A Point in the Path
Mac Collins is the winner of the inaugural Ralph Saltzman Prize.
There is, perhaps, a peculiarity about the idea of an “emerging designer”. When does a designer begin their emergence? When can they no longer be said to be emerging, but instead to have successfully emerged?
Definitions aside, it is emerging designers who are celebrated by the Design Museum’s inaugural Ralph Saltzman Prize: an annual award to be given to a product designer working in or across products, furniture, textiles or technology. It is an award created to honour the legacy of Ralph Saltzman, the founder of the materials company Designtex, and carries with it a £5,000 honorarium, as well as an opportunity to exhibit at the museum. “I created the Ralph Saltzman Prize as a legacy to my father,” said Saltzman’s daughter, Lisa. “He was an innovator and a pioneer who had a keen eye, great taste and he thought outside the box. The Ralph Saltzman Prize will be a way to give young designers an opportunity, an honorarium and a show.”
The inaugural winner of the prize is Mac Collins, a designer and artist who graduated from Northumbria University in 2018, and who was nominated for the award by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin of design studio Industrial Facility. “Young designers naturally ask different questions,” Hecht told The Financial Times of the studio’s decision to nominate Collins. “But only talent is able to answer them differently too. What Mac seems to be very good at is both of these”.
Collins is an outstanding choice for the award. His Iklwa chair was initially designed while still at university, and has the knack of being both a culturally incisive reflection on Collins’ Caribbean heritage and the African diaspora, as well as a formally inventive, sculpturally beautiful piece of furniture. The piece was soon put into production by the furniture brand Benchmark. “I hadn’t really referenced my heritage or my identity before in any of my work until the Iklwa chair,” Collins told The New York Times. “I’m proud of my identity and I think there’s space to respond to my own position within the African diaspora, but at the same time I don’t intend for it to be all of my practice.”
The Iklwa armchair.
Iklwa was followed in 2021 by two other technically accomplished wooden chairs: Jupiter’s chair, designed for an exhibition at Holkham Hall created by The New Craftsmen, and Concur, a chair developed for AHEC and Wallpaper*’s Discovered programme at the Design Museum (with the institution subsequently acquiring the piece for its permanent collection). In that same year, Collins showed wooden accessories for the Finnish brand Vaarni before receiving the 2021 Emerging Design Medal at the London Design Festival.
To what extent, then, is Collins still emerging? Although his arrival within design is recent, he has already accomplished much, with a clear skillset already apparent: an ability to create highly resolved, elegant objects, cut through with a streak of political or social commentary. His next commission, a work for Harewood House’s Radical Acts: Why Craft Matters biennial, promises to take his work further. Collins is currently designing a new piece of furniture that can explore British African-Caribbean identity and history in the context of Harewood, a stately home built using a fortune gleaned from the West Indian sugar trade and the ownership of plantations and enslaved people.
Although much of Collins’ work to date has centred around furniture, he says that he does not wish to become pigeonholed within a specific design discipline. Instead, he explains, his interests are varied and he does not wish to close himself off to opportunities: one of the pleasures of being an emerging practitioner, it seems, is the uncertainty of where precisely you are emerging. To find out more about Collins’ work and his path ahead, Disegno spoke to him over Zoom.
The Concur chair and companion, developed for Discovered (photo: Jason Yates).
Disegno Congratulations for winning the Ralph Saltzman Prize. Were you aware that you'd been nominated for the award?
Mac Collins The nomination was a surprise. I wasn't aware of the award and the Design Museum only contacted me once the five nominations had been made. I didn't find out that I'd won until a lot further down the line.
Disegno It must have been a thrill when you when you saw that it was Industrial Facility who had nominated you?
Mac Big time. I’m a really big fan of Industrial Facility. We’d studied them at university, so I'd been aware of their work for a long time. It was a surprise to see that they had nominated me, but hopefully that leads to some kind of relationship or a conversation.
“I’m trying to communicate a conceptual narrative, but hopefully through accurate and refined objects.”
Disegno Did you know them personally?
Mac No, I didn't know them before. I wasn't aware that they were aware of my work, or at least not to the level where they would have spent the time reading into it or understanding the narrative to then be able to comment.
Disegno In some ways you have very different practices, because a lot of their work has focused around consumer electronics, whereas your output to date has stayed largely within wooden furniture. But there are similarities. In a previous podcast we recorded with you, you mentioned that growing up you used to keep objects that you found interesting in your backpack, and that’s not a million miles away from Sam and Kim’s Under a Fiver project. Even if you're working in different areas of design, it seems like you appreciate similar things.
Mac There are definitely crossovers. When you mentioned the objects that I used to collect, it made me remember that one of my prized possessions when I was about eight years old was a little propelling pencil from Muji. I'd been given it as a gift when there was a Muji in Nottingham, and it's funny to think about that link through into me practicing as a designer/artist now, having been nominated by Industrial Facility who have done work with Muji. I definitely think there are links there. My interest in design when I was studying was very much to the point – I was really into and I’m still inspired by the work of companies such as Muji and Industrial Facility. I've always had an appreciation for that really refined appearance and overall visual language. Where I come at these projects from is a combination of both of those things. I want to approach them from an art perspective and I'm trying to communicate a conceptual narrative, but hopefully through accurate and refined objects.
Jupiter’s chair and side table for The New Craftsmen.
Disegno One of the outcomes of the prize is that you have a solo show at the Design Museum. Is it your first solo show.
Mac Yes, the first one. My work will be commandeering the mezzanine, so it’s just as you enter the space and then up the central stairs. I'm going to be presenting three standalone chairs: Iklwa, Jupiter’s chair with The New Craftsmen, and the chair from the Discovered project. Hopefully, as people enter the space their eye will be drawn up with the building to where those chairs are and there will also be process material exhibited alongside: sketch work, scale models, one-to-one prototypes. I've been working closely with Gemma Curtin, a curator at the museum, who has been great. She came up to Newcastle and we spent a whole day chatting through what I'd like to say. One thing that I definitely want to communicate is that I don't see this path as being linear, and that I don't see myself leaning towards a certain role in design or designing a certain thing. I want to try and explore as much as possible. I think I have a bit of a privileged position at this time to be able to do that. I want to be able to communicate through this exhibition that it's not going to be a straight line, and that this is just a point in this path. I don't want to be defined by any categories within design.
Bowls developed for the Finnish brand Vaarni.
Disegno The award must be helpful for for you in that respect, because there’s money attached which gives you a little freedom. It raises your profile, but also gives you breathing space to think about what you do and don’t want to do.
Mac I think you've hit the nail on the head with breathing room. Personally I'm seeing this exhibition at the Design Museum as a moment in time where I can stop and look back at what's happened. And with the press and the financial support from the award I have a minute to think about where I want to move, and then take those next steps. The freedom that I have at the minute is definitely going to enable me to take the time to just think about where I go. Awards like this provide space for liberated thought and creative freedom, which is hard to come by, particularly when you're young and just entering the industry.
“Awards like this provide space for liberated thought and creative freedom, which is hard to come by, particularly when you’re young and just entering the industry.”
Disegno How easy is it to make decisions about the direction you want to go in when, as you said, you have broad interests and want to try lot of different things. The excitement of starting out in any field is that everything still feels open.
Mac That's probably been one of the most difficult aspects of all this – working out where to go. Which is a luxury, obviously, because that comes from having opportunities and having a range of directions. Before this point, I was trying to just get into a box. In this last year or so, I've realised that my goal is to stay outside of that, and just see what comes up. There’s not a real stringent plan, which feels liberating.
The Mid armchair.
Disegno Before this interview began, you mentioned that your upcoming Harwood house commission is exactly the kind of thing you want to be doing right now. What is it about that commission that makes it so appealing?
Mac It has struck a chord. The narrative that I'm working on is something that I'm excited about and which feels culturally significant to me. I hope that other people think that too. When I visited the house, the room that spoke to me the most was the Cinnamon Drawing Room, which was set up at the time with a selection of games tables. I was considering the fact that we still venerate these spaces, and they still hold something that we associate with being quintessentially British and connected to the glory of Britain. But, in reality, these spaces omit the colonies and the people of the colonies who have since migrated here and exist as British people. Those people understood themselves to be British and were told that they were British, but they're often omitted from the images that we have of an idealised and romanticised Britishness. And so my contribution to this project is to highlight and talk about the Caribbean contribution to British societies. And to celebrate that within this location that, historically, has been very hostile to people like me. It’s an exciting opportunity to explore that tension and create something through objects that will highlight a conversation.
Collins’s Rudimentary stool.
Disegno How did the games tables tie into that?
Mac I'm creating a dominoes table for playing Caribbean-style dominoes. As part of the research, I went to play dominoes with Caribbean men and women at a pub in Hucknall, just outside of Nottingham. Since then, we’ve been playing lots of dominoes up here in Newcastle and it's become a bit of a thing. I've become immersed in this idea that the game of dominoes represents a portion of my identity. So I'm creating this dominoes table because it has ended up meaning a lot to me. I'm hoping to communicate through furniture, and I'm still in the workshop making things out of timber, but making them through a lens of conceptual art. And after this piece has been exhibited at Harewood House, it will go to Primary, which is a contemporary art space in Nottingham where it’ll be accessible to the Caribbean community there who have inspired and informed my investigation.
Images courtesy of Mac Collins and Friends & Co