these changing tides. Through Death and Life, Dean Toepfer crafts an exhibition and a poignant reminder of the power of change, the inevitability of cycles, and the quiet beauty of rebirth.

Dean Toepfer is an Adelaide-based designer whose approach is characterised by the detail and functionality of his lighting, furniture, and objects, which he retains whilst exploring the interplay of material, form and colour. It is rooted in self-directed experimentation of production methods within an interdisciplinary studio.