The Art of Business - Charles Darwin University graduates make their mark
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| Viva la Body proprietors and CDU graduates Jo Dodd and Micko Srbinovski |
Viva la Body is a thriving Darwin business that looks to the future in many more ways than one. Its premises in Cavenagh Street and the Darwin Airport Terminal are showcases for an ever-growing range of body care and fashion items.
The business is a partnership in the truest sense of the word, between Jo Dodd and Micko Srbinovski, two Darwin artists who are both Visual Arts graduates from Charles Darwin University.
For Jo the move to creating products for body and skin care was the natural progression from her childhood fascination with bath oils and her mum’s French perfume to making her own skin care products with egg white and oatmeal.
Combined with the techniques she used as a painter in blending oil sticks as her medium it’s not a big step to making soap and skin care products and blending in an aural palette.
Maybe even more significant for the development of Viva la Body, which began in 1998, was familiarity with the creative process.
This is shared by Jo and Micko and between them they are forever seeking new challenges of how to transform materials, remodel waste and with style elevate it to a new level. Another outcome of this process has created a distinctive product line for the shops. Rubber Souls a range of stylish and colourful shoes, purses and bags are made locally from used inner tubes of tyres.
What’s next – who knows what further transformations Jo and Micko will achieve.
