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 run from 18-21 September 2024 at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, as part of the London Design Festival.
Material Matters is produced and published by Delizia Media Ltd.
Episodes
120 episodes
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, becoming an architect, and his beautiful new memoir.
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 2023, her breakthrough year.
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
Tom Lloyd and Luke Pearson on their material change.
Tom Lloyd and Luke Pearson co-founded the hugely influential design studio, Pearson Lloyd, in 1997. Since then, it has gone on to work in areas such as the workplace, transport and health care, with organisations like Virgin, Lufthansa, the Dep...
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Season 16
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Episode 4
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1:05:00
Goldfinger’s Marie Carlisle on wood and social good.
Marie Carlisle is CEO and co-founder of social enterprise (and Material Matters exhibitor), Goldfinger. The organisation opened its doors at the foot of West London’s Trellick Tower in 2013 and makes high end furniture from wood – that has ofte...
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Season 16
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Episode 3
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48:33
Michael Marriott on resourceful design and his fascination with materials.
My guest for the 100th episode of Material Matters is a British designer who sits somewhere between industry and craft. Michael Marriott has a fascination with materials – so much so that his web shop is called Wood Metal Plastic – and a love o...
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Season 16
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Episode 2
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58:54
Alice Kettle on embroidery.
Alice Kettle is one of the country’s leading textile artists. She uses embroidery to tell stories and throw the spotlight on contemporary issues – most noticeably the refugee crisis in her series Thread Bearing Witness. Cur...
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Season 16
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Episode 1
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53:55
Beatie Wolfe on making music material again and the power of art.
Beatie Wolfe is a musician and artist, who has in her time been described as a ‘musical weirdo and visionary’ and one of the ‘22 people changing the world’. In a relatively short career she has: created a 3D interactive album app an...
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Season 15
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Episode 10
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1:11:30
Ndidi Ekubia on silver and her extraordinary, liquid-like vessels.
Ndidi Ekubia creates extraordinary, almost liquid-looking, vessels from silver. She graduated from the University of Wolverhampton in 1995, before going on to the Royal College of Art. Since then, her work has been shown internationally at exhi...
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Season 15
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Episode 9
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50:41
Ercol chairman, Henry Tadros, on elm, beech, ash and keeping his company relevant.
Henry Tadros is chairman of one of the country’s most renowned furniture companies, Ercol. The firm was founded by Italian immigrant, Lucian Ercolani, in 1920 but it really found its feet after the Second World War with the Windsor Range – an i...
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Season 15
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Episode 8
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47:00