Noongar-woven pendant lights bring place and story into Australian homes

A new range of woven pendant lights, made by Noongar artists from Western Australia's South West, is set to shift the conversation around Indigenous-made lighting design. The collection joins a growing number of products in Australia that hold cultural permission and provenance at their centre, rather than treating First Nations craft as decoration.

The South West of WA is boodja to the Noongar people, whose traditional weaving practices reach back tens of thousands of years. Working with local designers and weaving houses, the artists behind this collection have translated that lineage into a contemporary lighting object, designed to hang over dining tables, kitchen islands and reading nooks in homes from Boorloo (Perth) to the eastern states.

Across the country, designers are increasingly recognising that authentic collaboration means slowing down, paying fairly, and following the lead of cultural custodians. The Indigenous Art Code has set a benchmark for ethical partnerships, and this pendant range sits comfortably within that framework. It is one of the clearest examples yet of what that looks like in practice, where every shade carries the name of its maker, the materials of its place, and the stories woven through it.

The story behind the collection

The collection grew out of a residency hosted on Wardandi and Bibbulmun Country in the South West, near Margaret River and the timber towns that fringe the karri forests. Three Noongar weaving houses and a Perth-based industrial designer came together over two years of sampling, with each piece shaped through a back-and-forth between traditional technique and contemporary form.

Cultural protocols were written into the project from the first meeting. Artists retained authorship of the woven motifs, with patterns credited individually rather than bundled into a single brand name. Licensing agreements followed the standard set by the Indigenous Art Code, and a portion of every sale returns to the weaving collective that made the piece.

For the lead designer, a Bunbury-born maker who trained in furniture design in Fremantle before returning to the South West, the brief was deliberately simple. Rather than dictating a silhouette, the task was to engineer a frame light enough to hang from a standard ceiling rose, durable enough to last decades, and quiet enough in profile to let the makers' work speak. The first prototypes were tested in homes around Dunsborough and Busselton before the final form was locked in.

Materials sourced from boodja

What sets these pendants apart from the imported rattan shades filling many Australian homes is the source of every fibre. The weavers draw on a kit of local plants, including dyed bull kelp harvested along the southern coast near Albany, hand-stripped flax lily from the jarrah forests, and wool from a small flock of coloured merino sheep kept on a property outside Bridgetown.

The bull kelp handle is particularly significant. Gathered in season by Aboriginal women along the south coast, the kelp is boiled, dried and softened until it takes on the deep amber tone familiar in Noongar weaving. Pendants made with kelp have a translucent, leathery surface that throws a warm, slightly mottled light across a room, the kind of glow that softens concrete benchtops and timber floors alike. When backlit, the fibres reveal tiny imperfections and natural variations that quietly underline the handmade origin of every piece.

Metalwork is fabricated in a small workshop in Osborne Park, with shades fitted to powder-coated brass hardware sourced from a Sydney supplier. Every component is documented on a card stitched inside the fitting, a paper trail that lets a buyer trace the piece back to the South West and the hands that made it.

A new visual language for pendant lighting

Lighting design in Australia has spent the past decade chasing the same handful of references: Scandinavian paper lanterns, Italian glass globes, the occasional terrazzo experiment. This collection offers something different, a silhouette drawn from traditional coolamon and kelp-carrying vessels, scaled up and suspended.

The largest pendant reads as a soft oval when viewed from below, with the open weave casting a pattern of crosshatched shadows across the ceiling. Smaller sizes work as bedside lights or grouped over a long table, where the eye reads them as a constellation rather than a row of identical objects. The medium size, sometimes hung in clusters of three above a kitchen island, has quickly become the most photographed since the launch.

The colour palette is restrained on purpose. Most shades arrive in the natural undyed tones of bull kelp and flax, with smaller runs dyed using ochres sourced from the Pilbara, ochres that shift a pendant from pale butter to deep rust depending on the room. There is no gloss, no lacquer. The light is meant to feel like late afternoon moving through jarrah leaves.

Where the collection sits in the WA design landscape

Western Australian design has built a reputation over the past decade for furniture and objects that read the landscape, from the timber benches of the Perth Hills to the stoneware of the Great Southern. This pendant range slots squarely into that conversation, and into the network of galleries, design stores and industry gatherings where it will be seen first.

The collection will debut at a private viewing in Perth ahead of the next Contemporary Wine In Design event, where architects, interior designers and specifiers gather alongside makers to swap notes over a glass or two. From there, a small number of pieces will travel to Sydney and Melbourne, with stockists to be announced through the Contemporary platform as wholesale partnerships are finalised.

Local architects are already spec'ing the pendants for residential builds in Cottesloe, City Beach and the new wave of apartments rising around Cockburn. A few pieces have been installed in a coastal project in Yallingup, where the muted tones sit comfortably alongside raw timber and the kind of bleached concrete so common in WA's contemporary beach houses. Specifiers in Margaret River, where the timber-and-glass vernacular has dominated for years, are using the pendants to soften otherwise crisp interiors.

Caring for the pendants and the story they carry

Like any woven object, these shades ask for a little attention. Dust with a soft brush rather than a cloth, keep them clear of kitchen steam, and treat the bull kelp pieces with a light wipe of macadamia oil once a year to keep the fibres supple. Avoid hanging them in direct afternoon sun, where the natural fibres can dry and fade over time.

Each pendant arrives with a printed card naming the artist, the Country it was made on, and the materials it contains. Buyers are encouraged to keep that card with the pendant, and to talk about the maker when friends ask where the light came from. In an Australian design market where provenance is too often a marketing line rather than a record, that paper trail does real work.

The makers are also producing a small number of one-off pendants in collaboration with visiting weavers from other language groups, including Pitjantjatjara artists from the APY Lands and Yawuru makers from the Kimberley. Those pieces will be released through selected galleries, with first refusal given to existing buyers from the main collection. A handful of the collaboration pendants have already been reserved by collectors in Fremantle and Sydney ahead of the public release.

For readers interested in how WA architects are working with these new objects in their own homes, Inside the Home of a Perth Architect: A Lesson in Minimalist Living shows how a single woven pendant can anchor an entire interior. To stay across future product launches, studio visits and events such as Contemporary Wine In Design, subscribe to the newsletter and follow the platform's rolling coverage of the local design community.