London Design Festival: Reflecting on Water
London Design Festival is a bit like paintballing. Exhibitions, installations, parties, talks, you name it, are hurled in all directions. At full pelt. The balls (stay with me here) don’t hurt and the bruises are more satisfying but you sure as hell are tired.
Now London Design Festival is done for another year, we can all indulge in a moment of reflective calm; lean back in our chairs and try and make sense of everything that we’ve seen. What was boundary pushing? What was imaginative? What was engaging? What was relevant? What was done that has never been done before? What was simply beautiful?
Biased we may be, but Water is up there.
The multi-disciplinary exhibition saw 13 designers come together at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham’s Bussey Building to explore the theme of Water. With such a wonderfully sprawling subject matter, the designers were given total free rein to create new products, materials, installations or experiments that involved, examined or were otherwise inspired by the properties and potential of water.
The result was a glorious mash-up of strange and wonderful contraptions and concepts and included buildings from a frozen future, a network of floating buoys that generate poetry from local water conditions, a cloud-shaped philanthropic robot, and a series of surface textures that used water as an unseen component.
The 13 exhibitors were: Andy Sheen, Dean Brown, Fernando Laposse, Henrik Nieratschker, Interaction Research Studio, James Patmore, Kirsi Enkovaara, Ola Mirecka, Philipp Ronnenberg, Simon Denzel, Six:Thirty x Matteo Loglio, Studio PSK x Karl Toomey and Unit Lab.
The opening night saw a slew of thirsty (sorry) people eagerly walk through the doors to see the show. And who better to provide the music to an exhibition all about water than the London Sea Shanty Collective?
Water took place during London Design Festival between 19 and 24 September at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham.
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