WOOLLOOMOOLOO’S Gunnery building has spent the better part of a century housing artists, soldiers and, more recently, contemporary exhibitions inside ARTSPACE. This September it hosts something that sits between all three: The Macallan x David Carson: In The Studio, a two-day experience built around the whisky maker’s five-year creative partnership with the graphic designer.

Running from Thursday, 10 September to Saturday, 12 September, and open to the public from Friday, 11 September, In The Studio fills ARTSPACE’s raw brick galleries with layered artworks, motion pieces and whisky expressions from The Macallan’s Double Cask and Sherry Oak collections. The show is billed as exploring the meticulous processes and instinctive decision-making behind both Carson’s design practice and The Macallan’s approach to whisky making. General admission is complimentary, but a private masterclass with The Macallan’s Senior Whisky Maker Diane Stuart is the real drawcard, which will take guests on an even deeper journey into the world of The Macallan flavours and provenance.

The partnership between distillery and designer began in 2020 and reached a milestone last year, when Carson reimagined the packaging and artwork for the Double Cask and Sherry Oak ranges. Carson sums up his process plainly: “There is no magic answer. At some point, you have to trust your gut.” That philosophy shows up in the Double Cask artwork itself, which depicts two staves, one freshly seasoned in sherry, one exhausted by it, rendered in the white of American oak and the red of European oak. It is the kind of grid-averse composition that made Carson’s name in the 1990s, first at surf and skate titles like Beach Culture and Transworld Skateboarding, then as founding art director of Ray Gun magazine, where he once ran an entire Bryan Ferry interview set in Zapf Dingbats because he found the piece unengaging.

The two Macallan ranges on display trace different paths through the same oak. Double Cask, aged 12, 15, 18 and 30 years, splits maturation between sherry-seasoned American and European casks, producing the brand’s lighter, fudge-and-citrus register. Sherry Oak, aged 12, 18, 25 and 30 years, matures almost entirely in European oak from Jerez de la Frontera, yielding the darker profile of dried fruit, ginger and dark chocolate the distillery has built its reputation on since Alexander Reid founded it in 1824.

Leading the masterclasses is Diane Stuart, senior whisky maker on The Macallan’s Whisky Mastery Team. Originally from Speyside, she started in the industry as a summer distillery tour guide before studying forensic science at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and working as an analytical scientist at the Scotch Whisky Research Institute in Edinburgh, where she became a sensory panellist and picked up a diploma in distilling. She joined Edrington in 2017 as a trainee blender, was promoted to assistant blender within a year and became master blender for Naked Malt in 2020, before joining The Macallan in February 2022. Her work there includes The Macallan Distil Your World Mexico, built around a trip to Mexico City, along with The Harmony Collection’s Vibrant and Guardian Oak releases and the Classic Cut 2023 Release.

For a closer look, Stuart’s masterclasses run for groups of 20, pairing a curated flight of whiskies with tactile oak samples, aroma studies and archival imagery. These sessions sit as an add-on to general admission, priced from AUD$38.

Tickets for The Macallan x David Carson: In The Studio are available now at themacallan.com

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