Bronte Wilkes
Bronte is a mixed media artist living in Albany. Her love of paint and mixed media began in high school. She studied visual arts in Year eleven and twelve and found she always walked away with an abundance of enthusiasm for new projects at home. A few years down the track now and she’s living on a property surrounded by farms and bush reserve that constantly excites and inspires her to create.
Over the last few years, she has gained an understanding of a number of different mediums: including paint, marker, chalk, oil pastel and water colour. Her works today are a combination of these mediums and are designed to create vibrant pieces that evoke happiness and delight in those that view them. That is the essence of her practice, Bristle and Blue Gum.
Carol Duncan
Carol was a commercial photographer, but recently chose to return to number crunching and doing good deeds during the week. Now she can again enjoy escaping into the peace and quiet of creativity, whether out and about in our great region exploring and capturing the wide variety of environments or delighting in simple finds from her own backyard. Inspiration is always just around the corner, waiting to be seen and revealed.
Chrissie Gregory
Gemma Couldwell
Geoff Bee
Ian Michael
Ian grew up on farms and stations in the Northern Wheatbelt and the Gascoyne. He has always considered himself more inventive than artistic, something that's happened out of necessity, when fixing things with limited options, usually in the middle of nowhere. Since starting Designer Dirt he’s been able to have more fun with that creativity and really enjoys making metal sculptures out of scrap on hand.
Jack Bruning
Jane Michael
Jodie Edwards
Known as the "Giftware Goddess" at Designer Dirt, Jodie creates stunning displays of our merchandise inside our shed. She has an incredible knack for making a collection look not just inviting and beautiful, but also inspiring. So customers are tempted to create their own loveliness at home with practical touches showing how they can. Jodie loves to turn her hand to mixed media pieces in her time off. She has an art background with a Bachelor of Visual Art and a Diploma in Art Studies.Growing up in Albany she loves living by the ocean and has an affinity with marine life.
She’s always been drawn to creative projects and enjoys following an idea from conception, through the various stages of experimentation, to the final outcome. Using new materials - from paper to clay, water colour to metallic effects – and techniques are what keeps her enjoying her art!
Karen Harries
Kerri Blades
Malcolm Heberle
At the age of thirteen, Malcolm worked on a milk run after school in Katanning to save up for his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 33. It was the start of a lifelong passion! Throughout his career Malcolm has worked in many areas of photography, working in the industry for over fifty years. Always very involved in the photographic industry, he was a WA council member and President of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) and has received a number of awards in professional photography over the years.
Now he considers himself lucky to enjoy his photography at his own pace and finds helping others learn and improve their skills very rewarding. Malcolm’s images have always covered a large range of genres; soft and light, dark and moody, romantic, harsh, still life or action as well as street photography. He particularly loves to take images of anything old and rusty! It’s very rarely that he crops an image, most are composed in camera.
Creating images always has been and continues to be a huge part of Malcolm’s life.
Rachael Van Den Hoek
Rachael was born in Fremantle and moved to Albany as a teenager. She has always loved to learn and gravitated to craft through that love and her family's strong craft background. She comes from a long line of crafty women (her grandmother was a skilled puppet maker), so she feels like she’s genetically programmed to craft! She loves to dabble in three-dimensional work - constructing and creating. Rachael is a habitual maker; you will always find her with a project on the go - even when she’s out socialising, you’ll often find Rachael with her crochet hook in her hand! Giving personal gifts is something she gets a real kick out of!
Robyn Heritage
Robyn has been designing and creating jewellery for the last thirty years. Recently moving to Kalbarri, she’s loving being surrounded by national park, ocean and river. Both flora and fauna feature in her pieces and her metal clay ring designs are incredible. Her favourite metals to use are bronze and sterling silver, as they create beautiful texture and colour contrasts.
Rochelle Stuart
Ron Edwards