A Personal Investment
Designer Faye Toogood preparing her Manufracture installation for Stockholm Furniture Fair 2025, which will delve into the creative process behind her work.
With three months to go until the Stockholm Furniture Fair opens in February 2025, its guest of honour Faye Toogood is happy to admit to a certain sense of trepidation. “I’ve had to put my big boots on,” she explains, smiling, from her north London studio. “I need to be brave about the exposure.”
Toogood is right to anticipate public interest. Each year, the fair commissions a leading designer to create a Guest of Honour pavilion or installation that will greet visitors to the fair in the entrance hall of the Stockholmsmässan convention centre. It is a commission that sets the tone for the fair as a whole and which has previously fallen to practitioners including Nendo, Front and Ilse Crawford, often serving as a retrospective for the designer in question. This approach, however, does not fit Toogood’s ideas for her own turn in the spotlight. “A retrospective,” she quips, “would make me feel like I should hang up my boots – like I'm done.”
Rather than offer a summation of her work to date, Toogood has interpreted the Stockholm brief as an opportunity to shine a light on her wider working practice. Instead of providing an overview of the designs that she has created as part of her 15-year career, Toogood’s installation will offer a more intimate insight into the principles and ideas that underpin her studio, whose output spans sculpture, fashion and furniture. Toogood’s design work is diverse, frequently slipping between different modes of expression, but is often loosely united by a flair for sculptural form, visual wit, artisanal modes of making, and aesthetics that draw on English landscapes. In an effort to draw out these common threads between her projects, her display in Stockholm will look beyond their finished forms and instead delve into their creation. “I’m shifting the spotlight off of the final products and onto the process,” she explains. “It’s opening up the way that I work and the way that I produce.” It is an installation, she explains, that she has decided to call “Manufracture”.
“It’s the things I wouldn’t normally share and would keep to myself. It’s about the process of creativity, which is something that is not always talked about in design.”
The essence of Manufracture will be an assemblage of material from Toogood’s personal archive, collecting drawings, maquettes and development work from across her previous furniture designs, and exhibiting it on industrial racking at the entrance to the fair. In place of a roll call of her celebrated finished designs, such as her gently enveloping Roly-Poly chair or the playfully provocative Rude rugs for CC-Tapis, Toogood intends to look behind the scenes. “If you opened up my head and looked inside, this is how it would look,” she explains. “It’s the things I wouldn’t normally share and would keep to myself. It’s about the process of creativity, which is something that is not always talked about in design.” In this vein, the space will forego any sense of obvious spectacle and instead pursue an approach that is more exhibition-like in tone. “It's going to be much more constant and quieter than these spaces sometimes are,” she explains. “That sense of intimacy is important to me.”
Manufracture’s focus on process, as its name suggests, is partly motivated by Toogood’s dissatisfaction with elements of contemporary mass production. Toogood’s studio has long championed craft and localised production, with her self-produced works such as the tool-like Spade chair or shaggily rounded Gummy seating collection all produced by small-scale fabricators and artisans, and she has often expressed concern with heavily globalised supply chains in which components and products are shipped back and forth around the world, as well as modes of manufacturing that pay little attention towards material provenance. “Our whole manufacturing process is broken,” she explains. “There are so many parts of what we're doing that just don't make sense.” Manufracture, in this sense, aims to open up questions around how and why we manufacture and consume design – a key question for the 2025 edition of the Stockholm Furniture Fair, which is being curated under the overarching theme of “Connecting the Dots” by new director Daniel Heckscher.
Challenging the present realities of furniture manufacture, Toogood acknowledges, is a pointed message to display within the context of an international trade fair, but one that she feels will prompt useful debate at the fair’s opening on 4 February 2025 – an ambition supported by the fair’s plans for an extensive range of public discussions and keynote talks from leading designers and architects throughout its run. “The context is a space where many people and companies will feel that they’ve got things right [around how they manufacture], but these conversations still need to happen,” Toogood explains, whose self-produced work is complemented by occasional, carefully curated collections with brands such as Tacchini, Hem and Vaarni. “We are still making too much in the wrong places in the world, with not enough care, with not enough attention to local manufacturing, and with not enough attention to materials and waste,” she adds. “I don't have the answers to those questions, obviously, but I would like people to re-engage with that conversation.”
The beginnings of potential answers to these questions do, however, come through in Toogood’s intention for Manufacture to focus on the processes that lie behind products. Toogood describes the installation as “a personal sketchbook” and a platform that is intended to represent the process through which designers and artists work. As opposed to operating as a display of finished objects, Toogood hopes that her installation will explore the value that creative practitioners bring to craft and industry through the manner in which they approach their work, and shine a light onto the human stories that underlie all design.
Instead of seeing design as a discipline that always offers resolved answers to set questions, Toogood hopes that Manufracture will present the field as also grounded in human subjectivities and self-expression. “AI will soon be able to generate a better-looking chair than I can,” she suggests pithily, “so what is it that I can bring that is unique and is going to make us continue to connect to objects?” Toogood’s belief is that a key value within designed objects is the expression of care and the individuality of the designers and makers who have produced them. “For me, it is about putting my creativity and putting my instinct into everything that I do,” she explains.
“My feeling is always that the maquette has the right energy, and it’s then a question of how to best keep that energy in the final design.”
To communicate this, Manufracture’s exterior will be adorned with different representations of Toogood’s own hands – photographs, linocuts, prints and drawings. “The installation is just about getting everybody to realise what goes into making a product,” she says. “We should invest time in creativity and not simply assume that the creative bit can be done with technology and that we can extract the human from that.”
The clearest expression of this idea within Manufracture are Toogood’s maquettes – the early models that she creates from tape, wire, card and clay, and which she argues are “absolutely essential, above and beyond any sketch” to her work. The maquettes on display in Stockholm will represent “that very first nucleus of an idea, that very first moment”, Toogood explains, which subsequently provide the guiding force in all of her product development. “It's my job to keep the magic present in the maquette all the way to the end of the final product,” she explains. “They’re rough, but I still see magic, whereas other designers might see faults or issues that they hope to resolve. My feeling is always that the maquette has the right energy and it’s then a question of how to best keep that energy in the final design.”
This journey through an idea’s development is what guests to the Stockholm Furniture Fair will be drawn along in February 2025. With this in mind, Toogood and her colleagues have now begun the process of looking back through her archive in order determine what specifically will be displayed during the fair. “I am slightly fearful about that whole process, because it's a bit like when you move house and find stuff from 20 years ago that feels like it was from another life,” Toogood says. “I don't quite know what I'm going to find, so I'm excited, but also quite nervous.”
Despite this uncertainty, Toogood still has clear ideas about what kind of work the installation will and won’t encompass. “It won't be a case of showing the most successful project or a chair that everybody loves,” she explains. “There will be self analysis going on and exploring what was meaningful to me or felt important to me at the time it was being investigated.” Regardless of the individual decisions taken during this curation, however, Toogood is adamant about one key aspect of the final result: “Manufracture will be a side of myself that I haven’t shared before.”
Manufracture will be on display as part of the 2025 Stockholm Furniture Fair, which runs from 4-8 February at the Stockholmsmässan. You can book tickets to the event here.
This article was made for the Stockholm Furniture Fair.