Material Matters

Material Matters is the name of a Podcast I’ve been following for a couple of years now. The host, Grant Gibson, interviews artists, makers, designers and architects about how a particular material or technique has influenced them throughout their career. Grant explains that understanding materials helps us understand the world and therefore also the giant problem of the climate emergency. I’ve really enjoyed the podcast so when I heard it would be a physical fair I was immediately keen to go.

The Oxo Tower looking fab on the day of my visit to Material Matters at the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf

I’ve said before that I struggled with the idea of even setting up The Cranford Cabinet wondering if the ultimate best way to deal with my resource of thousands of small pieces of mostly natural materials might actually be to allow them to be recycled and turned into thermal insulation. The very process of me adding new parts, other different materials, threads, zips, buttons etc. as part of the making process means that the material becomes less recyclable just like the majority of our worldly possessions. The reality of the situation though is that life is complicated, things aren’t black and white and money (for me) has to come into it. I feel I cannot afford to ignore the resources of the Cabinet and neither does committing them to insulation value the thousands of person hours and tons of carbon and resources gone into their own making.

3D-printed vessels and furniture in third-time recycled polymer as woven textures by Gareth Neal

I also really like materials! Making things floats my boat and being able to transform the materials I have into other things that are more useful whilst honouring their aesthetic is a challenge that appeals to my resourcefulness as well as satisfying my senses. For my tailoring business I’ve spent decades training those senses to assess fabric, mostly made of merino wool, to understand, and translate its suitability for a piece of clothing for a person with their particular needs and preferences. To then explain what it might feel like to them to wear and enjoy. It can be quite abstract and a bit weird for a first-time tailoring client to be asked to think about the feel of fabric and how that relates to them expressing themselves, so acting as a kind of fabric translator has given me a particular set of skills that sees me energetically attracted to touching stuff (or imagining what it might feel like to do so).

An incredible wallhanging with environmentally-sensing material that stains itself to indicate detection and relative strength of UV radiation. Darker pink = higher UV exposure, crafting plastics! studio

I do think that if more people got genuinely involved in really feeling what its like to wear or interact with different fabrics there would be much less clothing wastage in the world. We’d make wiser choices when it came to the clothes we buy and we’d take better care of them because we had a deeper relationship with them both physically and emotionally.

Personally I think the best interactions with materials are when the materials have been derived from natural sources. You just can’t compare the lustre, softness and cool hand of a finely-made merino wool suiting for instance with that of one of the myriad versions of petroleum-based man-made fabrics. Even if you haven’t spent ages honing your senses to detect the differences, I reckon you can just tell, there’s something innate about it. Nature is just, better.

Textile waste transformed into veneers and boards. Denim waste from manufacture reformed into furniture by https://www.rezign.com

Having said that I abhor waste and that’s one of the reasons I find myself in possession of a Cabinet. It mostly consists of natural materials but also quite a lot of other things that looked like they had transformation value; an unrepairable airbed (possibly a base for a picnic blanket), books of mixed fibre upholstery fabric swatches (no idea at the time of discovery but the colourful designs sucked me in), offcuts of linen-esque polyester curtain fabric (though the commission of me to make a ton of man-made-fabric curtains didn’t thrill me for the client’s material choice, the surplus is too good to waste), and many more examples. I guess my attitude is not just that because something exists we should make the best of it from an environmental perspective but especially that if I can use something that might otherwise be wasted AND make it available to be enjoyed vs. just used then that’s the most ideal outcome.

Stunning lathe-turned lampshades from sustainable wood by Tamasine Osher

So finally back to the Material Matters fair after that extended ramble… It was held at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, in London, an ideally repurposed building for this particular fair with its focus on materials and how they shape our lives. The five levels of the building were occupied by displays from designers, makers, researchers and organisations (see pictures in this post for my personal highlights), plus an area for talks. Getting out of the house and away from the sewing machine was pretty exciting in itself but so were some of the enlightening and ingenious ways people were thinking about repurposing waste and even pollution. It was exciting to see designs focussed on beauty and function in re-use and also comforting to feel part of a journey and an acknowledged imperfect one at that. If humanity had started out making things for our initial use with deconstruction and re-use part of their original design we may not be in quite as deep an environmental mess as we are currently. This concept is called Circular Design and brings responsibility to the designer for considering material sourcing, supply chains, distribution models and reuse, repair and recycling on top of the user experience, form and function that is the traditional remit.

@pearsonlloyd design studio research presentation on improving the circularity of mass-produced products

I went to a couple of talks whilst at the fair and felt particularly drawn by something that was said by a speaker about their reimagining of pollution into something mimicking expensive materials - the idea of disconnecting from the narrative of waste where a material or product doesn’t wear this idea on their ‘sleeve’ and people are attracted to the item first then find out it’s waste second. This felt like a very well summarised version of the ethos of The Cranford Cabinet and something I’m going to re-purpose too ;)