Material Matters with Grant Gibson

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 manufacture...

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...

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...

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 mag...

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, cr...

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 s...

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 recentl...

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 near...

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...

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 finis...

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, ra...

Claire Wilcox is best known for her work as senior curator of fashion at the V&A, where she has staged shows such as Radical Fashion , Vivienne Westwood , The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57 , and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty , as well as launching the groundbreaking, Fashion in Motion in 1999.  She is also professor in fashion curation at the London College of Fashion and...

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...

Emma Witter is an emerging artist who has forged a reputation with her delicate sculptures that often resemble flowers but are created, rather intriguingly, from animal bone, such as oxtail and chicken feet. Her pieces straddle our sense of beauty and the macabre. As she told one writer: ‘I am fascinated with the diversity of death and burial rituals across the world… In the floral motifs, I do li...

Chris Day is an emerging artist with a fascinating hinterland.  The glassblower was a plumber and heating engineer in the Midlands for two decades before deciding to change his life.  Since graduating from Wolverhampton University in 2019, his rise has been startling. That same year, he received a special commendation at the British Glass Biennale, which was followed by a solo show at Vessel Galle...

My final guest of the latest series is Emily Johnson, co-founder of the Stoke-on-Trent-based, ceramics company 1882 Ltd. Clay is part of the former TV executive’s DNA. She is the fifth generation of Johnson to work in the industry, with her father and business partner, Chris, spending over 30 years as a production director of Wedgwood, after it bought the family firm in 1964. Since launching a dec...

As regular listeners will know, every once in a while I break free of Material Matters ’ self-imposed format and meet someone with an overview of the design world. And in this episode, I’m delighted to chat with Sir John Sorrell CBE.  It’s a question really of where to start with John’s career (but here goes). He was chair of the Design Council from 1994-2000; chair of CABE (Commission for Archite...

What does an artist do when the material he has devoted his working life to runs out?  Garry Fabian Miller is a renowned photographer, who doesn’t use a camera in his practice. Instead, he works in his darkroom and relies on a combination of light and cibachrome paper, using exposures that can last between one to twenty hours.   His extraordinary, abstract pieces are inspired by nature and the thi...

This episode investigates the near-future and how material technology could transform the way we live. Mark Miodownik is the UCL professor of materials & society. He received his PhD in turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford University, and has worked as a materials engineer in the USA, Ireland and the UK. For more than twenty years he has championed materials science research that links to the...

One of the joys of Material Matters is that it allows me to roam across disciplines. So one week I can discuss carbon fibre and Formula 1 racing with John Barnard, while in the next I could be talking taxidermy with fine artist Polly Morgan.  My guest in this episode is the excellent Sarah Wigglesworth. I think it’s fair to say that Sarah has been a pioneer of sustainable architecture through her...

Jasleen Kaur is an artist, designer and maker, who graduated from the jewellery and metal course at the Royal College of Art in 2010. Since then her practice has encompassed pieces created for gallery spaces as well as work that is socially-engaged. She has described herself, rather intriguingly, as a ‘cobbler’.  Recently, she has created films and pieces of text which investigate untold histories...

Alice Potts is a material researcher, who ‘explores the poetry of the human fluids’. She caused quite a storm when she graduated from the fashion department of the Royal College of Art in 2018 with a collection of crystals grown on various garments – including an extraordinary pair of ballet shoes dyed in red cabbage juice. These crystals were a little different though as they were created from th...

Thomas Thwaites was one of the first people I wanted to interview when I started Material Matters in 2019. I’m not entirely certain why it has taken so long to arrange a chat. The designer graduated from the Design Interactions course of Royal College of Art in 2009, with a piece that has gone on to become genuinely iconic.  In The Toaster Project , Thwaites set out to make this industrially manuf...

Gregg Buchbinder is the owner of US-based furniture manufacturer, Emeco. The Electrical Machine and Equipment Company was founded in 1944 and quickly created the 1006 chair for the US Navy. The piece, made out of recycled aluminium, has gone on to become a design classic but its story is far from straightforward.  By the time Buchbinder bought the firm from his father in 1998, its factory in Hanov...

Yinka Ilori started his practice from his parents’ back garden in 2011, after receiving a £3000 loan from the Prince’s Trust. Initially, the designer made his name by creating a string of chairs, notable for their strong use of colour that came from his Nigerian heritage, and a profound sense of narrative – the pieces were often based on the stories of old school friends and parables his parents t...