Matthew Bird

Exhibition Date

30 October > 30 November 2025

Exhibition Closing Event & Artists Talk

Thursday 27 November 2025, 5:30 > 8pm;
Artist Talk starts at 6:30pm, All Welcome



 Visual Rating 75%

The Linden Projects Space can be accessed via an older lift that is not DDA compliant and requires staff operation. Our team is always available to assist—please let us know if you need support during your visit.

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Soft Infrastructures: St Kilda Reimagined is a speculative architectural project by artist and architect Matthew Bird (Studiobird & MADA), developed in collaboration with Associate Professor Brady Robards (Digital Sociologist, Monash University) and Dr Suzanne Barker (Urban Planning and Design, MADA).

Set against the backdrop of St Kilda’s shifting social and cultural landscape, the project asks what forms of architecture might emerge when intimacy, gathering, and sensory connection become scarce civic resources. In an era of disconnection, Soft Infrastructures investigates how design might choreograph new forms of closeness, creating spaces that invite encounter rather than isolation.

Reimagining the lost Palais de Danse and the adjacent St Kilda Triangle as speculative sites of renewed civic intimacy, the exhibition combines an animated film, architectural photomontages and a sculptural seating prototype to explore how bodies, materials, and atmospheres can co-produce belonging. These works operate as both proposition and experiment, testing how architecture might serve as a medium of collective emotion, shared rhythm, and public care.

The project features photography by Peter Bennetts, architectural visualisations by John Wong, and an edited film and soundscape by James Wright, each contributing to the sensory and spatial complexity of the work.



Soft Infrastructures is supported by a Creative Works Grant from Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA).

Future Fossil is an immersive public sculpture by architect-artist Matthew Bird and architect-geographer Charity Edwards, merging myth, ecology, and machine mythologies. Rooted in Bass Strait narratives and Lorne’s coastal history, the work imagines a future fossilised megafauna emerging from mechanical debris washed ashore. It prompts reflection on more-than-human temporality: how ancient ecological dominances, contemporary technologies, and the long durations of extinction and regeneration intersect.

Rendered in steel, paint and zinc, Future Fossil evokes the weight of geological and industrial memory. It conflates the natural and the manufactured, prompting tactile encounter, wonder, and critical speculation about how we might choreograph futures that honour disappearance, fragility, and resilience.

Future Fossil was initially exhibited at the Lorne Sculpture Biennale March 2025, and presented at Linden New Art alongside Soft Infrastructures: St Kilda Reimagined from 30 October – 30 November 2025.