Scaling up the lessons of jewellery making, Anna Varendorff produces composed works that blur the line between utility and beauty.
Anna Varendorff pictured with Pearl cabinet, a wall-hung hemispherical shelf in brushed aluminium.
It is the middle of the day when I speak with Anna Varendorff over Zoom, at the end of a very long week. She is sitting in her studio in Melbourne’s historic Nicholas Building, where she has worked for close to two decades, ever since a friend suggested, in her first week in the city, that the two of them share a studio there. She has moved rooms within the building more than once, and now shares a smaller studio after losing a larger one when the rent went up. What ties her to the building is a sense of belonging to it, and to the floor she occupies with Caves Gallery and a handful of others still holding out among the shopfronts. “It’s a good community,” she says. “There’s some good people still persevering.”
There’s something both frank and disarming about how Anna talks about her practice, which she splits in two. ACV Studio carries her product and furniture work, while her sculptural practice sits under her own name. “I permit ACV Studio to think about function, not without the conceptual framework that I might apply to my artwork, but with a lighter load,” she says. “When I’m making a sculptural installation, the politics of making art is hard and heavy and vital. ACV Studio can be freer.”
The visually expressive but materially restrained Love Chair in curved stainless steel.
Anna trained as a jeweller and still works chiefly in metal, and her attachment to the material is enduring. “I love its properties, its conductivity, its strength, its malleability and its history,” she says. Working in metal at scale remains uncommon for women, and she counts that fact among the foundational motivators of her practice. “One of the through lines for me is definitely women making big things in metal,” she says. “It’s just not common. I do speak a lot about gender from the vantage point of a female-identifying person, and at the same time the hypocrisy in that is that, ideally, we wouldn’t discuss gender. But the historical binary is so male-oriented in that material that it stays politically potent for me to use it as a woman, or as a female-identifying person.”
We talk about attachment, belonging, memory and desire in a world where there is a very apparent dissonance between person and object, and what I’m most struck by when speaking with Anna is a deep humility, and an affinity for repetition that translates directly to her objects. Across her output, from rings to vases to lighting, the circle recurs. She traces it back to jewellery, and to the ring specifically, a form with no single point of entry. “It’s a form without a hierarchy,” she says. “It goes around things. If you’re thinking about rings, they go around your fingers. That’s the origin form for me.”
Invertible (2023) can be flipped and displayed as a sculptural form or vessel.
One of her most ambitious projects was unveiled at the 2026 Melbourne Art Fair (MAF), where she was awarded the inaugural MAF x National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Design Commission. For the commission, Anna presented U Lights and Vases, expanding her hallmark tubular forms into an installation of ceiling lights, suspended vases and monumental floor vessels. Now bound for the NGV’s permanent collection, the work disarmed even Anna herself. “You meet the work when it’s out, right?” she says. “Even if you know what you think you’re making, and you think you understand it, you meet it when everyone else meets it.”
It’s been a busy year for Anna, who has also has a show at Oigall Projects in Melbourne from 22 October to 7 November 2026, followed by more work with Caves Gallery, to be shown at an art fair in Kyoto in November. Beyond those two shows, the ambition is simpler and entirely her own: “I want to live in the bush,” she says, “make what I want, like everybody else.”
Published online: 16 Oct 2026 Words: Georgia Smedley Images: Anna Varendorff , Casper Plum , Danielle O'Brien , Pier Carthew
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