Show Notes
Alkesh Parmar is a designer and researcher. Over the years, he has hollowed out champagne corks and turned them into chandeliers, as well as transforming traditional Indian terracotta cups into light fittings. But he is best known for his work with citrus peel in general – and orange peel in particular. Using a material generally thought of as waste, he has created a variety of extraordinary products including a juicer (for obvious reasons) and a lampshade. His practice combines craft with cr...
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Corin Mellor is the creative director of David Mellor Design – a brand that is synonymous with his father, David, but also the design and manufacture of beautiful cutlery, primarily made of stainless steel. According to Sir Terence Conran, David was ‘Britain’s most serious, modest and greatest post-war product designer’, who created everything from bins to bus stops before concentrating on cutlery. Corin took over the company in 2006, expanding the company’s range and material pal...
Nicola Turner is a UK-based artist who is best known for her use of horsehair and wool in her extraordinary, and often quite dark, sculptures. She originally trained as a theatre designer – working for the likes of the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Sydney Opera House – before doing a Fine Art MA in her fifties. Since then, her work has featured in a string of locations – most notably, the Courtyard at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2024. Currently, she has...
Dublin-based architect John Tuomey first appeared on Material Matters in 2024 to talk about his brilliant memoir, First Quarter. Now he’s written the follow-up, unsurprisingly entitled, Middle Quarter. John is the co-founder of O’Donnell + Tuomey. He was the inaugural professor of Architectural Design at University College Dublin and visiting professor at Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Over the years, he has won numerous awards, including the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, and his practice is res...
What if the materials a building needs are already sitting in a skip down the road? Joel de Mowbray, founding director of Yes Make, joins Grant Gibson to explain how a regenerative design and build practice rescues high-quality construction materials from landfill — and builds a viable business around them. Earlier this year, Yes Make joined forces with interdisciplinary design collective Resolve Collective and architecture practice Material Cultures to launch Tipping Point East, a circular c...
Welcome to another summer bonus episode of Material Matters with Grant Gibson, this time in association with Hyosung TNC. In this special episode, Grant talks to the South Korean company’s marketing and sustainability director, Simon Whitmarsh-Knight, about an intriguing new material the company is spending nearly $1bn to develop – a bio-based elastane (or spandex) that has the potential to revolutionise the clothing market. In this episode they discuss: the history of elastane and its ...