Material Matters With Grant Gibson

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 decade ago, 1882 Ltd has worked with an eclectic roster of designers including: Max Lamb, Faye Toogood, former Material Matters guest Barnaby Barford, architect John Pawson and fashion designer Paul Smith. According to the company’s own official blurb, at its core is a combination of ‘progressive design and industrial craftsmanship’. So why did she decide to leave television and return to clay? And what’s it like to launch a new manufacturing company in Stoke-on-Trent in the 21st century?In this episode we talk about: making through the pandemic; opening a brand new production unit (or factory) at Wedgwood; why she init

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 Architecture and the Built Environment) from 2004-2009; vice-president of the Chartered Society of Designers from 1989-1992; and chairman of the Design Business Association from 1990-1992. In 2014, he founded the Creative Industries Federation, stepping down as chair in 2017. Not content with any of that, he co-founded the London Design Festival in 2003, as well as the London Design Biennale in 2016 – both with Ben Evans. Perhaps most importantly, in 1999 he co-founded The Sorrell Foundation with his wife Frances, that aims to inspire creativity in young people and improve lives with good design. Subsequently, they co-founded

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 things he sees on walks around his home in Dartmoor. His work is held in an array of public and private collections, including MoMA in New York, the Sir Elton John Collection and the V&A in London. Meanwhile his latest book – and there have been many – is entitled Blaze and features a forward from an old friend of the show, Edmund de Waal.Trouble is that, thanks to the rise of digital photography, production of cibachrome halted in 2012 and supplies have dwindled to nothing. This is the story of how he has coped.  In this episode we talk about: the vital role light and cibachrome paper have played in his life; the imp

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 arts and humanities, medicine, and society. This culminated in the establishment of the UCL Institute of Making, where he is a director and runs the research programme.He’s the author of two highly successful – and, I think importantly, incredibly accessible – books on materials, Stuff Matters and Liquid and regularly presents TV and radio programmes about material science on the BBC. Most recently, however, he’s co-chaired a working group that has just delivered a fascinating, and far reaching, report for the Royal Society, entitled Animate Materials, which is the focus of much of our chat. In the episode we talk a

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 eponymous practice. Over the years projects have included cultural centres such as Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, housing schemes like Umpire View in Harrow and Trent Basin in Nottingham, and a fistful of thoughtful, sensitively-designed schools, including Roseacres Primary School in Essex and Mellor Primary School in the Peak District. She made her name though with her own home-cum-office, the revolutionary Stock Orchard Street, designed with partner Jeremy Till. The building, which is 20 years old this year, used a plethora of low tech materials such as rubble, sandbags and, most famously, straw bales to change the w

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 and notions of identity that are both personal – detailing her Sikh background from Glasgow – and, in some instances, to do with this nation’s colonial past. And, more often that not, embedded in all this somewhere is food. In a commission for the Serpentine Gallery, entitled Everyday Resistance, Kaur worked collaboratively with children and mothers from The Portman Early Childhood Centre, based in London’s Edgware, and used the micro-politics of cooking and eating together to consider and respond to issues facing the local community.  This is art with a very real purpose. As well as exhibiting in places such as MIMA

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 the user’s own sweat.  Unsurprisingly perhaps,  the collection was entitled PERSPIRE and Alice was quickly picked up by some of the fashion world’s big beasts, including Nick Knight and Sarah Mower.In 2019, she was part of the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 – London’s most influential people and her pieces have been shown everywhere from the Onassis Foundation in Athens to the Philadelphia Museum in the US via the V&A in London. A collection of 20 facemasks fashioned from biodegradable plastic – made from food waste sourced from local food markets, butchers and households – as well as a limited edition jewellery

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 manufactured product by hand. He mined his own iron ore, extracted copper from water and attempted to persuade BP to allow him onto an oil rig to bring back a jug of crude. His adventure was published as a (highly readable) book in 2011. And not satisfied with that, a few years later this most unpredictable of creatives came up with another book. Goatman: How I took a Holiday from Being Human charted his quest to live his life as a goat and cross the Alps on all fours, eating grass along the route.It was described by designer Anthony Dunne as ‘a wonderfully eccentric, at times absurd, but always thoughtful reflection on one

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 Hanover, Pensylvania was on the edge of closure. He pumped its chest with a roster of high profile designers and pieces, starting with the Hudson chair by Philippe Starck in 2000.Since then the company has gone on to work with the likes of Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Michael Young, Jasper Morrison and Nendo to name just a few. Not only that but Emeco has been innovative with its use of materials too. In 2010, the company launched a new version of the Navy Chair made from 111 recycled Coca Cola bottles, finding a new use for plastic that otherwise would have been destined for landfill. Further research into the material led i

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 told him as a child. However, after creating his eponymous studio in 2017, the scale of his work started to change. Happy Street is a permanent installation in a Battersea underpass, for instance, while The Colour Palace – a timber pavilion inspired by markets in Lagos – was installed in the grounds of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2019. More recently his public art installation, in support of the NHS, at London’s Blackfriars brought joy at a moment when it was desperately needed. Written in bright pink letters it said simply: ‘Better Days Are Coming, I promise.’ According to architect Sir David Adjaye: ‘His furnitur

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 leav

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; maki

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 few. Subsequently, he segued into films – directing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Coneheads, and Mike Bassett: England manager – as well as the small screen, with recent credits including The Durrells on the BBC. However, in 2016 he established Margent Farm on a 53-acre site in the Cambridgeshire countryside where he grows hemp – a rather magical but misunderstood crop, which has an array of possible uses and the potential to change all our lives for the better. Not only that but he used the crop as the key material to build his own farm house, designed by Practice Architecture.In this episode we talk about: deciding t

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

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’ and ‘slow activism’, often using stitching and embroidery as a fundamental part of its process. Since then the organisation has grown in size and has thousands of members, while Sarah has delivered talks and lectures around the globe, launched a slew of successful campaigns and worked with the likes of the V&A, Secret Cinema and Unicef. She has also done a TEDx talk that has been seen by more than a million people. In this episode we talk about: the art and strategy behind gentle protesting; why she became disillusioned with traditional forms of activism; picking up her first cross-stitch kit; the importance of b

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 for her thoughts and ideas’. This is clay as performance art but, perhaps most importantly, in her hands, the material becomes extremely beautiful. Phoebe was the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011, picked up the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize in 2017 for a fountain entitled Triumph of the Immaterial, and was a finalist for the Arts Foundation 25th anniversary awards in 2018. She’s had exhibitions at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, a solo show at the University of Hawaii and residencies at Camden Arts Centre and the V&A, among other places. In this episode we talk about: the relationship b

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 beeswax work took one week, and approximately 40,000 bees, to create. It is now in MoMA’s permanent collection in New York. Since then, the designer has worked with a range of other materials, including paper, which he turned on a lathe, ink from Bic biros, and hand-welded layers of stainless steel, as well as refining the Made by Bees series. He has had major solo exhibitions in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Brussels, while his pieces are in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Corning Museum of Glass and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, to name just a handful.In this episode we discuss: b

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. Best known for his use of wood, in 2015 he launched a new product FORMcard, essentially a small piece of bio-plastic which can be heated and then moulded, allowing users to mend their own products. His work has been exhibited at New York’s MoMA, Design Miami, Design Museum Holon, the V&A, and the Design Museum in London. He has also created commissions for the likes of Paul Smith, Bloomberg  and The Museum of Childhood. And if that wasn’t enough, he teaches design at London Metropolitan University. In this episode we talk about: his issues with passive consumption and sustainability; his collecting habit; why h

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. In her hands, a prone, and obviously lifeless, bird dangles from a string attached to a single red balloon; a white rat can be found filling a champagne glass; and a stag’s belly is filled with tiny bats. As one critic wrote: ‘These animals are not restored to life, but so to speak, resuscitated into their deaths.’ Her latest show, entitled How to Behave at Home, opened at London’s Bomb Factory Art Foundation on 14 October 2020 and features snakes which spill out of cast concrete and polystyrene containers. Perhaps signalling a few direction. In this episode we talk about: how local nail bars played a vital role in

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