Kenneth Rowell: Designer for the Stage

Characters and productions come alive through design. Their new Collection-in-Focus exhibition highlights the work of Melbourne-born painter and designer Kenneth Rowell (1920-1999). He lived and worked as an artist and theatre designer in London from 1952, frequently returning to work in Australia until 1982 when he moved back to Melbourne. Rowell’s costume design archive comprises of about 1,400 designs for costumes and sets, as well as notebooks, sketchbooks, programs and photographs. It documents 87 productions he worked on between 1943 and 1993, often in collaboration with his wife, Victoria, who painted the fabric of his costumes. While Rowell almost always designed both costume and set designs for a production, this exhibition showcases a selection of hand-drawn costume designs, as well as other items that give us a sense of his life in the theatre, who he was as an artist and the vast scope of theatre productions he was involved with in his lifetime.