Sara Thorn is an artist and designer working across various media, specialising in textiles, and interiors. Sara co founded the WorldWeave brand in collaboration with Piero Gesualdi. She is known for her vanguard approach to creativity, blurring the line between art and design, traversing markets and disciplines.
In the 1980s Sara co established the popular Abyss Studio and Funkessentials labels and Galaxy retail store in Melbourne. In the late 1990s Sara moved to Paris, where she designed textiles for Christian Lacroix, and in London for Michiko Koshino, and Bella Freud. Sara was Curator of Design at Museum Victoria during 2004 in Melbourne.
Sara's design work can be seen at WorldWeave in the collections of rugs, cushions and scarves produced in India. Sara has extensively researched traditional textile techniques and histories and was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 2001 to study jacquard silk weaving at the Lisio Foundation in Italy and received an Asialink artist residency to research and collaborate with tribal ikat hand weavers in Borneo. Sara recently had two solo exhibitions in Melbourne and New York of her watercolours. She conducts workshops across the globe in design and creativity.
International workshops include:
At the invitation of the Indian Ministry of Textiles, Government of India in 2005: Design workshops to re-educate and encourage master weavers to design original weaves across South India: Pattern and Design workshops in Soweto, South Africa in 2007 as part of the South Project through Craft Victoria.
RMIT have recently established The Sara Thorn Archive as part of the RMIT Design Archives, which will document and collect work from the eighties through to the current time.
Sara exhibits regularly and her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum, in Sydney Australia.
