The Market

The Market Project

Written by the team at the Market Project

TEA! Tea. Tea and cake, and sitting around the kotatsu (for those who don’t know, that’s a coffee table with an inbuilt heater and blanket – and you should probably get one). In this setting were the beginnings of our small business. What started as table talk over shared baked goods and a variety of teas turned into the development of a group project, and with a name that was just essentially a place holder became what we still know today as our MARKET PROJECT!

So, hello! We are Market Project and we are still fresh and new, being only 10 months in since our beginnings. We are a group of artists who want to utilise our creative knowledge from each of our own practices to contribute to one ongoing and evolving ‘market project’ to bring to local Tasmanian markets. We are a painter, embroiderer and sculptor. The sculptor taught us to love the art of clay and ceramics, and with that became the bulk of our collection that is made up of ceramic jewellery, small homewares and figurines.

We decided we wanted to explore monthly (now bi-monthly) themes that reflected the small tokens of Tassie – so far, that has been oysters, heritage houses, the apple isle, cheese, and Tasmanian flora! For our first theme we wanted a token that was fun to turn into all sorts of products: jewellery, homewares, cards, bags. Oysters were not only fresh, local and yummy, but were so strange and elegant in their colours, patterns and shapes that curled around their shells. We decided this was perfect and set off on an oyster shell hunt. We asked local restaurants for their leftover shells and stormed the local beaches to find the empty, mutant, and ugly oyster shells. We used them as our table-top inspiration and set out to make our first ever themed collection for the Market Project of 2019, and so followed suit with the rest of our themes!

All our items are original, one-offs that are sculpted, painted and sewn by hand. If you have a gift idea in mind we can customise and make to order for any occasion. Commission us! Collaborate with us! See what we have in stock! We brought this project together with the intent to have it be fluid, experimental and fun. We have bimonthly themes, but love to hear new ideas and suggestions.

Pre and post quarantine, we have participated in markets including the Kingston Beach Handmade Market, Hobart Twilight Markets, Cuckoo Market, Tasmanian Made Mini Market and The Re-loved Market. We also sell our products online and you can catch us on Instagram, Facebook and Etsy as ‘Market Project Hobart’.

Instagram: www.instagram.com/marketprojecthobart Facebook: www.facebook.com/marketprojecthobart