material matters

In my opinion, Carl Clerkin is one of the most original – and certainly one of the wittiest – designers currently practicing. He graduated from the now-defunct furniture course of the Royal College of Art in the late ’90s, a time when many of his contemporaries were dreaming of fame and fortune with a glamorous Italian manufacturer. However, he steered a very different – more local – course. 

His work, which ranges from industrial to fine art pieces, is always imbued with a sense of narrative and not a little charm. Clerkin is also a teacher at Kingston University and has curated exhibitions such as The Learned Society of Extra Ordinary Objects at London’s Somerset House. He returns to the London venue this month with The Beasley Brothers’ Repair Shop, as part of the gallery’s new show Eternally Yours – an exhibition about repair, care and healing.

In this episode we talk about: his new installation at Somerset House and the importance of mending; the role narrative and humour plays in his work; feeling uncomfortable in the art world and becoming a designer by default; growing up in London’s Eastend; the influence of Michael Marriott; his love of teaching… and his fascination with buckets. 

Juliette Bigley is an artist and sculptor who creates extraordinary, abstract, but somehow familiar, pieces out of metal. I first saw her work at New Designers, the graduate design show held annually in London, after she left The Cass  in 2013 and, since then, her career has gone from strength to strength. She has a piece in the permanent collection of the V&A; won a slew of awards; written a book entitled, Material Perspectives; and exhibited around the world. 

Happily she’s also an incredibly eloquent advocate for her material of choice and the importance of thinking through making.

In this episode we talk about: discovering metal by chance and the effect that moment had on her life; why making helps her understand the world; how different metals have contrasting personalities; her fascination with the vessel; a love of lines and boundaries; her background in music and healthcare; the relationship between music and making; her problem with perfection; oh and swimming the Channel (yes, really).

It’s an incredibly rich. 

Nigel Coates is a hugely influential architect, designer, artist and educator. He first came to widespread attention as a teacher at the Architectural Association in the early 80s when he co-founded NATO, a radical architecture collective that published a series of magazines with a unique perspective on the city.

Later, he co-founded the practice, Branson Coates, and created buildings and interiors across the globe from Caffe Bongo in Japan to the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. He has also designed a slew of products for the likes of Fornasetti and GTV as well as exhibitions, such as Ecstacity and Mixtacity at Tate Modern. 

Importantly, he did much of this while being head of architecture at the Royal College of Art. 

He has just published an intriguing – and occasionally quite racy – memoir. It’s a book that charts the changes in architecture in general, and London in particular. There are tales of extraordinary projects, of club culture and parties, of friendships and loves, and of lives sadly lost.

In this episode we talk about: his early life in Malvern and his difficult relationship with his parents; his love of Italy; teaching at the Architectural Association and the creation of NATO; working in Japan and, finally, building in the UK; his role in controversial projects such as the National Centre for Popular Music and the Millennium Dome; the problem with developer-led London; regrets about about not building more; being queer and ‘the unspoken conformity of architecture’; and missing his great friend Zaha Hadid. 

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg started her career as an architect, before going on to study on the revolutionary  Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art in London. While there, she became fascinated by synthetic biology and set about finding a place for design within this emerging field – bringing together scientists and designers to collaborate on a variety of projects. 

More recently, she’s turned her attention to the relationship between technology and nature, producing a string of installations that aim to illustrate what we have, and what we’re in danger of losing, through our own intransigence and our obsession with the ‘new’. 

So she has used artificial intelligence to re-create the birds' song of the dawn chorus, investigated how Mars could be colonised by plants, and designed a digital version of the (now-extinct) Northern White Rhino. 

Her most recent work has just opened at the Eden Project in Cornwall. Pollinator Pathmaker is a 55m long piece (funded by Garfield Weston Foundation, with additional founding supporters Gaia Art Foundation and collaborators Google Arts & Culture) that has been made quite deliberately for insects using an algorithm designed by a string theory physicist.

In this episode we talk about: her new piece at the Eden Project; working alongside a beekeeper and a string theory physicist; the relationship between pollen and data; coding empathy; dropping out of architecture; stepping into synthetic biology; why she was once dubbed ‘poo girl’; our obsession with ‘better’; colonising Mars and making a digital rhino; the importance of challenging technology.

Robert Penn describes himself as a journalist, woodsman and lifelong cyclist, who has written some of the best craft-based books of recent years, including It’s All About the Bike, where he travelled the globe finding the best components with which to build his dream bicycle, and The Man Who Made things out of Trees, which told the tale of what he did with an ash tree that he felled in some nearby woods. 

The titles tell a personal story, which Penn deftly combines with a broader history and, sometimes, a bit of science. But, really, they are all about the importance of making. 

His latest is no different. A little like Ronseal, Slow Rise: A Bread Making Adventure, does exactly what it says on the tin. It has been described by writer, Jenny Linford, as ‘a wide-ranging, gloriously obsessive odyssey’.

Robert lives in the Black Mountains with his wife, three children, two spaniels, 12 bicycles and a collection of axes. He bakes his own bread in a wood-fired oven. 

In this episode we talk about: writing a book devoted to bread; his fascination with the ordinary things that surround us; how a three-year, around-the-world cycling trip piqued his interest in baking; the relationship between bread and power; ploughing his own field with a horse; searching the globe for the right wheat seeds; seeking divine intervention; our obsession with white bread; and how industrial farming took such a wrong turn.

Carmen Hijosa is the creator of Pinatex, a new, non-woven textile made from pineapple leaves. 

After finishing a PhD in textiles at the Royal College of Art, she founded her company, Ananas Anam. And subsequently, the new material has been specified by brands such as Hugo Boss, Chanel, and Mango for bags, shoes and clothes. It has even been used for a vegan hotel suite at the Hilton Hotel Bankside.

Meanwhile, Pinatex production offers additional income to more than 700 families from farming communities and cooperatives in the Philippines, where the pineapple leaves are collected. 

None too surprisingly, she has won a slew of awards, including the Arts Foundation Material Innovation Prize and the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award.

In this episode we talk about: what Pinatex is and how it’s made; why she came up with the idea to create a non-woven textile from pineapple leaves; her background in the leather industry; the trip to the Philippines that changed her life; growing up in Spain and being a rebel at school; issues around the material’s end of life; starting her new foundation for children; and why the material brings out the best in people.

Amin Taha has been described as ‘London’s most controversial architect’. This is largely due to 15 Clerkenwell Close, a development that is defined by a single material, stone. 

The building (which houses his collective practice, Groupwork, and where he also happens to live) was shortlisted for this year’s Stirling Prize, the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, despite that fact it was finished in 2017. 

And it’s fair to say the nomination came as a surprise. This wasn’t simply to do with the timing, nor the building itself – which is a smart, witty, and, it transpires, sustainable piece of work that subtly references the area’s history. But rather because, three years ago, it was issued with a demolition order by Islington Council for non-conformity with the submitted plans . 

Happily, Taha won his appeal and has taken the thinking behind the building – which uses limestone as a structural frame, rather than as a facade for steel and concrete – to investigate how we might build carbon negative towers in the future.  

As architecture writer, Tim Abrahams, has pointed out what sets Taha’s practice apart is his ‘fundamental rejection of style as an orientating device in favour of structure’. In other words, this is an architect for whom materials really matter.

In this episode we talk about: the controversy around 15 Clerkenwell Close; being shortlisted for the Stirling Prize; learning to build in stone; why it’s a sustainable material; the nation’s planning system; beauty; being born behind the Iron Curtain; growing up in Southend-on-Sea; studying under Isi Metzstein and working for Zaha Hadid; designing 30-storey stone towers; and how the construction industry could become carbon negative. 

Did you know that, for years, paper was made from rags rather than wood pulp? No, me neither. 

Mark Cropper is chair of the extraordinary paper manufacturer, James Cropper PLC. And it’s fair to say that the material has dominated the life of his family for over 175 years. The company has been based in the picturesque village of Burneside, near Kendal in the Lake District since 1845 and Mark is, rather remarkably, the sixth generation to run a firm that currently employs around 600 people.

He also has unique insight into the company having written its official history, entitled The Leaves We Write On, in 2004. James Cropper has long specialised in making coloured paper but, in more recent years, it has also branched out with a division devoted to technical fibres – think carbon fibre paper – as well as Colourform, a new packaging solution which the company hopes will replace single-use plastic. It has also developed a process to recycle used coffee cups into paper.

Not only that but Mark has also launched the Paper Foundation, on a site a stone’s throw away from the main factory, where he is creating paper the traditional way, by hand, using over 700 moulds that he has tirelessly collected.

In this episode we chat about: the history of making at Burneside; why the railway revolutionised the company; weathering economic storms; coping with COVID; how the company started making paper from rags (rather than wood pulp); creating carbon fibre paper; the importance of looking after the material’s heritage and making paper by hand again; and attempting to unite the local community through paper.

Piet Hein Eek is a world renowned Dutch designer, who made his name when he graduated from the Academy for Industrial Design Eindhoven in 1990 with a cupboard made from scraps of wood he found in a lumber yard. 

He set up his own practice three years later creating furniture that, in his words, was designed from ‘available possibilities’, with pieces using waste from other processes and, sometimes, waste from that waste. Products are created around the materials the practice has in stock – whether that be a vast number of huge wooden beams or metal pipes – and the machines it possesses. 

Craft is vitally important to everything he’s produced. And production is at the heart of his enormous studio in Eindhoven that also includes a shop, restaurant, an art gallery, and, in the very near future, a hotel. 

During his career, the designer has also branched out into architecture, starting by creating extraordinary garden outhouses and expanding into pieces of urban planning, as well as collaborating with brands such as LEFF and IKEA. 

I caught him just as he was preparing to exhibit at the Salone in Milan, arguably the world’s most important design festival. 

In this episode we talk about: being a bit of a rebel; the studio’s new boutique hotel; his fascination with ruins and how that feeds into his practice; the story behind his iconic Scrap Wood series; his love of Eindhoven; why making is vital to his studio; splitting up with his long term business partner, Nob Ruijrok; embracing failure; and collaborating with the behemoth that is IKEA. It's fascinating stuff.

My thanks go to the American Hardwood Export Council (or AHEC) for sponsoring this episode. To find out more about its new project at London’s Design Museum, Discovered, go to: https://discovered.global

Stuart Haygarth is an artist and designer who works with the stuff that other people throw away. After beginning his career as a photographer and illustrator, he burst onto the design scene in 2005 at Designersblock in London’s Shoreditch with a pair of extraordinary chandeliers. Millennium was made from a series of party poppers he’d collected on the first morning of the year 2000, while Tide comprised of flotsam and jetsam picked up over several years from the Kent coastline. Subsequently other pieces have used the tail lights of cars and spectacle frames.

He has exhibited around the globe, including: the V&A and Gallery Libby Sellers in London, The Lighthouse in Glasgow and DesignMiami. There has also been a solo show at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris. 

As the critic and former director of the Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic, has written, Stuart ‘has a gift for placement and a colour sense that give the mundane a sumptuous, tactile quality… He finds richness in the traces that wind and weather leave on humble materials and that can give dignity to even the most tawdry of things.’

In this episode we talk about: his interest in abandoned objects; why he’s neither a designer nor a fine artist; his obsession with collecting; not being an eco-designer; walking 500 miles along England’s south coast to pick up detritus; the problem with German beaches; and trying to make sense of the world through his work. 

You can find out more about Stuart here

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Juli Bolaños-Durman is an artist and sculptor best known for her work with cut and engraved recycled glass. She was born and raised in Costa Rica, initially studying graphic design. However, in 2010 she moved to Edinburgh to take an MA in her chosen material and her career took off. 

Her beautifully colourful, joyfully decorative, genuinely jaunty pieces have been exhibited at the V&A in London, Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, Somerset’s Make Hauser & Wirth, Design Days Dubai and the Corning Glass Museum in the US. Over the years, she has also received commissions from the National Glass Centre Collection in Sunderland as well as the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. 

In 2015 she won an Elle Decoration British Design Award, while in 2017 she was selected for the prestigious Jerwood Makers Open.

In this episode we talk about: staying creative during lockdown; growing up in Costa Rica; taking the decision to move to Scotland; the importance of play; how reuse is a rebellious act; her relationship with colour; making art more accessible; and why a simple jug might really want to be an astronaut (no, really it might).

You can learn more about Juli here

And you can sign up to my newsletter here

As regular listeners will know the idea behind the show is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist or architect about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers. However, every once in a while I mix the format up a bit and talk to someone who has an overview of the design world. This is one of those occasions.

Paola Antonelli is senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as the institution’s founding director of Research and Development. 

Over more than 25 years at the museum, she’s curated shows such as: Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, Workspheres, and Design and the Elastic Mind. Most recently, she has been responsible for Broken Nature in Milan’s Triennale in 2019 and Neri Oxman: Material Ecology. 

She has lectured and given talks all over the world and picked up a fistful of awards, including 2020’s London Design Medal. 

In collaboration with writer Alice Rawsthorn, her latest project, entitled Design Emergency, is a series of interviews on Instagram, which investigate design’s importance during the pandemic.

In this episode we discuss: coping with the crisis at MoMA; why she co-created Design Emergency as the virus took hold; falling into curating; the importance of rejection; creating the museum’s first-ever website; and how computer code is as fragile as ceramics.

Find out more about MoMA here

And you can sign up to my newsletter here

Sean Sutcliffe co-founded high-end furniture maker, Benchmark, with the late Sir Terence Conran in the early ’80s, when he was fresh out of Parnham College. Initially, he produced work for The Conran Shop, Heals and Habitat, before helping Terence change the face of the London restaurant scene by creating furniture and fittings for Bibendum and Quaglino’s. 

Subsequently, Benchmark has gone on to do commissions for the likes of the National Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the Eden Project, Vodafone’s world headquarters, and The Gherkin (or 30 St Mary Axe) to name just a few. Sutcliffe has also collaborated with the likes of Foster + Partners and David Rockwell and has just launched a new chair collection with the up-and-coming designer, Mac Collins. 

Most recently, the company made all the pieces for the Connected project – organised by the American Hardwood Export Council and on show at the Design Museum until 14 October 2020 – which featured furniture made from designers such as, Thomas Heatherwick, Jaime Hayon, Maria Bruun and Ini Archibong, among others. 

Starting with a team of three, the firm now employs 70 people. In other words, Sean has built a hugely successful business around skill, craft and, of course, wood.

In this episode we talk about: his relationship with Sir Terence; how his love of timber began; studying at the legendary Parnham College under John Makepeace; finding the heart of a craftsman; the future of work; and the importance of apprenticeships.

It’s searingly honest and really quite emotional. 

Learn more about Benchmark at: benchmarkfurniture.com

And learn more about me at: grantondesign.com 

Natsai Audrey Chieza is a designer who has built an extraordinary career by working with bacteria. She grew up in Zimbabwe, before moving to the UK at the age of 17 and training as an architect at Edinburgh University. Subsequently though, she changed tack and completed her MA on the Material Futures course at London’s Central Saint Martins. 

Now through her experimental studio, Faber Futures, she operates between biology, design and our wider society, working, for instance, with microorganisms to find new, ecologically-sound, processes for dying our clothes. 

As one magazine put it: ‘For Chieza, designing with biology presents unique opportunities to address significant ecological challenges, squaring the circle of sustainable production and finite resources.’ 

Her work has been exhibited in places such as the V&A, the London Design Museum, and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. She also has a wildly successful TED talk under her belt. More recently she has set up a multi-media storytelling platform with Ginkgo Bioworks, entitled Ferment TV, looking at the future of synthetic biology, Covid 19, Black Lives Matter and an array of other issues.

In this episode we discuss: growing up in Zimbabwe; racism in the design world; changing the way we consume; learning to work with bacteria; and why our future is biological. It’s kind of eclectic but hugely important.

Discover more about Natsai here.

And you can find out more about me and sign up to my newsletter here.

Julia Lohmann is a German-born designer who first came to prominence after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2004 with a chandelier fashioned from 50 preserved sheep stomachs. She followed that up with a stool made by casting the inside of a dead calf and, perhaps most famously, with her Cow Bench – essentially a sculpture of a cow’s body covered, anatomically correctly, with an entire hide. Both beautiful and a bit disturbing, the pieces were created as provocations, to make us consider the provenance of the stuff we wear and sit on everyday. 

However, more recently, she has become known for her research into kelp. In 2013, Julia set up the Department of Seaweed during a six-month residency at London’s V&A, which allowed her to start exploring the potential of this extraordinary material and she has been working with it ever since. 

In this episode we discuss: how she came across kelp in the first instance; inventing her own form of craft; the future role of museums; the importance of dissonance in her work; doing a guerrilla exhibition at Tate Modern with maggots; and falling out (briefly) with one of the greats of contemporary design. 

Julia is currently professor of contemporary design at Aalto University in Finland, and directs her eponymous design practice from Helsinki, so this interview was conducted over the internet.

You can find out more about Julia’s work at: julialohmann.co.uk 

And for more about me go to: grantondesign.com

Esna Su is an artist and jewellery designer, who was brought up in Turkey, near the Syrian border, before arriving in London in 2003. 

Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2015, she has developed a reputation for her extraordinary pieces that attempt to highlight the plight of refugees. Her wearable sculptures curve and bulge around the body, using traditional Turkish techniques of hasir, twining, needlework and crochet, as well as materials such as leather, cotton and paper rush.

In her collection entitled The Burden I, for example, knitted vegetable tanned leather cord is moulded around some of her most cherished objects, leaving hollow shapes that in the artist’s words ‘contain memories and the loss of the past’. 

It is stunning, deeply moving work that combines craft with protest and a deep-seated sense of empathy. As one writer put it: ‘Su actively seeks out both the horror and the beauty in her own cultural history as a way of unpicking contemporary issues surrounding cultural identities.’

In this episode, we talk about growing up in Turkey and the culture shock of coming to London; how the Syrian war has changed her home city of Antioch; why her mother didn’t want her to weave; the importance of memory in her pieces; and how making helped her recover from the death of her brother. 

It’s a delicate, and often, really quite touching interview. 

To find out more about Esna and her work: www.esnasu.co.uk

Dominic Wilcox is a London-based designer, artist and inventor. I first came across his work in 2002 when he created The War Bowl, in which he melted down plastic toy soldiers from a particular battle and turned them into, well, a bowl. Since then he has gone onto to create a singular space in the design world, with witty creations and drawings that are a combination of David Shrigley and Heath Robinson, with a dash of Vic and Bob thrown in to boot. 

In Wilcox’s hands your shoes can tell you where to go, a crane comes out of a hat on top of your head and serves you breakfast, while your car is made of stained glass. Oh, and there are art exhibitions designed specifically for dogs. 

But this isn’t whimsy. There is logic behind everything he does and a desire to turn the normal things around us into something interesting and surprising. To make life just a little bit better. 

More recently, he has been turning his attention to schools, through the Little Inventors Project, which encourages children to use their creativity and come up with new ideas of their own. And this year he has published two books, Little Inventors go Green and Little Inventors in Space.

In this episode he discusses the importance of creativity; how he comes up with his ideas; presenting at the United Nations; his fear of failure; and how he could have been an athletics champion.

To find out more about Dominic's work: dominicwilcox.com

The third 'lockdown special' of Material Matters features the radical knitter Freddie Robins. 

The common perception of knitting is that it’s a gentle, mindful activity. A thing you can do quietly in front of the television to relax after a hard day. Well Robins’ work is the antithesis of all that. It’s frequently dark, and always provocative. Her subject matter encompasses death, loss, religion, depression and challenges the perceived hierarchy of the art and craft worlds. It is work meant for the gallery rather than to be worn at home and comes with titles such as ‘Bad Mother’ and ‘I’m so Bloody Sad’. Kaffe Fassett she ain’t.

In this episode we discuss: the pivotal role her Godmother played in her childhood fascination with textiles; her loathing of conformity and the ‘danger of being ridden over by mediocrity’; her spell working in the fashion world; exploring the dark side through her work; having her pieces vandalised; and why knitting shouldn’t always be good for you. Not only that but we also chat about her appearance on Grand Designs with Kevin McCloud. So something for everybody I think. 

You can find out more about Freddie’s here: freddierobins.com

NB: Like all our lockdown episodes this has been recorded over the internet rather than in our guest’s studio. As a result the sound quality isn’t quite where we’d like it to be all the time. 

Junko Mori is one of the world’s leading metal artists, who has work in the collections of The Goldsmiths’ Company, The British Museum and numerous others. The Japanese born blacksmith is renowned for her extraordinary work in mild steel or silver that aggregates hundreds of individually forged elements to create pieces that are often inspired by nature in general and cell division in particular. As she has said: ‘The uncontrollable beauty is the core of my concept.’ 

We talk about growing up in her native Japan; how she ended up fixing boilers in Tokyo for a living; why she decided to move to the UK in the 1990s; the fundamental differences between the two cultures she has lived in; and how she learned English by going to the local pub. 

Most importantly we talk about metal and the meditative qualities of forging – it’s a bit like jogging only better apparently.

You can find out more about Junko’s work here: www.junkomori.com

Meanwhile her pieces can be purchased here: adriansassoon.com