Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Bethany Williams describes herself as ‘an artist, humanitarian and sustainable fashion designer’. Since graduating from the London College of Fashion in 2016, she has collaborated with organisations that help people with a range of issues – including drug addiction and homelessness – and used waste and discarded clothes to create high end fashion pieces. 
During the pandemic, she joined forces with a few of her fashion friends to create the Design Emergency Network, making PPE for those on the front line of the crisis. And most recently, she has launched a new collection with clothing brand, TOAST. 
In this episode we talk about: splitting her time between the Isle of Man and London’s Deptford; dealing with severe illness and how it affected her work and personal life; the importance of love and family; painting again; returning to fashion with the TOAST project; how working with clay brought her back to textiles; the importance of craft and systems to her practice; creating socially sustainable fashion; and her extraordinary response to the Covid crisis.
Finally, you can find more information on Assemble with Material Matters here: materialmatters.design/conference
And you can purchase tickets here: app.pairsoftware.io/material-matters/ou3085wj
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Corin Mellor is the creative director of David Mellor Design – a brand that is synonymous with his father, David, but also the design and manufacture of beautiful cutlery, primarily made of stainless steel. 
According to Sir Terence Conran, David was ‘Britain’s most serious, modest and greatest post-war product designer’, who created everything from bins to bus stops before concentrating on cutlery. 
Corin took over the company in 2006, expanding the company’s range and material palette, as well as creating some delightful knives, forks and spoons himself.
In this episode we talk about: the extraordinary David Mellor campus outside Sheffield; his family’s relationship with architects Michael and Patty Hopkins; living next door to the Mellor factory; why the production of cutlery has barely changed since the turn of the twentieth century; being obsessed with control and sweating the small stuff; the properties of stainless steel and the importance of chromium; how knives are different; the changing face of Sheffield and finding the right skills in the city; being the custodian of his father’s legacy and growing up with his brilliant writer mother; not being good at school; the joy of finding new makers; and why he can’t design cushions.
For more information on Assemble with Material Matters go to: https://materialmatters.design/conference
And to purchase tickets go to: https://app.pairsoftware.io/material-matters/ou3085wj
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Nicola Turner is a UK-based artist who is best known for her use of horsehair and wool in her extraordinary, and often quite dark, sculptures. She originally trained as a theatre designer – working for the likes of the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Sydney Opera House – before doing a Fine Art MA in her fifties. 
Since then, her work has featured in a string of locations – most notably, the Courtyard at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2024. Currently, she has an installation at the chapel of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as well as an upcoming exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art in London’s Hanover Square.
In this episode, we talk about: discovering horsehair in a skip; naming her YSP show after a Shakespeare sonnet; her interest in death; her cancer diagnosis; visiting an abattoir as a student; her mother’s background in upholstery; creating site responsive pieces and using her intuition; how people respond to her work; moving from theatre design into fine art; opening her own studio in Bath, making clothes as a child; why she still writes to her school art teacher; and not being afraid to work at scale.
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Dublin-based architect John Tuomey first appeared on Material Matters in 2024 to talk about his brilliant memoir, First Quarter. Now he’s written the follow-up, unsurprisingly entitled, Middle Quarter. 
John is the co-founder of O’Donnell + Tuomey. He was the inaugural professor of Architectural Design at University College Dublin and visiting professor at Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Over the years, he has won numerous awards, including the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, and his practice is responsible for buildings such as V&A East, the Lyric Theatre Belfast, and the Glucksman Gallery in Cork. 
In this episode, he talks about: this year’s opening of V&A East; material as ‘tangible reality’ in architecture; why he wrote his new book (and why it isn’t a biography); being interested in mortality and melancholy; architecture and ‘endurance’; his relationship with his mother (and her friendship with actor Richard Harris); the purpose of poetry and the purpose of architecture; creating buildings with lasting value; being ‘lucky’ and working the way he wants; failure; the importance of music in his life; architecture as an ‘occasional art’; his inner drive; being drawn to the scared; oh... and telling Michael Graves to ‘fuck off’. 
You can buy the beautiful Middle Quarter here: https://shop.materialmatters.design/products/middle-quarter
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What if the materials a building needs are already sitting in a skip down the road?
Joel de Mowbray, founding director of Yes Make, joins Grant Gibson to explain how a regenerative design and build practice rescues high-quality construction materials from landfill — and builds a viable business around them. Earlier this year, Yes Make joined forces with interdisciplinary design collective Resolve Collective and architecture practice Material Cultures to launch Tipping Point East, a circular construction hub in east London that aims to divert tonnes of material from waste.
In this episode, we dive into the practical realities of reuse in construction. We discuss:
Tipping Point East: Founding a circular construction hub and what it takes to make reuse work at scale.
Cooking with what's in the fridge: How Yes Make designs around the materials it already has, rather than specifying from scratch.
Elton John's purple kitchen: The strange, brilliant afterlives of salvaged fixtures and fittings.
The 'wild west' of industrial sites: Working on the edges of the construction industry, and building a studio from materials already to hand.
The challenges of reuse: Why the industry still finds it easier to demolish than to recover.
Public engagement: Why bringing people into the process is central to the practice.
Joel also reflects on living on a former Dunkirk 'little ship', moving from Lambeth Council to start Yes Make, being a 'lost boy' growing up, why bike mechanics saved him, and how learning from — and working with — his father shapes the projects he takes on.
And remember, Material Matters London runs from 15-17 September at UNLOCKED Shoreditch. It's free for trade but you must register in advance. You can find more information here: materialmatters.design/The-Fair
New to the podcast? Head to materialmatters.design/podcast for our playlists — including 'Start Here', 'Design Icons' and our Material Focus collections on clay, timber, fibre and biomaterials.
Explore more: Visit materialmatters.design for more on our fairs and conferences.
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