After last year’s hugely successful debut, the Material Matters fair returns to Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf during the London Design Festival. The fair, which runs from 20-23 September, will convene world-leading brands, designers, makers, and innovators to investigate and celebrate the importance of materials and their ability to shape our lives.
Themes
New Ways of Working with Waste
There will be a plethora of designers and brands re-evaluating materials and finding new ways to work with waste.
On the top floor of the fair, for example, emerging designer BC Joshua will be showing a seat (created with designer Ella Doran) and lighting (designed in collaboration with Purva Kundaje) made from a newspaper pulp blend. Hagen Hinderdael and Novavita Design have joined forces to develop a new product collection made from coffee waste, milk packaging, and fermented sugar.
Planq will launch Rezign® materials – a new collection of materials made from textile waste such as post-consumer denim, army clothing, suits and white denim. This is combined with bio-based resources like flax and jute coffee bags to create veneer, multiplex board, and flex sheet materials.
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- Yair Neuman and Planq
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- Solidwool
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- Planq to launch Rezign® materials
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- Hagen Hinderdael and Novavita Design
Working with nature
There is an array of designers and research studios finding ways to work with nature at this year’s fair. bioMATTERS, for instance, specialises in 3D printing and robotic fabrication techniques for living materials. It develops solutions for “grown-living design” for product design and architecture applications, and fabricates a wide range of biomaterials using clay, mycelium, and microalgae and bacterial based dyes.
Silklab is an interdisciplinary materials science lab from Tufts University, in Greater Boston, which focuses on the potential and properties of silk fibroin. The studio will be displaying the possibilities of its material.
Material Magic comes from the Innovation Hub East-Groningen and Dutch designer Jack Brandsma. It investigates how binders like magnesium and potato starch can be combined with hemp fibres to create products.
And on the top floor, Mycelium Lab creates highly sustainable, bio-based wall covering panels using mycelium. Each wall panel showcases unique textures captured at different stages of the mycelium growth cycle, resulting in some fascinating designs. The company will be presenting part of its inaugural collection, Fumo Panels.
A sense of craft
In many respects Material Matters is concerned with the importance of making. Craft is a thread that runs through the fair, starting with this year’s headline sponsor, the high end, British lighting manufacturer, Bert Frank. The brand will mark its tenth anniversary with new product launches that celebrate the considered use of exceptional materials, created from its factory in Birmingham. It will also celebrate its birthday by joining forces with the fair to throw one of the biggest parties at this year’s London Design Festival.
On the top floor, designer-maker Ana Bridgewater (also known as Abalon) creates extraordinary lighting sculptures from Corallo porcelain, while Mixed Metals – a collaboration between leading metal artists Juliette Bigley and Simone ten Hompel – is back at the fair with an interactive installation.
Goldfinger is an award-winning social enterprise that designs and crafts timeless furniture and homeware, using reclaimed and sustainable materials. Its profits support the Goldfinger Academy, which creates pathways to design and craft careers for young people in the local community, and the People’s Kitchen, a monthly community meal cooked from surplus ingredients.
Craftsmanship has always been vital to Gareth Neal’s practice but its definition has often stretched beyond the handmade into the digital. The studio will be showing ODC 3D on the fair’s first floor. The work, produced in collaboration with The New Raw and funded by The Better Factory though an EU grant, promises to push the boundaries of traditional 3D printing and uses a three times recycled polymer.
Bill Amberg Studio has long been one of the most important names in leather. Last year, it teamed up with the Knepp Estate, renowned for its ground-breaking rewilding project, to design and manufacture a sustainable furniture collection. The pieces use materials sourced from the estate – leather produced from the longhorn cattle and the deer roaming the Sussex-based project.
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- Bert Frank
International outlook
This year’s fair has exhibitors coming from all over the globe. To take a handful of examples: Silklab (and half of bioMatters) are from the USA; the Lowlit Collection (another of our exhibitors that looks at ways of repurposing materials) is from South Korea; Regular Concrete, which makes sculptures from a material most readily associated with the construction industry, hails from Slovakia; while the Wicker Story, a brand that creates extraordinary furniture from wicker using a combination of technology and traditional craft, is from India.
