For this episode Material Matters travelled to Paris to chat to up-and-coming designer Marlene Huissoud about her relationship with propolis (or bee glue) – a substance made up of wax and resin that bees collect from vegetation and use to seal the honey frames inside their hive. Working the material a little like glass, the Central Saint Martin’s graduate has created a series of cooly dark, vaguely threatening, vessels as well as a number of other objects. During our chat we discuss what it was ...
Sep 04, 2019•48 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Tom Dixon is one of the biggest names in design with ‘hubs’ in New York, Hong Kong SAR, China, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo. In this episode we sat down in his King’s Cross complex to discuss his days welding scrap metal into pieces of baroque furniture but we got into quite a lot more besides. There’s his appearance on Top of the Pops, for example. And the time when some furniture he’d produced for shoe designer Patrick Cox fell apart at a dinner party. We hear what London used to be like in t...
Aug 28, 2019•51 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Adam Nathaniel Furman is an artist and designer based in London. His work has been exhibited in Paris, New York, Milan, Rome, Eindhoven, Minneapolis, Portland, Kortrijk, Tel Aviv, Veszprem, Mumbai, Vienna and Glasgow as well as his home city, and is held in the collections of the Design Museum, Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Abet Museum, and the Architectural Association. He has also played a fundamental role in the recent re-appraisal of post-modernist architecture and...
May 29, 2019•47 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Mourne Textiles is a rather brilliant hand-woven textile company based in Northern Ireland. It was founded by Gerd Hay-Edie after the Second World War and quickly went on to create pieces for the likes of Robin Day, Terence Conran, Liberty of London and fashion designer Sybil Connolly, becoming a staple of British modernism. After some difficult years, it has re-emerged from the doldrums and appears to be in fine fettle under the aegis of Gerd’s grandson Mario Sierra. In this episode Mario discu...
May 22, 2019•37 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Sculptor Laura Ellen Bacon weaves extraordinary structures out of willow. Her work has been shown in venues such as the Saatchi Gallery, Chatsworth, New Art Centre, Somerset House, Sudeley Castle (for Sotheby’s) and Blackwell – The Arts and Crafts House in Cumbria. Meanwhile, in 2017 she was a finalist of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize at the V&A and was selected for Jerwood Contemporary Makers in 2010. In this episode she talks about growing up on a fruit farm in Derbyshire; her childhood obs...
May 15, 2019•45 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Simone ten Hompel started her career as an apprentice blacksmith but has gone on to become one of the most influential metal artists in the world. Over the years she has had a major retrospective at the Ruthin Craft Centre and shown her work at fairs such as Collect at the Saatchi Gallery and What is Luxury? at London’s V&A. In an extraordinary interview she discusses: her ‘alternative’ East London studio; getting her first tool box at the age of six; her childhood in West Germany; her abili...
May 08, 2019•44 min•Season 2Ep. 3
James Shaw is an up-and-coming designer who has made a name for himself through his use of that most controversial of materials – plastic. Using a gun-like mini-extruder, he produces sausages of the material that he subsequently manipulates to create a huge variety of products – from candlesticks to tables. His work is an attempt to change its perception, to persuade people to treasure plastic, rather than using it once before burying it in the ground, During this episode we investigate our age ...
May 01, 2019•48 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Kate Malone is one of Britain’s most important ceramicists, with pieces in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Manchester Art Gallery and the V&A, to name just a few. She works in many different areas, from nature-inspired gallery pieces to batch production mugs via public art and architectural commissions – as she puts it rather wonderfully, her projects range in value from £25 to £1.5 million. In a discussion that can only be described as wide-ranging, we talk about her fa...
Apr 24, 2019•46 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Bill Amberg was the first ever guest on the Material Matters podcast. The renowned leather designer is arguably best known for his bags but over the years he has increasingly worked on architectural projects with the likes of David Chipperfield at the RA and MUMA at Westminster Abbey. He is a master of his craft and a really good bloke to boot. In this episode we talked about his upbringing in Northampton (did you know his mum used to work with Alvar Aalto?), learning his trade in Australia, for...
Jan 22, 2019•31 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Every now and again I break the format of the podcast and speak to a critic or someone who can provide an overview of the field. In series one I featured the New York-based curator and commentator Glenn Adamson. The fact that he also had a new book out – entitled Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects – was an added bonus. I think it’s safe to say that we cover a fair amount of turf in our conversation: the relationship between academia and craft, the role of museums in our digital ag...
Jan 22, 2019•36 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Peter Layton is one of the pioneers of the British studio glass movement. During our interview Peter recounts an extraordinary life that has included fleeing Eastern Europe from the Nazis and settling as an immigrant in Bradford, studying ceramics under the likes of Ruth Duckworth (and not Dickinson as your tongue-tied host accidentally said) at the Central School of Art and Design, meeting the wildly influential glass artist Harvey Littleton while he was teaching in the US, and burning himself ...
Jan 22, 2019•35 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Celia Pym is an artist who has taken darning out of the domestic sphere and into galleries and museums. In this episode we chat about a career that has encompassed studying sculpture at Harvard via jobs in teaching and nursing – as well as a stint at the Royal College of Art – to being a finalist of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize in 2018. One of the intriguing elements of Pym’s work is that she uses the process of darning and the objects that are brought to her to get to know people. As she told m...
Jan 22, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Edmund de Waal is that rarest of creatures, a potter who has broken out of the crafts world into the fine art market. He also happens to be a best-selling author of books such as The Hare with Amber Eyes and The White Road as well as a lucid and thoughtful speaker and curator. His work has been shown around the world in places such as the RA, Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, the V&A and the Ateneo Veneto in Venice. His first set design featured in the 2017/18 Season at the Royal Opera House f...
Jan 22, 2019•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Eleanor Lakelin appeared on in the first series of Material Matters and is one of the UK’s leading woodturners, concentrating on making an array of vessels since 2011. As she explains: ‘I’m fascinated by wood as a living, breathing substance with its own history of growth and struggle centuries beyond our own. I’m particularly inspired by the organic mayhem and creative possibilities of burred wood. This proliferation of cells, formed over decades or even centuries as a reaction to stress or as ...
Jan 22, 2019•29 min•Season 1Ep. 2
