In conversation with Marlo Lyda

To mark the launch of our Venezia Collection, we asked Australian-born maker and designer Marlo Lyda to create a capsule collection within her expanding body of work, Toile.

Marlo's practice, spanning furniture, lighting and objects, is led by a belief in what she calls "a sense of becoming," work that carries the evidence of its own making rather than concealing it. Toile reveals its own construction, an approach which Lyda describes as an "ode to craft". "None of these decisions make Toile easier to produce," she says. "They make it slower and more exacting, but that is part of what gives each lamp its character."

For this capsule, that same material honesty was applied to deadstock silk. In this conversation, Lyda delves deeper on her creative process, her approach to silk and how she embraces its unique qualities in her work.

Photography by Matthew McQuiggan

Toile is described as “a final draft in fabric”. For someone encountering your work for the first time, what does that phrase mean in practice?

“Final draft in fabric” is first a nod to garment construction. A toile is the calico version made before the final couture garment, so there’s already this lovely idea of something provisional being important in its own right.

That sits very naturally within my practice. I’m always looking for ways to immortalise a sense of becoming. In Toile, it appears through irregular panels, exposed seams and asymmetry. They carry evidence of how the piece came into being, while also becoming the places where the craftsmanship can sing.

Your collections often work with irregularity, imperfection or overlooked materials. What draws you back to that territory each time?

Today there’s an unfortunate expectation that materials - and everything derived from them - should be homogeneous and polished. Inevitably, that expectation leaks into what we create and how we perceive ourselves. [Yellowtrace founder] Dana Tomić Hughes’ recent Sightline talk described “The Great Flattening”, giving voice to that concern.

I feel that imperfection is increasingly a radical point of resistance. A lot of my joy - and creativity - comes from self-expression and observation that doesn’t feel bound to a pre-defined outcome. In this context, irregularity is my personal method and measure.

With reuse, that resistance becomes essential and practical. Reuse asks us to work with what a material actually is rather than what we wish it were. That adaptability is a muscle we need to train; otherwise we keep discarding perfectly useful things simply because they refuse to be uniform.

"I feel that imperfection is increasingly a radical point of resistance."

You’ve described the construction of Toile as closer to a couture garment than a conventional lampshade. How has that shown up in your work?

Toile really is built more like a garment around a body than a conventional lampshade. The fabric is cut from individual patterns, stitched in sequence, then fitted over a fully welded steel frame so every seam lands directly over a rib - like tailoring cloth over a skeleton.

What’s often missed when looking at Toile is the internal textile lining. It tensions the whole piece, effectively upholstering the frame in fabric, while several seams can only be hand-stitched once everything is pinned into place. It’s almost the final closing of a chrysalis.

Armadillo invited you to create a capsule of Toile in response to Venezia, our first pure silk rug collection. What did you take from Venezia going in, and where did it take you?

Silk has been in and around my life for a long time, so when Armadillo approached me with Venezia, I immediately thought about the qualities I’ve always loved most in it: its iridescence and the variation held within the cocoon.

I remembered seeing raw silk in India used in a way that celebrated those tonal shifts, creating subtle striping and slub through the weave. In silk, the fibre feels present and undisguised.

It was almost happenstance that Venezia’s palette felt so familiar too. The browns, creams, eucalypt greens and golds sit naturally within the Australian bush - bark, striations, the shifting surface of a eucalypt trunk.

The capsule became a meeting point between those memories, the qualities I recognised in Venezia, and a landscape we know instinctively.

"I remembered seeing raw silk in India used in a way that celebrated those tonal shifts, creating subtle striping and slub through the weave. In silk, the fibre feels present and undisguised."

How has working with silk surprised you, and how does it differ from other materials you work with?

What continues to captivate me about silk is its magic - the way it carries light. Silk fibres have a roughly triangular cross-section, which gives them that extraordinary reflectivity; colour deepens and shifts as you move around the surface.

Toile is innately sculptural and designed to have presence on or off. In daylight, the silk itself becomes the feature, catching and shifting light across the surface. At night, its fineness allows it to glow from within. It appears delicate, but silk is remarkably strong, and I love that contradiction.

Silk as a material often carries associations with formality and unattainability; your approach embraces difference over uniformity. How has your approach changed the way silk is interpreted?

I think silk should feel precious. Its history, craftsmanship, and material qualities have earned that. But precious doesn’t have to mean untouchable. So much of what makes silk exceptional - its strength, lustre and longevity - is also what makes it deeply usable.

I like the idea that we can treat a material with reverence without removing it from everyday life.

Toile continues as an ongoing body of work. What’s next for it, and for you?

I think Toile and I will be exploring each other for a while longer. For now, that means expanding the shape language of the pendants and using the collection as a vehicle for collaborations with people I really admire, like Armadillo, with a few more quietly underway.

I’m also increasingly interested in textiles as a vehicle for nostalgia. The women in my family have all had deep relationships with fabric, and my time in India as a teenager exposed me to weaving and embroidery in ways that still sit with me. It feels a little like a homecoming I haven’t fully explored yet.

That’s beginning to feed into a new collection reviving fragments from my grandmother’s sewing box in a more theatrical way, across furniture, lighting and objects. I’m also developing a collaboration with Martyn Thompson for Melbourne Art Fair 2027, which has grown quite naturally from sharing a studio and finding where our practices overlap.