“It’s Quite a High Failure Rate”: Meet the Aussie Designer Turning Metal into Pillowy, Inflatable Forms

As Douglas Powell nears completion when building a piece of furniture, it’s the final 30 seconds that make or break his design. In those crucial moments, the designer blasts a jet stream of water between two thin, welded sheets of steel. Like air filling a balloon, the metal pocket inflates, taking on soft dimples to reveal its ultimate shape.

“I relinquish control in the final stages,” Powell says. “I can gauge what the metal is going to do, but it still creases and does weird things I wouldn’t expect. That unknown draws me in.”

Since 2023, Perth-based Powell has been crafting a small range of furniture, lighting and vases under the name Duzi. His signature technique makes polished metal appear pillowy and supple: each piece wavers, puckers and undulates despite its rigid material. Already, his work has caught the eye of Simone LeAmon, curator of the NGV’s prestigious Rigg Design Prize, in which Powell is a finalist this year. “The idea of people calling me an artist is still very new,” he says.

Powell has worked with steel since he was 16, but Duzi marks a shift from the industrial to the artistic. By day, he’s a certified metal fabricator for design and production studio Remington Matters in Perth. The company kindly lends its workshop to Powell for his creative endeavours after hours – “an amazing perk of the job”.

Born in Wales, Powell spent his early years on a farm in Zimbabwe before returning to the UK to study product design at university. The materials and landscapes around him have long shaped his work, and now he finds himself  “at the end of the earth”, responding to Western Australia’s natural beauty. “I can spend hours looking at a flower or leaf, or chopping a stem of broccoli and finding a weird shape to play with.”

Powell has three works on display in the Rigg Design Prize: the Mbosho table, which nods to the rolling contours of his father’s coffee farm in Zimbabwe; the Luva lounge chair; and the Physalia vase. While the pieces push the boundaries of design, Powell balances form with function. “It’s not just a sculpture: it’s a vase, a coffee table, a chair,” he says. “You can work and sit on it and it’s actually quite comfortable.”

They’re also unexpectedly lightweight. The Luva chair weighs just eight kilos, thanks to the absence of a heavy internal supporting structure.

Powell first encountered hydroforming – the technique behind his inflated pieces – a decade ago at his university’s design show. A few years later, he rigged up a pressure washer and started experimenting himself. “I know very little about it,” he admits. “I’m not a mathematician and can’t expect what it’s going to do, so it’s quite a high failure rate. But it’s exciting because of the spontaneity.”

Still, Powell doesn’t want to just be known as “the hydroforming guy”. “It’s a process I absolutely love, but in my day job, I’m also the guy that does tiling or stonework. I’m multi-skilled, so I want to show that as well.”

Recently, he’s been experimenting with enamelling and is currently working on a brass mirror for this year’s Melbourne Art Fair.

“I started Duzi because I had a deep desire to create my own ideas, and I’ve just been having so much fun with it.”

See Powell’s work as part of the Rigg Design Prize 2025 at the NGV Ian Potter Centre until February 1.

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