Material Matters with Grant Gibson

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...

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 com...

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 Londo...

Usually on Material Matters I speak to a combination of designers, architects, artists or makers. This episode is a little bit different. Steve Barron is a multi-award winning movie and television director, who made his name in the eighties with a slew of iconic videos featuring artists such as: Michael Jackson, Dire Straits, A-ha, Madonna, Paul McCartney, David Bowie and The Jam to name just a fe...

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 Antonel...

Sarah Corbett is an award-winning campaigner and author. She began her career in activism at the ripe old age of three and went on to have a successful career working for NGOs including Christian Aid, Oxfam and the UK Government Department for International Development.  However, her life took a different turn in 2009, when she created the Craftivist Collective, which champions ‘gentle protesting’...

Phoebe Cummings is an artist who works in clay. Intriguingly, she uses the material in its raw form – so unfired and unglazed – for sculptures that are usually site specific. Inspired by nature (either real or imagined), her pieces are ornate, fragile and, often, decay over time – giving them a wistful dynamism. The writer, Imogen Greenhalgh, has described them rather lyrically as ‘holding bays fo...

Tomáš Libertíny is an artist and designer, who was born in Slovakia but currently lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He burst into the wider consciousness with his Honeycomb Vase during Milan’s Design Week in 2007. For the extraordinary piece, Libertíny constructed vase-shaped beehive scaffolds and, essentially, let nature take its course, in a process he dubbed ‘slow prototyping’. The...

Peter Marigold is a London-based product designer who originally studied sculpture at Central St Martins before changing tack and enrolling at the Royal College of Art in 2004. Since then he has created gallery pieces for the likes of Libby Sellers and, more recently, Sarah Myerscough, had furniture and shelving manufactured by SCP and others, as well as creating a porcelain collection for Meissen...

Polly Morgan is an artist who has been hugely responsible for the recent revival of interest in taxidermy, an art form more readily associated with the Victorians, hunting trophies, and dusty bell jars. The one-time English Literature graduate and bar manager has set about upsetting those traditions, creating dark, but alluring, pieces that often place her creatures in disorientating environments....

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 d...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 Ro...

The final episode of this special ‘lockdown’ series of Material Matters features Alexis Peskine. I came across the Paris-based artist’s work at last year’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at London’s Somerset House and described it in a subsequent Instagram post as ‘breathtaking’.  Rather than using canvas, Peskine takes an earth and coffee-stained timber base. And instead of paint, he hammers...

In the fifth ‘lockdown special’ of Material Matters, I speak to the brilliant Lin Cheung. Lin is one of the world’s most intriguing jewellery designers, her output vacillating between installation pieces, work that contains political and social commentary, as well as high profile commissions, including the medals for the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.  She picked up an Arts Foundation Award in 2...

The fourth ‘lockdown special’ episode of Material Matters features the excellent Fernando Laposse. The up-and-coming designer has made his name in recent years with his colourfully beautiful veneer, Totomoxtle, which is made from the husks of Mexican corn grown in the tiny village of Tonahuixtla.  The product was included in last year’s exhibition Food: Bigger than the Plate at the Victoria and Al...

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,...

The second ‘lockdown special’ episode of Material Matters features the excellent Sheridan Coakley. The entrepreneur cut his teeth as a modern furniture dealer before founding the iconic SCP – or Sheridan Coakley Products – in London’s Shoreditch during the mid-eighties.  The manufacturer and retailer burst onto the nascent British design scene with pieces by Jasper Morrison and Matthew Hilton. In...