Madeleine Murdoch is co-founder of Streifen, the Melbourne-based design studio behind the spatial design of Table Manners — an exhibition on show as part of Melbourne Design Week 2026, presented by the NGV. Here, she reflects on the rituals embedded within one of the most familiar objects in domestic life. Curated by Object Massive, the exhibition brings together commissioned cutlery collections and historical pieces to explore the relationship between the hand, the mouth and the traditions of dining.
Cutlery is among the most stable and unchanged forms in domestic life, and yet the act it performs is one of the most intimate. Something crosses the threshold of the mouth, directly into the body, repeatedly, over a lifetime. We were interested in what that simplicity conceals.
Frances Normoyle and I founded Streifen on the belief that objects hold more than their function. We are drawn to the histories, materials, and lives that exist before and beyond the things we produce, and to the question of what they can teach us about making. There is something in an object that has been kept and used that no new thing can replicate, and that is what we are working to understand and carry forward.
Table Manners came to us through Georgia Smedley, curator and Normoyle’s partner, whose practice, Object Massive works at the intersection of objects, ideas, and how both are articulated. We had been developing spatial design through our own projects for some time. Our first exhibition, Seven Minutes in Heaven, presented as part of Melbourne Design Week the previous year, was where we understood what it meant to design completely holistically: space, scent, sound, and experience as a single proposition.
The presentation gathers a series of designers who have each produced a singular set of cutlery distilled by the guiding principles of their practices. Among them: Belle Thierry, Hamish Munro, Ryan Mueller, Soie Lait from France, and Studio Kyss, each approaching the brief from entirely different positions, making visible just how much variation is possible within a form that has barely changed. The commissioned works are shown alongside historical and contemporary pieces drawn from the Kraftsman collection, the life’s work of Arne and Nicolette, who have spent decades gathering and restoring beautiful objects from markets and corners of the globe, developing an eye for the shapes found in everyday things.
The spatial design takes its cue from the height of fine dining: that world of glamour, ritual, and controlled excess. Black lacquered screens, gloss surfaces, tight framing. White gloves to handle the work. We wanted you to look at something so ordinary you have never really looked at it before.
We became obsessed with an indeterminate golden age of design. The glossy screens are deliberately slippery because the ideals we hold around food are too. They act as sites of deferral between the hand and the mouth. Why have these objects remained so standardised when eating itself is so personal?
Streifen co-founders Frances Normoyle and Madeleine Murdoch
