British designer Faye Toogood‘s furniture and objects demonstrate a preoccupation with materiality and experimentation. All of her pieces are handmade by small-scale fabricators and traditional artisans, and have a rawness that respects the honesty of each material.
Her tiles are no different. One stand-out design, created in partnership with Made a Mano, utilises volcanic stone taken directly from Mount Etna in Sicily.
Toogood presents these tiles in appropriately fiery colours: with bright reds contrasting with dark greys and blacks. She also created white, grey and brown versions of the tiles, to represent the different colours of lava as it cools down. The glazed stone is fired in a kiln at temperatures reaching 2,000°C to fuse it to the glaze – a process that can take up to ten days.
Toogood has an academic training in the theory and practice of fine art, yet her work delivers pure self-expression and relies on well-tuned instinct.
Her objects, grouped together into numbered Assemblages, can be viewed on her eye-popping website. The diversity of this on-line portfolio proves her ability to avoid the formulaic while experimenting with both materials and processes.
Unusually, she engages not only with the products themselves but also with the 3D space in which they are shown. Truly inspirational!
A new post by Joe Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, February 2017.