Located in the entrance pavilion of the Art Gallery of NSW's new Sydney Modern building, the Gallery Shop is an immersive resin installation of fluid contours developed with surfboard designer Hayden Cox, shaping a luminous space of shifting perspectives & refractions of light. Striated layers of bio-resin wraps the shop’s perimeter to form a transparent margin which serves as both boundary & display.

Opened in December 2022, the new building, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, is the centrepiece of the Art Gallery’s Sydney Modern Project expansion.

The Gallery Shop is the principal retail space of the new Sydney Modern building and is designed to express the artistic endeavours of the new gallery, challenging the commercial experience of an archetypical gallery shop.

The site presented a unique opportunity to break past the ‘exit through the gift shop’ conventions and extend the artistic experience of the Art Gallery into the experience of the retail space.

Conceived as a translucent bubble within an architectural landscape, the shop captures natural light throughout the day bringing dynamic reflections and refractions of the city. While holding people, objects, and books within its centre, products are showcased to passers-by through the lens of the resin walls. This speaks to the client brief for face-out displays - gently maximising the identity of the space while preserving the architectural experience of the new building.

Akin Atelier engaged multi-disciplinary designer Hayden Cox, best known for his surfboard brand, Haydenshapes, on a 2 year experimental process to develop & fabricate the project's bio-resin materiality. A custom-engineered formulation composed of a minimum 26% biological matter was specifically written by Cox for the project.

Colour development was informed by the gallery's local context and references the sandstone of the original gallery building. The gradation of tone speaks to the layered nature of Sydney’s sandstone geology, and acts as a visual continuation of the rammed earth wall in the gallery volumes below.

Sintered layers of colour were hand poured and finished by Cox’s dedicated resin team in Sydney into custom moulds for 109 consecutive days to achieve the gradient. The bubble’s glossy translucency was achieved with 12 grit levels of hand-sanding and 7 hand-polishing stages. Each unit required over 3 weeks of sanding & polishing by specialist Haydenshapes resin workers. A total of 29 unique resin modules each weighing between 300 and 500 kilograms comprises the installation.

The design implements sustainable design principals to positively impact future flexibility & project-permanence.

The primary material of bio-resin is composed of a minimum 26% biological matter, reducing the amount of embodied carbon and reduced toxicity during the manufacturing process.