At Designer Dirt we are fortunate to have a number of local artisans that exhibit their work with us.  We have an amazing and diverse collection of work available at affordable prices.  There are so many talented people in our region!
 

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

Chrissie is an artist and designer living in Denmark, WA.  She first began the Chrisea Designs label in 2001. (ChriSea is pronounced like “Chrissie” - the name is made up of her first name plus the word ‘Sea’ - reflecting her love of the ocean).After completing a BA of Visual Arts at Curtin University, Chrissie began working as a screen printer, where printing skills and an interest in graphic design developed. Many years of working in the arts followed.The wrap collection of unique designs is printed on either a cotton/silk blend, modal/cotton blend or a wool/silk blend of fabric. There is now a range of jewellery also! 

Gemma Couldwell

Gemma captures the beauty of the Western Australian coastline from the land, sea and air. After arriving in Western Australia in 2009 as a backpacker, she fell in love with the sheer beauty that this State has to offer. Gemma’s photographic journey started in Albany in 2016 when she first started shooting landscapes.  Since then, Gemma’s focus has moved towards capturing the beauty of the Southern and Indian Oceans from the sea and air. Gemma creates stunning landscape and fine art images which showcase the crystal-clear waters and unspoilt beaches that our coastline has to offer.  You can find a selection of Gemma’s gift cards at Designer Dirt along with some new work she’s excitedly developing … 

Geoff Bee

Geoff is a retired farmer from Jerramungup.  He produces garden structures and rustic furniture from bush sticks and recycled material sourced from his bush block “Bilga” at Dunn Rock.  He enjoys using natural materials to produce useful, practical and functional structures, which have aesthetic appeal and character.  Geoff is always willing to create custom-built projects to suit specific needs. 

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.

Ian always tries to include recycled pieces in his work, to give meaning and relevance to each piece, especially if it's a commission.  If he has access to a person's scrap pile it can help bring that piece closer to them.  His commissioned work can be found from Denmark to Onslow.

Jack Bruning

Jack has been making our raised garden beds for over 4 years now, the type with timber frames that are either oiled or painted, then lined with corrugated iron in a choice of Colorbond colours. He’s now added mud kitchens, firewood boxes and a bank of compost bins to his range of products.  Jack also does some home maintenance for people in town to help fill his time productively, now he has retired.The garden beds started out more as a hobby for him while working full time.  He taught Design and Technology locally for about 30 years, teaching in Perth metro and Tasmania before that.
Jack and his wife have five children and sixteen grandchildren and they’re extremely thankful to be in touch with them nearly every day.  They also enjoy the beach and often go free camping in their Toyota Coaster.  They love to go fishing, walking and bodyboarding in their spare time.

Jane Michael

  

Jane grew up on a farm south of Kojonup.  She always loved art and nature and thought about becoming a graphic designer when she finished school, but went down a different road, due to the lack of opportunities at the time. 
Now she’s at Designer Dirt, she’s really enjoying the opportunity to create art as an everyday part of her work, especially being able to mix gardening with art through the versatility of metal and recycled materials, loving how adaptable and durable they are.  Ageing metal in the garden just looks like it belongs and using different metals - including Corten steel and tin, as well as special effects paints - gives her so many options to work with.  She’s also had fun recently, expanding her range of Corten cut-outs - and enjoyed adding some more playful elements!
 

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

Over the years Karen Harries has explored many creative mediums but always knew jewellery design was where she wanted to be.  She fell in love with silver in 2012 when she took classes with a much-admired Margaret River jeweller and hasn’t looked back since. Her preferred mediums are silver, copper, brass, enamel, timber and resin.  She loves seeing how they react, if they can be combined and how they work together.  The detail found in nature inspires her work. 

Kerri Blades

Kerri’s images are inspired by family, home and her surroundings. She has always worked from home around her four children, easel set up in the corner of the living room, paints on the kitchen table, art mess everywhere.  Due to the nature of her husband's work, her family has lived in many remote places all over the state, moving every two to three years. So, making a place feel like home has always been important to her, seeing the beauty in different surroundings, and bringing some of that beauty into her work, whether it be certain colours or images pertaining to the area.Her style is illustrative, colourful and whimsical – she tries to capture the magic in the everyday. Her work is created to encourage, inspire and make you smile. 

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

  

Rochelle Stewart is an Albany local who hand pours a beautiful range of gorgeously scented soy candles for us.  Born and raised in Albany, she is currently studying Teaching online through Curtin, whilst looking after her little boy.  She loves being outdoors and going to the beach. Her favourite thing to do is going fishing with her Dad.
She started making candles over 5 years ago as she wanted something to do in her spare time, as she loves to be busy.   

Ron Edwards

  

Ron was born in Perth, and has worked with metal, professionally, all his life.  Now working at Albany Hydraulics during the week, Ron loves to have a play in his shed when he has some spare time - when he's not brewing up a batch of his latest favourite beer of course!  He has had his metalwork at Designer Dirt for over seven years now and while he was making larger works in the past, he has found his current niche making mozzie coil holders, stakes and planters, which are proving very popular with locals and tourists. 
Always up for a challenge though, he has new designs happening all the time.  The latest theme … cacti … large and small! 

Roy Townsend

Roy is an old school carpenter and joiner, living the good life in Little Grove, just out of Albany, together with his wife Tania.  Now retired, he spends his days down in in his shed repurposing pallet wood into garden décor and ornaments: like birdhouses, potting benches and mud kitchens for kids.  He also splits pallet wood for kindling over the winter. 

Tania Townsend

Tania is an Albany based potter specialising in raku firing and whimsical garden art.  She, and her husband Roy, spend many happy hours whiling away the time in their shed, with their Australian terriers, Cricket and Maisie, in tow.  Her little pottery birds are always popular. 

Wendy Thorne

Wendy is the photographer behind our popular rural themed gift cards.  A Riverina girl, she married her husband Geoff and moved to their farm in Kojonup in the late 70s. Her framed photographic prints can be found from Perth to Melbourne and her gift cards are enormously successful.  Just to prove that she doesn’t take herself too seriously though, Wendy has done several photo shoots with “Father Christmas” involving his favourite farm antics! – after enticing her neighbour with a carton of beer!  He can be seen bogged in the creek, fishing at the dam, feeding the chooks and riding the 4-wheeler.  These have been so popular; they are ridiculous, but they are clever because they’re not just beautiful, they’re funny. “Photography is all about evoking emotion” she confides, “I think that is what I do best.”  These days she loves taking photos on the fly, in particular beautiful, local landscapes and wildflowers.