Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Claudy Jongstra is a Dutch artist and designer who has become globally renowned for her, often monumental, textile installations and tapestries made from wool.  After establishing her studio in Friesland in the Dutch countryside during 2001, she started an ecological venture, which involved maintaining a herd of indigenous sheep and creating a biodynamic farm near her studio to grow plants used fo...

Tim Minshall is an expert in manufacturing and innovation. He is the inaugural Dr John C Taylor professor of innovation at the University of Cambridge, the head of the Engineering Department’s Institute for Manufacturing and a fellow of Churchill College. Importantly too, he has published a new book. Your Life is Manufactured: How we make things, why it matters and how we can do it better does exa...

Seetal Solanki describes herself as a materials translator and has been in the vanguard of material thinking since she launched her practice, Ma-tt-er, in 2015.  Three years later she produced the hugely influential book, Why Materials Matter , and she has gone on to work with a variety of brands, including Nike, Selfridges and Potato Head in Bali, as well as teaching at institutions such as Centr...

Callum Robinson makes all sorts of things out of wood, as well as being the creative director of Method Studio, the company he established with his wife, Marisa Giannasi, 15 years ago.  In 2024, he published a fascinating, lyrical memoir. Ingrained: The making of a craftsman , tells the story of his lifelong fascination with his material of choice, his relationship with his woodworker father, and...

Neil Brownsword is one of the most intriguing – and uncompromising – ceramic artists currently practicing in the UK. His work is inspired by the de-industrialisation of his home city, Stoke-on-Trent, and, appropriately enough, his career in ceramics began when he worked as an apprentice in the Wedgwood factory as a 16 year old in the mid 1980s. Subsequently, he went on to study at the University o...

Zandra Rhodes is one of the most recognisable and influential figures in fashion, as well as the founder of the Fashion and Textile Museum in London.  Describing herself as both ‘chaotic’ and ‘fastidious’, she possesses a unique sense of colour and pattern. Over the years, she has dressed some of the world’s most famous people from Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Harry and Diana Ross to...

Aaron Betsky is a US-based writer, educator and critic, who has served as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as a curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  He has also written over 20 books with subjects ranging from Zaha Hadid, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Dutch architecture practice MVRDV to the relationsh...

Nicole Rycroft is the founder and executive director of the award-winning environmental not-for-profit, Canopy. Since it launched in 1999, the Vancouver-based organisation has worked with more than 950 companies – including Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Puma – to ‘develop innovative solutions and make their supply chains more sustainable to help protect our world’s remaining ancient and endangere...

Mark Hearld is an artist and designer who has a fascination with flora and fauna and has worked in a range of different media – including lithographic and linocut prints, painting, ceramics, textiles and tapestry. However, he is best known for his collage pieces.  A graduate of Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, he has curated installations and exhibitions at York Art Gallery and...

Todd Bracher is a US-based product designer who has worked with brands such as Humanscale, 3M, Herman Miller, Georg Jensen and Issey Miyake through his eponymous studio, winning a slew of awards along the way.  More recently, he created another company, Betterlab, in which he collaborates with scientists and innovators to, in his words, ‘shape emerging research and foundational technologies into g...

Zena Holloway is a bio-designer and founder of Rootfull, which creates exquisite clothes, lights and sculptures from grass roots.  She started her career as an underwater photographer, doing extraordinary high-end fashion shoots, as well as working with the likes of Kylie Minogue, Tom Daley, Katie Price and numerous other celebrities. At the same time, she was capturing the effects of pollution on...

Alkesh Parmar is a designer and researcher. Over the years, he has hollowed out champagne corks and turned them into chandeliers, as well as transforming traditional Indian terracotta cups into light fittings. But he is best known for his work with citrus peel in general – and orange peel in particular. Using a material generally thought of as waste, he has created a variety of extraordinary produ...

Sanne Visser is a Dutch-born, London-based designer. She describes herself as a ‘material explorer, maker and researcher’, who is best known for a string of installations and products using human hair. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins a little under a decade ago, she has exhibited all over the world and been nominated for a number of awards.  Happily too, she will be one of the stars of...

Artist Bharti Kher was brought up in England before moving to India almost on a whim in the early ’90s. Since then, she has established herself as a major player on the international art scene.  Her sculptures talk about women’s place in society and the female body. She has a fascination with mythology and mixing the real with the magical, as well as a profound interest in materials and found obje...

Oliver Heath is a designer, architect, author and one of the world’s leading advocates for biophilic design. Along with his team and the sustainable platform Planted, he currently has an exhibition at the Roca Gallery in South London, which focuses firmly on bio design – illustrating what it is, why it’s important, and how it can be used in the spaces we inhabit.  Oliver has been a fixture on our...

Ernest Scheyder is an author and senior correspondent for Reuters. His new book, The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives , looks at the impact of the green transition in the US – and, more particularly, the tensions over the increasing need to mine for metals to decarbonise the grid (and power a plethora of devices) against the nation’s desire to conserve the envir...

Adi Toch is one of the world’s most fascinating metal artists, who over the years has buried her pieces for months on end before digging them up, and even made them react to sound. She has also taken part in collaborations with furniture makers and glass artists.  Adi has work in the permanent collections of the V&A, The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland, and t...

Jonathan Smales is a housing developer like few others. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Nature, whose new project, The Phoenix, on the outskirts of Lewes, East Sussex in the UK, has just won planning permission.  What makes the development different? The Phoenix will contain 685 homes, designed by a roster of fascinating architects, who will be working in materials such as cro...

Adam Yeats is co-founder and managing director of Bert Frank, one of the UK’s leading lighting companies. Yeats started the brand with designer, Robbie Llewellyn, in 2013. Since then it has gone from strength to strength, opening a showroom in London’s Clerkenwell in 2019, exhibiting at home and abroad, and winning the Elle Decoration British Design Award for Lighting in 2016. The company was also...

Ptolemy Mann is a British artist who came to widespread attention with her woven textile pieces, often stretched across a frame and notable for her extraordinary use of colour.  More recently, her practice shifted and she has turned to painting on paper with fascinating – and inevitably colourful – results. Her latest pieces combine the two, as she paints on her hand-woven artworks.  Ptolemy is ha...

Bas van Abel founded Fairphone in 2013. The company attempts to transform the way our smartphones are manufactured, by reducing e-waste, sourcing conflict-free minerals, and improving working conditions in its supply chain. It creates a product consumers are encouraged to keep longer and which, importantly, they can also repair themselves.  Fairphone was an immediate hit, attracting 25,000 orders...

Can memory itself be a raw material for design? John Tuomey, co-founder of the award-winning practice O'Donnell + Tuomey joins Grant Gibson to discuss how his formative years in rural Ireland continue to shape his landmark architectural projects. In this episode, we dive into the relationship between landscape, narrative, and building. We discuss: First Quarter : The process of writing his ly...

Sara Grady and Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather in 2020. The duo aim in their own words ‘to link leather with exemplary farming and, in doing so, to redefine leather as an agricultural product’. All of which means creating a new network of systems within the industry. Essentially, the pair are attempting to make the material we buy traceable in the same way food is.  In 2022, they...

Florian Gadsby is a bit of a phenomenon. The ceramicist currently has a new show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and has also published a memoir, By My Hands, that charts his formative years with clay, including apprenticeships in the UK and, most intriguingly, Japan.  Essentially, it unpicks his route to becoming a fully, fledged professional potter, while at the same time, providing tips about...

Christien Meindertsma is a Dutch designer who has a fascination with materials. She currently has an installation at the V&A, entitled Re-forming Waste, which shows new work based around her interest in linoleum, as well as technological advances with the material she has described as her first love, wool. Christien came to wider attention initially when she graduated from the Design Academy E...