LDF x Material Matters 2022: Top themes.

As the summer comes to an end, the London Design Festival is now firmly on the horizon. And a brand-new fixture on the London design calendar for this year is Material Matters 2022.

Based on the podcast of the same name, the event will see its inaugural edition take place between 22 and 25 September on the capital’s Southbank. Part of the Bankside Design District, the event promises to bring together over 40 world-leading brands, designers, makers and organisations to celebrate the importance of materials and their ability to shape our lives.

The fair will take place across five floors of the iconic Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf, an unadorned but magnificent former factory setting, and will feature a wide range of exhibits and installations tying into a slew of fascinating themes. Here's a preview of what's in store...

Circularity

Floor four includes Smile Plastics, which creates sustainable materials from ‘waste’ plastics collected from a variety of post-consumer and post-industrial sources. Meanwhile, Alkesh Parmar will be launching a new range of lighting pieces made from carefully sewn orange peel, and recent Royal College of Art graduate, B.C. Joshua, will show a furniture collection made from recycled newspaper pulp, entitled Similar Differences.

Netherlands-based start-up, Circuform, gives industrially designed furniture a circular life. Its latest chair, Rex, was originally created by Ineke Hans in 2011 but the latest version is made of recycled PA6 from office chair components, fishing nets, carpets and industrial waste. Spared is a start-up by interior and product design practice, Volume Creative. It offers a creative service that turns waste into beautiful objects, furniture and surfaces – sparing it from landfill. It will be creating a series of sculptures for the fair made from a variety of waste, including plastics, food and masonry detritus.

SolidWool will bring its Hembury Chair, which has a seat made from a combination of Herdwick wool and bio-resin.The wool is a by-product of sheep farming once used by the UK carpet industry but which has fallen out of vogue recently. When mixed with the bio-resin it produces a beautiful composite – each chair, which comes with legs made from ash, contains the equivalent of one entire fleece.

At a different scale, on the fair’s second ‘learning’ floor, Hydro will illustrate how it reuses aluminium from demolished building projects, food and drink containers, or even cars with a special area for CPD’s aimed directly at architects and designers.

Scandinavian design

High quality design from Scandinavia will be hard to avoid at Material Matters 2022. The aforementioned Hydro has taken a large space on the second floor, while the third floor – devoted to products that have been produced with the utmost care and attention to detail – is dominated by two brands: Fora Form and Ragnars.

Norwegian-based brand, Fora Form, specialises in creating spaces where people gather – such as meeting rooms, dining areas, auditoriums, and break out spaces. The manufacturer will be showing a fistful of products including: the Atrium Chair and Senso Frame, both designed by Anderssen & Voll. The former is a demure chair for contract environments, with a wide range of options and finishes, while the latter is a sofa system that can be configured in a number of ways and has been created to enable interaction.

Ragnars, a Swedish brand renowned for the craftsmanship that lies behind its pieces, will be showcasing its range of storage products and height-adjustable desks. It is also taking an interest in biophilic design, integrating nature into its collection. The cabinet series, Frames, is built with a solid wood skeleton, with doors made in organic materials that bring the fragrance of alpine hay and flowers. R5 Nxt is a series of electric height-adjustable desks where many of the steel parts have been replaced by solid wood, except for one of the table tops that is made from textile waste.

A sense of craft

Craft is another thread that runs through the fair. Joining Fora Form and Ragnars on the third floor, for example, is Modet. The Irish company, founded by award-winning master craftsman Paul O’Brien in 2017, will be launching the Langford collection in the UK. The range of exquisitely-made furniture includes a dining chair, dining table, console table and bench that have been hand-carved from solid oak and contain hints of classic Scandinavian design.

Elsewhere, Mixed Metals is a collaboration between two of the nation’s leading metal artists, Juliette Bigley and Simone ten Hompel; Majeda Clarke is a brilliant weaver who works with artisans in Bangladesh and mills in North Wales; Helen Johannessen of HJ Keramikk and Kerry Hastings are leading ceramic artists; ROKOS specialises in beautiful glassware; and Xena Kalouti’s work evokes the craftsmanship from her native Jordan.

Karen Henriksen has built an international reputation as a milliner but, more recently, has turned her attention to interiors under the guise of Studio KH. She will be launching a new range of sculptural pendant light shades and table lamps at the fair, made from sinamay (or banana fibre). Widely used in the millinery industry, sinamay is lightweight and translucent, and diffuses light beautifully. It is sustainably made in the Philippines, by independent weavers and small family co-operatives.

Some artists are using Material Matters 2022 as a reason to experiment. Candice Lau of Studio Candice Lau is an artist and maker known for her leatherwork. However, she has started using the material as a tool to work with clay. The results are wonderfully strange, animated humanoid figures. LIVING OBJECT is a joint venture between designer Philip Hughes and ceramic artist Vanessa Hogge – bringing together the former’s love of tectonic forms, inspired by rugged geology and the latter’s fascination with nature and flowers. Together the pair will be launching a sculptural ceramic light, the Contour Pendant, with a surface covered in Hogge’s ceramic flowers.

Technology

The digital world isn’t ignored at the fair either. OZRUH, founded by architect Levent Ozruh in 2019, creates intelligently designed objects at a variety of scales, fashioned using computational procedures and advanced manufacturing techniques. At the fair the practice will launch PRIMITIVES [2] made from 3D printed sand.

HagenHinderdael is a practice which works at the intersection of sustainable design and innovative technology to create sculptural products and immersive installations, fashioning pieces from waste taken from medical settings and sawdust. For Material Matters 2022, it has joined forces with digital fabrication specialist Fab.Pub to launch SWIVEL, a dual purpose stool and planter made of 3D printed fermented sugar, wood fibre and PLA bioplastic.

The exhibition will also feature specially-commissioned installations, the Wood Awards, and a talks programme. For more information and to register for your free ticket, visit materialmatters.design.