LDF Diaries 2023: Day Five
Porcelain lighting by Shelley Simpson and Zachary Hanna for Mud Australia (image: courtesy of Mud Australia).
As the 2023 London Design Festival (LDF) enters its final stages, Disegno’s editorial team rounds up a series of new products from Hay, Mud Australia, Aram and others; pays a visit to POoR Collective’s group show; and takes in a display of experimental furniture from Chair of Virtue.
Resolve Collective’s posters, exhibited as part of POoR Collective’s Powershift (image: Stagg Studio).
Future facing
POoR Collective, the practice of Shawn Adams, Larry Botchway, Ben Spry, and Matt Harvey-Agyemang, were selected as the recipient of LDF's 2023 Emerging Design Medal, with the festival praising the group’s “development of communities within the built environment and driving positive social change”. Fitting, then, that the studio’s public contribution to the festival, Powershift, puts these virtues front and centre. Powershift is a group show that highlights the work of emerging designers and artists, with a particular focus on collective practice and the potential for creative work to reshape existing power dynamics. There is, as such, work from Resolve Collective, who have created a fascinating display of posters from their previous work (a medium that is, by its nature, public-facing and invites participation), cleverly encased within bricolage frames formed from leftover materials. Mark and Cristina have contributed beautiful textual and visual graphics that address the means by which public spaces can fall short of their promise of being truly inclusive, while a selection of work from the ever-insightful Edit Collective shows the group’s interest in disentangling architecture from the sexist and capitalist ideologies that are woven into the built environment. The show acts as a platform to highlight its various contributors and is, as a result, dense – what is on display in many cases is not so much clear, digestible projects, but rather the studios’ ways of working – but it is worth picking your way through this complexity. Powershift is an excellent introduction to the different forms of socially conscious, collective design that are gaining traction among many emerging practitioners, and it feels like a fine barometer of where the discipline is heading. Moreover, there are more than enough tantalising objects and films on display for those who find themselves less drawn to wall texts: Ahmed Abokor’s Aforfuturist Affu typeface, shown through the movements of a dancing body; Andu Masebo and Em Lemaître-Downton’s collaborative table; and Shanice Palmer’s beautiful United Ties textile sculpture chief amongst them.
Powershift: 219 Brompton Road, SW3 2EJ
Sara Afonso Sternberg’s Camarada d’aluminium, displayed as part of Prototype / in process - capturing intangible notions (image: Disegno).
On a pedestal
The chair has long been mythologised in design. For a designer, it can be a distillation of one’s design thinking; a chance to make a splash or hustle for attention at a design fair or graduate show; or simply an opportunity to make something slightly more comfortable to sit on. Prototype / in process - capturing intangible notions is a show that understands the status of the chair in design cannon and uses this as a bedrock for experimentation and sculpture. The show is a collection of 1:1 sculptural chair prototypes, which are displayed surrounded by items that went into their development. These can be process drawings, smaller models, or unused material that has subsequently been used to create accompanying objects. It is the first physical show initiated by Chair of Virtue, an online publication of sculptural chairs from maker Adam Maryniak. The instagram project started in 2020 and Prototype / in process is the first show off the back of this collected research. Maryniak has commissioned 12 London makers to contribute a chair that is in the process of being made and which represents something about its own prototyping process. The viewer is left with a mix of chairs in different states of finesse. Andrew Pierce Scott’s Prototype is a scrappily welded rounded steel chair, with accompanying pillow and tapestry made from scrap cloth, which leans into a homely idiosyncratic aesthetic; Natalia Triantafylli’s The Seat is a demonstration of how ceramic beads can be used to create large-scale ceramic surfaces with a small kiln, in this case by creating the seat and backrest in an inviting beaded sheet and back; and Sara Afonso Sternberg’s chair, Camarada d’aluminium, objects to hostile design strategies to create a design made from anti-homeless armrests. It’s a small but well paced show that leans into design’s deification of the chair typology, redeploying it as an absorbing catalyst for research.
Prototype / in process - capturing intangible notions: Unit 198, Dirty Lane, Borough Yards, SE1 9PA
Boa by Diez Office for Hay (image: courtesy of Hay).
Assorted objects
In comparison to rival festivals such as Milan’s Salone del Mobile or Copenhagen’s 3 Days of Design, product launches or presentations are often not a major component of LDF: the festival lacks a strong trade fair element (although we did enjoy the new Material Matters), and the UK does not have the kind of deep manufacturer base enjoyed by, for instance, Denmark. Nevertheless, the week has showcased a selection of new designs, many of which are worth seeking out in the assorted showrooms dotted around the capital. Stefan Diez’s Boa table for Hay is the kind of rigorous, elegant design that his Diez Office studio is rightfully acclaimed for – a work that translates lightweight, bamboo assembly methods into an ingenious aluminium trestle system. Material translation also comes to the fore in a presentation from Mud Australia, a brand known for its colourful tableware, which has used its porcelain expertise to launch a selection of charming table lamps, executed by brand founder Shelley Simpson and designer Zachary Hanna. At Aram, meanwhile, the company’s longstanding collaboration with the estate of Eileen Gray has resulted in a series of new rug designs, whose patterns are drawn from the designer’s gouaches, drawings, and collages, throwing a welcome light onto Gray’s artistic production that ran alongside her more well known work in design and architecture. Conversely, it was good to see All the Way to Paris, a studio known predominantly for its graphic design work, operating within the field of lighting: its Mist lighting collection for &Tradition offering a take on the globe light, but adjusting the form into a charming lozenge shape instead. LDF may not be a festival dominated by products, but those that are on display are worthy of attention.
Aram: 110 Drury Ln, WC2B 5SG
Hay: Underwood Works, 6-14 Underwood St, N1 7JQ
Mud Australia: 61 Marylebone Ln, W1U 2PA
&Tradition: Nine United Showroom, 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AB