GREAT BRITS: INGENIOUS THERAPIES

Wednesday 18 April 2007

The British Council and the Design Museum will launch the work of a new generation of talented young designers from Britain at the 2007 Milan Furniture Fair in Great Brits: Ingenious Therapies, an exhibition at Paul Smith's European headquarters in Milan from 18-23 April 2007.

The five designers in the exhibition - Peter Marigold, Hiroko Shiratori, &made, Eelko Moorer and Nadine Jarvis - have, in the early stages of their careers, demonstrated uncommon conceptual maturity and ambition, combined with outstanding fluency in the making and function of objects.

Peter Marigold's furniture addresses the makeshift imperatives of temporary living with elegance and mechanical deftness. Shiratori's exquisite prototypes dissemble as faux-artefacts derived from ancient Japanese stories. Conscientious entrepreneurs &Made turn design into a socially-responsive performance of multifunctional objects. Eelko Moorer's objects indulge improbable fantasies from flying like a bird to hanging and swinging like a jungle beast. By poignant and elemental means, Nadine Jarvis's funeral urns return their precious contents to the earth.

This is the third exhibition of young British designers organised by the British Council and Design Museum with Paul Smith Ltd. during the Milan Furniture Fair. The first in 2003 identified a new romanticism in design and helped launch the international careers of Tord Boontje, Sam Buxton, Mathias Bengtsson and Daniel Brown. The second Great Brits, the New Alchemists, introduced the raw, transformative and frequently surreal work of Wokmedia, Mathias Megyeri, Julia Lohman and Peter Traag to Japan, Singapore and Australia in an international tour following its Milan launch in 2005.

In Great Brits: Ingenious Therapies, the curators Emily Campbell, Head of Design & Architecture at the British Council, and Libby Sellers, Curator at the Design Museum, will explore the twin imperatives of ingenious function and therapeutic action which appear to compel this group of young designers. That is, the design of objects whose functional performance is brilliantly contrived and crafted while they address a particular human emotion or need - fear, fiction, fantasy; escape; stasis and calm; perpetuity.

'Great Brits has been such a fantastic success that we've all decided to do it again' said Sir Paul Smith. 'We are very excited by the new group of designers in Great Brits: Ingenious Therapies and can't wait to see the show'. [get new quote from Sir Paul for 07]. Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, comments: 'Getting the chance to show in Milan is an important kickstart to the careers of young product designers, and we have a responsibility to them'.

GREAT BRITS: INGENIOUS THERAPIES
The designers

Peter Marigold
Marigold was born in London in 1974 and studied and sculpture at Central St Martins before enrolling in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in 2004. His fine art training, combined with a series of jobs in scenographic design and production - props, models, costumes and sets for theatre and exhibitions - has led him to take a pluralistic and resourceful approach to furniture design. His Prop and Wedge storage units honour the lightness and improvisation which are the virtues of temporary living, while their fine hardware details express permanence and functional reliability.

Hiroko Shiratori
Born in Tokyo, Shiroko studied furniture design in Japan and spatial design at Chelsea College of Art before entering the Royal College in 2004. Dissatisfied by the dry, object-driven nature of her first year of studies, and questioning the very need for more things, she decided to work with historical narratives - contriving "an excuse to make something new out of an old context". Her final year project, A Collection of Historical Objects from Japan, lies somewhere between fine art, design and theatre; indeed Shiratori explicitly credits theatre - "the creation of one world" - as an inspiration. In the meantime the ingenious functionality proposed by her Historical Objects contains broad and deliberate possibilities for industrial design.

&made
Since graduating from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005, David Cameron and Toby Hadden have used design to provoke re-consideration of a variety of social, cultural and environmental themes. The recent series of natural disasters - tsunami, earthquake, flooding 2 encouraged them, for example, to investigate a range of domestic products that double as life-saving devices: the Either-Oar table that converts to a raft in the event of a flash flood, and the Uber-Ornament, an intelligent vase that becomes a torch at the impact of an earthquake or serious jolt. Lucky visitors to the Milan furniture fair in 2005 found the pavements and bar floors strewn with mysterious coins doubling as handy paperclips - an self-promotional device from the craftsmen-pranksters &made.

Eelko Moorer
Born in the Netherlands 1975, Moorer graduated in 3 Dimensional Design from Utrecht School of the Arts in 1999 with a specialisation in accessories. He set up his own interior and furniture practice and ran it for four years while also completing a technical course in shoemaking. In 2003, the year he was nominated for the Rotterdam Design Prize, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art. He received his MA in Design Products in 2005, presenting a series of darkly suggestive objects: a "perch" to launch the user from a balcony into flight or suicide; shoes with integral hooks to support the user hanging upside down from the handrail of a transport carriage; and a bearskin rug rendered in less-than-cosy rubber "fur".

Nadine Jarvis
Jarvis was born in London in 1982 and graduated in design from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2006. Her academic work expresses a metaphysical questioning. A series of objects interfere with the supposed permanence and impermanence of the material world and the realm of the emotions: a light blushes in response to the emotional pitch of a mobile phone conversation; a ring made of sugar prefigures treasure melted on the tongue; and bird feeders briefly commemorate life while accelerating the disposal and distribution of remains.

Milan Furniture Fair, 18-23 April 2007
Paul Smith, Viale Umbria 95, 20135 Milan
The British Council or The Design Museum

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