Photography by Nicola Gnesi
Writer Georgia Smedley speaks with curator and Agglomerati founder Sam Henley from Lorne, where he’s spending time on the Victorian coast before returning to Melbourne. After eight years based in London, he’s back in Australia ahead of the Melbourne Art Fair, where his studio will present new work at the intersection of furniture and material research, in collaboration with Rotterdam-based designer Maria Tyakina.
When we speak, I ask Henley to walk me through his relationship with Tyakina and how the collaboration began. “I reached out to Maria because I adore her work,” he offers. “Her practice is very restrained, and that translates well into stone. That kind of minimal but gestural language suits a hard surface.”
The pair’s collaboration began in 2023 with Between a Rock and a Hard Place and has since expanded into a broader body of work titled Geologies of Memory. For the Melbourne Art Fair, Henley and Tyakina have collaborated on a series of works, including The Past That Made Them and The Weight of the Earth and The Valley, each exploring memory, accumulation and surface.
“There’s always a sense of pressure in the work,” Henley explains. “Something pushing up or down, force against force.” The black stone tables that anchor the presentation are carved from an almost uniform stone, chosen for its ability to register subtle surface detail. “It’s nearly pure black. People don’t immediately read it as stone,” he says. “That helps the impressions pressed into the surface come through clearly.”
Material selection sits at the core of the collaboration. For this collection, Henley set the material parameters, prioritising stones local to the fabrication context, marking the first time Agglomerati has worked outside of Italy. “We tested more active stones, but they distracted from the forms,” he says. “The shapes are quiet, so the stone needed to be homogeneous.”
Portrait courtesy of Agglomerati
Photography by Nicola Gnesi
Henley’s sensitivity to material comes from a non linear path into industrial design. Trained in interior design with early experience in timber furniture making, he encountered stone while managing a London studio working on an aggregate terrazzo product with Max Lamb. “Stone made sense to me,” he says. “In terms of reduction, machinery, how you take material away.”
That background informs how he approached working in stone for this collection. What stood out to him was the way Maria Tyakina’s work carries architectural structure while remaining emotionally precise. Stone, he notes, became the medium through which that balance could be held. Its inherent weight and resistance allowed structure and tension to communicate meaning without excess, relying on restraint and pressure rather than gesture alone.
Photography by Piercarlo Quecchia
Henley says trust is the defining factor for the collaborative nature of Agglomerati. “I tried doing my own branded pieces,” he says. “They were fine, but I didn’t feel connected. I’m more interested in drawing something out of someone else’s practice.” Working with Tyakina reinforced the importance of allowing ideas to evolve through material and making, rather than forcing resolution too early. Her clarity of intent, he says, creates space for refinement and stronger outcomes.
With Tyakina, that exchange is fluid. “Communication is easy,” he says. “Minimal projects take a lot of work to produce well, and I like the moment where people ask how it’s made. Where’s the join line? How do you bend stone?”
Henley lights up when asked about working with Tyakina again in future, and offers that “there are parts of this project we haven’t realised yet,” he says. “It can always continue evolving.” For now, Melbourne offers a return point, where ideas, materials and audiences can be tested before the next phase takes shape.
Photography by Michael Sinclair
Portrait courtesy of Agglomerati
Photography by Ben Westoby