Majeda Clarke is a weaver, whose work is concerned with identity and a sense of place. She combines traditional techniques from some very different parts of the world – such as Bangladesh and North Wales – with an aesthetic that has been influenced by Josef and Anni Albers. 

She came to textiles relatively late in life (having previously been in education) but has gone on to win a number of awards, as well as exhibiting at the Aram Gallery, Mint and Fortnum & Mason in London. She has also collaborated with the likes of The Rothschild Foundation and The Citizens of the World Choir. 

In this episode we talk about: her passion for collecting; why she makes scarves in Bangladesh and blankets in Wales; growing up on a tea plantation; being locked in a cell when she arrived in the UK at the age of five; producing art in lockdown; how the Black Lives Matter movement has shifted her thinking; the pressure of representing; her fascination with regional skills; and encouraging mistakes.

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In my opinion, Carl Clerkin is one of the most original – and certainly one of the wittiest – designers currently practicing. He graduated from the now-defunct furniture course of the Royal College of Art in the late ’90s, a time when many of his contemporaries were dreaming of fame and fortune with a glamorous Italian manufacturer. However, he steered a very different – more local – course. 

His work, which ranges from industrial to fine art pieces, is always imbued with a sense of narrative and not a little charm. Clerkin is also a teacher at Kingston University and has curated exhibitions such as The Learned Society of Extra Ordinary Objects at London’s Somerset House. He returns to the London venue this month with The Beasley Brothers’ Repair Shop, as part of the gallery’s new show Eternally Yours – an exhibition about repair, care and healing.

In this episode we talk about: his new installation at Somerset House and the importance of mending; the role narrative and humour plays in his work; feeling uncomfortable in the art world and becoming a designer by default; growing up in London’s Eastend; the influence of Michael Marriott; his love of teaching… and his fascination with buckets. 

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Juliette Bigley is an artist and sculptor who creates extraordinary, abstract, but somehow familiar, pieces out of metal. I first saw her work at New Designers, the graduate design show held annually in London, after she left The Cass  in 2013 and, since then, her career has gone from strength to strength. She has a piece in the permanent collection of the V&A; won a slew of awards; written a book entitled, Material Perspectives; and exhibited around the world. 

Happily she’s also an incredibly eloquent advocate for her material of choice and the importance of thinking through making.

In this episode we talk about: discovering metal by chance and the effect that moment had on her life; why making helps her understand the world; how different metals have contrasting personalities; her fascination with the vessel; a love of lines and boundaries; her background in music and healthcare; the relationship between music and making; her problem with perfection; oh and swimming the Channel (yes, really).

It’s an incredibly rich. 

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Nigel Coates is a hugely influential architect, designer, artist and educator. He first came to widespread attention as a teacher at the Architectural Association in the early 80s when he co-founded NATO, a radical architecture collective that published a series of magazines with a unique perspective on the city.

Later, he co-founded the practice, Branson Coates, and created buildings and interiors across the globe from Caffe Bongo in Japan to the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. He has also designed a slew of products for the likes of Fornasetti and GTV as well as exhibitions, such as Ecstacity and Mixtacity at Tate Modern. 

Importantly, he did much of this while being head of architecture at the Royal College of Art. 

He has just published an intriguing – and occasionally quite racy – memoir. It’s a book that charts the changes in architecture in general, and London in particular. There are tales of extraordinary projects, of club culture and parties, of friendships and loves, and of lives sadly lost.

In this episode we talk about: his early life in Malvern and his difficult relationship with his parents; his love of Italy; teaching at the Architectural Association and the creation of NATO; working in Japan and, finally, building in the UK; his role in controversial projects such as the National Centre for Popular Music and the Millennium Dome; the problem with developer-led London; regrets about about not building more; being queer and ‘the unspoken conformity of architecture’; and missing his great friend Zaha Hadid. 

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Richard McVetis is an embroiderer, who is fascinated with time. Each of his, often monochromatic cuboid, pieces is meticulously made to explore the subtle differences that emerge through the ritualistic and repetitive nature of sewing.

More recently, he has taken inspiration from his family’s mining heritage to investigate a story of race and class through stitch. The artist says that he uses making ‘to understand the world, to give material form to abstract ideas, making the intangible tangible’.

Richard has shown his work around the globe and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including: the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and the Loewe Craft Prize in 2018. He currently has a solo show, Shaped by Time, running at Farnham’s Craft Study Centre.

In this episode we talk about: his new show in Farnham; the joy of slowing down and developing patience; drawing with thread; the majesty of the hand; his love of simplicity; the subjectivity of time; gender politics and embroidery; growing up in a mining community and how that has fed into his work; his other career in retail design; and why he never sews in public.

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Elaine Yan Ling Ng is a Hong Kong-based designer and innovator. She founded her own studio, The Fabrick Lab, in 2013, after stints working with the likes of Nissan and Nokia.

Initially trained as a textile designer and weaver at London’s Central Saint Martins, her work encompasses traditional craft and cutting edge technology, with clients and collaborations ranging from Danish textile manufacturer Kvadrat to crystal company Swarovski, via UBS, and a group of traditional artisans in the Guizhou area of southern China.

Most recently, she has been working with design brand, Nature Squared, on CArrele (pictured), a range of tiles made from waste, or to be more precise, eggshells.

Elaine is a TED Fellow and has a fistful of design awards, including The Emerging Talent Award from Design Anthology, GGEF’s Eco Innovator Award, Swarovski’s Designer of the Future Award and Tatler’s Gen T Award.

In this episode we chat about: making tiles from eggshells (not surprisingly); learning to sew at the age of three; her ten pin bowling champion father; learning to love weaving; how maths and data feed into her work; designing student pieces with shape memory alloy; taking jobs at Nissan and Nokia; the changing design culture in China; setting up her own studio; how winning an award from Swarovski transformed her career; and bridging the gap between craft and industry.

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Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien founded their eponymous design studio, Doshi Levien, in 2000. The duo, who are also real life partners and met while studying at London’s Royal College of Art in the late ’90s, came to prominence in 2003 with an extraordinary range of cookware, designed for French company, Tefal. 

At the time, the pieces seemed different and more than a little exciting, a combination of contemporary European design and thinking from somewhere else entirely. In terms of form, each item was incredibly precise. However, flip the pots and pans over and, on the base, was an unexpectedly beautiful pattern. 

Since then, the pair have gone on to work for the likes of Moroso, Hay, Kvadrat, BD Barcelona, galerie kreo, Cappellini and many others, creating textiles, furniture, glassware, shoes, lighting, and even ice cream, that deftly combines their contrasting skills, ideas and backgrounds.

In this episode we talk about Nipa’s relationship with colour and textiles; why card is a vital part of Jonathan’s process; growing up in India and Scotland respectively and how that affected their design thinking; living and designing together; facing prejudice; that initial project with Tefal; and working with Italian furniture giant Moroso.

Yet, mostly it’s about how two people with different hinterland have come together to create a single vision.

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Peter Lord founded Aardman Animations, with his school friend David Sproxton, in 1972. The Bristol-based company rapidly became known for its witty, character-driven, stop-motion work in Plasticine, giving the world characters such as Morph, Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, as well as working on a dizzying array of feature films, shorts, TV shows, adverts, music videos, computer games, TV idents… Frankly the list goes on. 

The studio has won Oscars for the likes of Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. While Peter himself has been nominated himself on several occasions, including for The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. Aardman recently picked up yet another nomination for its short, Robin Robin. 

Peter was awarded a CBE in 2006 and received a Blue Peter Gold badge, no less, in 2015.

In this bumper episode we talk about: meeting his partner David Sproxton at the age of 12; why Bristol became so important to Aardman; picking up Plasticine for the first time and why it’s a transformative material; creating Morph; working with the legend that is Tony Hart; the genius of Nick Park; cracking Hollywood and wearing a jacket bought from Oxfam to the Oscars; the role technology plays in the studio’s output; and turning the company into an employee-owned business.

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Alison Britton is a ceramicist, writer and educator, who emerged as part of a revolutionary group of artists from the Royal College of Art in the 1970s, which was determined to provided an alternative to the then-dominate school of pottery, led by Bernard Leach. 

Instead, their work was angular, abstract, urban, a little bit feisty and, hey, Post-Modern, provoking one critic to write in Crafts magazine that these were pieces which rejoiced ‘in a hideousness that does not even have the excuse of eloquence’. 

Her pots, which famously test the outer limits of function, have evolved over the years and are generally slab built with abstract surface finishes and an architectural quality. Meanwhile, her prose has long been a vital part of her practice and a collection of her writing, entitled Seeing Things, was published in 2013. 

In 2016, she had a major retrospective of her work at the V&A in London, while she received an OBE for her services to art in 1990.

During this episode we talk about: picking up clay at nine years old; growing up with her teacher parents and becoming part of her father’s research; why she became fascinated by the material; the importance of language; studying under Hans Coper at the Royal College of Art; her happy revolution in the 1970s; the importance of ‘containment’ in her practice; and her changing attitude to the work of Bernard Leach. 

Huge thanks must go to the brilliant specialist auction house and art consultancy dedicated to studio ceramics, Maak Contemporary Ceramics, for sponsoring this episode. www.maaklondon.com.

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Tom Raffield is a designer and maker who has built a hugely successful business by creating an array of products from wood that have been steam bent into extraordinary shapes, and, subsequently, are sold by the likes of John Lewis and Heals. In doing so, he has effectively brought craft on to the British high street.  

Not only that, but he has designed installations at the Chelsea Flower Show, created steam bent coffee kiosks in London’s Royal Parks, and built his own breathtaking house in south Cornwall, that included (inevitably) a steam bent timber facade and featured on Channel Four’s Grand Designs.

It’s safe to say that wood is a material that completely dominates Tom’s life.

In this episode we talk about: designing through making; the importance of trial and error in his practice; growing up in a garden centre and his fascination with sustainability; how his dyslexia enabled him to see the world differently; falling in love with Cornwall; and his determination to make craft (relatively) affordable. But most of all we chat about his obsession with wood in general – and steam bending in particular – and how the process has shaped his life and career. 

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