Stay ConnectedIn Material Matters, host Grant Gibson talks to a designer, maker, artist, architect, engineer, or scientist about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discovers how it changed their lives and careers.
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Copyright: © 2021 Material Matters with Grant Gibson
Richard McVetis is an embroiderer, who is fascinated with time. Each of his, often monochromatic cuboid, pieces is meticulously made to explore the subtle differences that emerge through the ritualistic and repetitive nature of sewing.
More recently, he has taken inspiration from his family’s mining heritage to investigate a story of race and class through stitch. The artist says that he uses making ‘to understand the world, to give material form to abstract ideas, making the intangible tangible’.
Richard has shown his work around the globe and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including: the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and the Loewe Craft Prize in 2018. He currently has a solo show, Shaped by Time, running at Farnham’s Craft Study Centre.
In this episode we talk about: his new show in Farnham; the joy of slowing down and developing patience; drawing with thread; the majesty of the hand; his love of simplicity; the subjectivity of time; gender politics and embroidery; growing up in a mining community and how that has fed into his work; his other career in retail design; and why he never sews in public.
Elaine Yan Ling Ng is a Hong Kong-based designer and innovator. She founded her own studio, The Fabrick Lab, in 2013, after stints working with the likes of Nissan and Nokia.
Initially trained as a textile designer and weaver at London’s Central Saint Martins, her work encompasses traditional craft and cutting edge technology, with clients and collaborations ranging from Danish textile manufacturer Kvadrat to crystal company Swarovski, via UBS, and a group of traditional artisans in the Guizhou area of southern China.
Most recently, she has been working with design brand, Nature Squared, on CArrele (pictured), a range of tiles made from waste, or to be more precise, eggshells.
Elaine is a TED Fellow and has a fistful of design awards, including The Emerging Talent Award from Design Anthology, GGEF’s Eco Innovator Award, Swarovski’s Designer of the Future Award and Tatler’s Gen T Award.
In this episode we chat about: making tiles from eggshells (not surprisingly); learning to sew at the age of three; her ten pin bowling champion father; learning to love weaving; how maths and data feed into her work; designing student pieces with shape memory alloy; taking jobs at Nissan and Nokia; the changing design culture in China; setting up her own studio; how winning an award from Swarovski transformed her career; and bridging the gap between craft and industry.
Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien founded their eponymous design studio, Doshi Levien, in 2000. The duo, who are also real life partners and met while studying at London’s Royal College of Art in the late ’90s, came to prominence in 2003 with an extraordinary range of cookware, designed for French company, Tefal.
At the time, the pieces seemed different and more than a little exciting, a combination of contemporary European design and thinking from somewhere else entirely. In terms of form, each item was incredibly precise. However, flip the pots and pans over and, on the base, was an unexpectedly beautiful pattern.
Since then, the pair have gone on to work for the likes of Moroso, Hay, Kvadrat, BD Barcelona, galerie kreo, Cappellini and many others, creating textiles, furniture, glassware, shoes, lighting, and even ice cream, that deftly combines their contrasting skills, ideas and backgrounds.
In this episode we talk about Nipa’s relationship with colour and textiles; why card is a vital part of Jonathan’s process; growing up in India and Scotland respectively and how that affected their design thinking; living and designing together; facing prejudice; that initial project with Tefal; and working with Italian furniture giant Moroso.
Yet, mostly it’s about how two people with different hinterland have come together to create a single vision.
Peter Lord founded Aardman Animations, with his school friend David Sproxton, in 1972. The Bristol-based company rapidly became known for its witty, character-driven, stop-motion work in Plasticine, giving the world characters such as Morph, Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, as well as working on a dizzying array of feature films, shorts, TV shows, adverts, music videos, computer games, TV idents… Frankly the list goes on.
The studio has won Oscars for the likes of Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. While Peter himself has been nominated himself on several occasions, including for The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. Aardman recently picked up yet another nomination for its short, Robin Robin.
Peter was awarded a CBE in 2006 and received a Blue Peter Gold badge, no less, in 2015.
In this bumper episode we talk about: meeting his partner David Sproxton at the age of 12; why Bristol became so important to Aardman; picking up Plasticine for the first time and why it’s a transformative material; creating Morph; working with the legend that is Tony Hart; the genius of Nick Park; cracking Hollywood and wearing a jacket bought from Oxfam to the Oscars; the role technology plays in the studio’s output; and turning the company into an employee-owned business.
Alison Britton is a ceramicist, writer and educator, who emerged as part of a revolutionary group of artists from the Royal College of Art in the 1970s, which was determined to provided an alternative to the then-dominate school of pottery, led by Bernard Leach.
Instead, their work was angular, abstract, urban, a little bit feisty and, hey, Post-Modern, provoking one critic to write in Crafts magazine that these were pieces which rejoiced ‘in a hideousness that does not even have the excuse of eloquence’.
Her pots, which famously test the outer limits of function, have evolved over the years and are generally slab built with abstract surface finishes and an architectural quality. Meanwhile, her prose has long been a vital part of her practice and a collection of her writing, entitled Seeing Things, was published in 2013.
In 2016, she had a major retrospective of her work at the V&A in London, while she received an OBE for her services to art in 1990.
During this episode we talk about: picking up clay at nine years old; growing up with her teacher parents and becoming part of her father’s research; why she became fascinated by the material; the importance of language; studying under Hans Coper at the Royal College of Art; her happy revolution in the 1970s; the importance of ‘containment’ in her practice; and her changing attitude to the work of Bernard Leach.
Huge thanks must go to the brilliant specialist auction house and art consultancy dedicated to studio ceramics, Maak Contemporary Ceramics, for sponsoring this episode. www.maaklondon.com.
Tom Raffield is a designer and maker who has built a hugely successful business by creating an array of products from wood that have been steam bent into extraordinary shapes, and, subsequently, are sold by the likes of John Lewis and Heals. In doing so, he has effectively brought craft on to the British high street.
Not only that, but he has designed installations at the Chelsea Flower Show, created steam bent coffee kiosks in London’s Royal Parks, and built his own breathtaking house in south Cornwall, that included (inevitably) a steam bent timber facade and featured on Channel Four’s Grand Designs.
It’s safe to say that wood is a material that completely dominates Tom’s life.
In this episode we talk about: designing through making; the importance of trial and error in his practice; growing up in a garden centre and his fascination with sustainability; how his dyslexia enabled him to see the world differently; falling in love with Cornwall; and his determination to make craft (relatively) affordable. But most of all we chat about his obsession with wood in general – and steam bending in particular – and how the process has shaped his life and career.
Lucy Sparrow came to widespread attention in 2014 with an extraordinary installation held in a derelict site in London’s Eastend. At The Cornershop, she assiduously recreated everything you might find in a traditional newsagent – some 4000 items – in felt.
This was followed by The Warmongery, a gun shop in Bethnal Green and, in 2015, by Madame Roxy’s Erotic Emporium, a felt installation of a sex shop in London’s Soho. There have also been shows in the US and China, while this year she launched The Bourdon Street Chemist at the Lyndsey Ingram Gallery in Mayfair and The Billion Dollar Robbery at the Start Art Fair in the Saatchi Gallery.
Her pieces are warm, witty and genuinely joyful – containing references to the likes of Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. While the artist has described her work as being like ‘Blue Peter on acid’.
In this episode we talk about: her fascination with felt (obviously); turning an old ambulance station into her studio; her obsession with fluffy bananas; being ‘weird’ at school and dropping out of university; repairing her binmen’s trousers; owning an HGV licence; working as a lap dancer; the huge success of The Corner Shop; the importance of nostalgia in her work; why felt is so disarming; and her pieces as performance art.
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.
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