Material Matters with Grant Gibson
In Material Matters, host Grant Gibson talks to a designer, maker, artist, architect, engineer, or scientist about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discovers how it changed their lives and careers.
Follow us on Instagram @materialmatters.design and our website www.materialmatters.design
The Material Matters fair will return in 2025, as part of the London Design Festival.
Material Matters is produced and published by Delizia Media Ltd.
Episodes
127 episodes
Neil Brownsword on clay and safeguarding skill.
Neil Brownsword is one of the most intriguing – and uncompromising – ceramic artists currently practicing in the UK. His work is inspired by the de-industrialisation of his home city, Stoke-on-Trent, and, appropriately enough, his career in cer...
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Season 19
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Episode 1
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58:49
Zandra Rhodes on pattern, colour, and textiles.
Zandra Rhodes is one of the most recognisable and influential figures in fashion, as well as the founder of the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. Describing herself as both ‘chaotic’ and ‘fastidious’, she possesses a unique sens...
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Season 18
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Episode 10
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50:27
Aaron Betsky on why architects should stop building (and reuse instead).
Aaron Betsky is a US-based writer, educator and critic, who has served as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as a curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Ar...
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Season 18
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Episode 9
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57:28
Nicole Rycroft on viscose and her mission to save the world's endangered forests.
Nicole Rycroft is the founder and executive director of the award-winning environmental not-for-profit, Canopy. Since it launched in 1999, the Vancouver-based organisation has worked with more than 950 companies – including Marks & Spencer,...
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Season 18
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Episode 8
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59:11
Mark Hearld on collage.
Mark Hearld is an artist and designer who has a fascination with flora and fauna and has worked in a range of different media – including lithographic and linocut prints, painting, ceramics, textiles and tapestry. However, he is best known for ...
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Season 18
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Episode 7
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59:56
Todd Bracher on light (and designing Net Positive products).
Todd Bracher is a US-based product designer who has worked with brands such as Humanscale, 3M, Herman Miller, Georg Jensen and Issey Miyake through his eponymous studio, winning a slew of awards along the way. More recently, he crea...
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Season 18
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Episode 6
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1:06:18
Zena Holloway on grass roots.
Zena Holloway is a bio-designer and founder of Rootfull, which creates exquisite clothes, lights and sculptures from grass roots. She started her career as an underwater photographer, doing extraordinary high-end fashion shoots, as ...
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Season 18
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Episode 5
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46:41
Alkesh Parmar on orange peel.
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 ...
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Season 18
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Episode 4
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45:07
Sanne Visser on human hair.
Sanne Visser is a Dutch-born, London-based designer. She describes herself as a ‘material explorer, maker and researcher’, who is best known for a string of installations and products using human hair. Since graduating from Central Saint Martin...
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Season 18
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Episode 3
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57:01
Bharti Kher on material alchemy and her fascination with bindis.
Artist Bharti Kher was brought up in England before moving to India almost on a whim in the early ’90s. Since then, she has established herself as a major player on the international art scene. Her sculptures talk about women’s plac...
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Season 18
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Episode 2
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1:02:32
Oliver Heath on biophilic design.
Oliver Heath is a designer, architect, author and one of the world’s leading advocates for biophilic design. Along with his team and the sustainable platform Planted, he currently has an exhibition at the Roca Gallery in South London, which foc...
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Season 18
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Episode 1
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52:22
Ernest Scheyder on lithium, mining, and the politics behind going green.
Ernest Scheyder is an author and senior correspondent for Reuters. His new book, The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, looks at the impact of the green transition in the US – and, more particularly, ...
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Season 17
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Episode 10
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52:36
Adi Toch on why she buries copper.
Adi Toch is one of the world’s most fascinating metal artists, who over the years has buried her pieces for months on end before digging them up, and even made them react to sound. She has also taken part in collaborations with furniture makers...
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Season 17
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Episode 9
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54:01
Human Nature's Jonathan Smales on mining the Anthropocene, and building in timber and Hempcrete at The Phoenix.
Jonathan Smales is a housing developer like few others. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Nature, whose new project, The Phoenix, on the outskirts of Lewes, East Sussex in the UK, has just won planning permission.
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Season 17
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Episode 8
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1:06:23
Bert Frank's Adam Yeats on manufacturing in post-Brexit Britain.
Adam Yeats is co-founder and managing director of Bert Frank, one of the UK’s leading lighting companies. Yeats started the brand with designer, Robbie Llewellyn, in 2013. Since then it has gone from strength to strength, opening a showroom in ...
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Season 17
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Episode 7
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40:07
Ptolemy Mann on colour, weaving, and painting.
Ptolemy Mann is a British artist who came to widespread attention with her woven textile pieces, often stretched across a frame and notable for her extraordinary use of colour. More recently, her practice shifted and she has turned ...
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Season 17
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Episode 6
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57:48
Fairphone's Bas van Abel on repair, longevity, and conflict minerals.
Bas van Abel founded Fairphone in 2013. The company attempts to transform the way our smartphones are manufactured, by reducing e-waste, sourcing conflict-free minerals, and improving working conditions in its supply chain. It creates a product...
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Season 17
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Episode 5
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1:01:15
John Tuomey on his childhood in rural Ireland, becoming an architect, and his beautiful memoir, First Quarter.
There have been over 100 episodes of Material Matters but, for listeners who might be new to all this, the idea is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist, or architect about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and...
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Season 17
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Episode 4
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55:47
Sara Grady and Alice Robinson on making ethical leather.
Sara Grady and Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather in 2020. The duo aim in their own words ‘to link leather with exemplary farming and, in doing so, to redefine leather as an agricultural product’. All of which means creating a ne...
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Season 17
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Episode 3
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55:47
Florian Gadsby on clay and becoming a potter.
Florian Gadsby is a bit of a phenomenon. The ceramicist currently has a new show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and has also published a memoir, By My Hands, that charts his formative years with clay, including apprenticeships in the UK and, ...
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Season 17
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Episode 2
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58:13
Christien Meindertsma on wool (and linoleum).
Christien Meindertsma is a Dutch designer who has a fascination with materials. She currently has an installation at the V&A, entitled Re-forming Waste, which shows new work based around her interest in linoleum, as well as technological ad...
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Season 17
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Episode 1
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51:23
Simone Brewster on cork and creating 'intimate architecture'.
This special festive episode is slightly different because, as we come to the end of 2023, we thought it would be interesting to talk to someone who has had a breakthrough year. And we couldn’t think of anyone that description fits ...
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Season 16
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Episode 8
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59:01
Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert on hot glass.
Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert is a Paris-based designer, maker, and artist, obsessed with blown glass. In an eclectic career, that has seen him travelling through the USA and Europe, before settling in France in 2007, he has shown work at the V&...
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Season 16
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Episode 7
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53:48
Neil Thomas on building with bamboo.
Neil Thomas is the founder and director of Atelier One, one of the most creative engineering practices in the UK. The firm has worked on building projects such as Singapore Arts Centre, Federation Square in Australia, and Baltic in Gateshead, a...
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Season 16
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Episode 6
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56:18
Caroline Till on material futures, regenerative design, and lots more.
Caroline Till is a consultant, author, curator, and academic. She founded Franklin Till, along with Kate Franklin, in 2010 and, since then, the future research agency has worked with the likes of international textile exhibition Heimtextil, pap...
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Season 16
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Episode 5
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59:03