Melbourne Design Week: Tall Poppy: Curated by Tiffany Jade

NGV Melbourne Design Week: Tall Poppy

29 April - 7 June, 2026

Vernissage: Saturday, 9 May 4-6pm

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with distinction in Australia. To rise is to invite scrutiny; to make work of ambition is to risk the social penalty of being seen to reach. The tall poppy does not ask permission to grow, and that, in this country, has always been the provocation.

This exhibition takes its name from that reflex and refuses it.

The designers gathered here have each chosen to stand for something – work that does not hedge, does not soften its convictions, does not mistake restraint for modesty. Their practices span material and method, geography and generation, but share a refusal to diminish.

Presented as part of Melbourne Design Week, an initiative of the NGV and Creative Australia, Tall Poppy marks the first time the program has rooted an exhibition in the Mornington Peninsula. A reminder that creative rigour is not a metropolitan inheritance. It belongs wherever the work is honest, and the thinking runs deep. This is that work.

Exhibition Catalogue