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LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2011
MARTHA FREUD design file
A product designer with a natural reserve of talent.
Tucked behind St Pancras Station sits Camley Street Natural Park, a little-known, two-acre conservation site which, for the duration of London Design Festival, became an open air gallery space for the work of furniture and lighting designer Martha Freud.
The human drive to categorise and control nature informs many of the pieces on display at Camley Street Natural Parkduring London Design Festival. Photography: Portrait ©Jack Brockway. Butterfly Pendant ©Mark Cocksedge.
This was Freud’s second year at the Festival following her 2010 debut show held at Cov- ent Garden’s creative hang-out, The Hos- pital Club. The positive response and swell of support she received at the time made a return this September seem a fitting way of bookending her first year in business. “It’s so nice having that yearly marker; looking back on where I was this time last year and feeling a real sense of accomplish- ment,” she tells mondo*arc during prepara- tions for LDF 2011. Freud studied Product and Furniture Design at Kingston University and on graduating in 2007 was snapped up by fashion label Issa Couture. She spent two seasons creating products and furniture ‘in-style’ for the brand before striking out on her own. Today from her base in Great Western Studios in west London, Freud creates works inspired by nature, often sculpted from natural forms and increasingly realised in ceramics – a medium she only took up three years ago, but which has quickly become a favourite part of her work. “I really love it; it’s so instant and I can make almost anything I want here in my stu- dio without having to go to my welder or my carpenter – it’s a control freak’s dream, and yet it’s not, because it can also be totally unpredictable.”
Her pieces often use light, not only to deepen the viewer’s response to the work, but also to add a pleasing functionality to what would otherwise be a purely sculptural form. A sense of ecological awareness runs through her work and the she finds further satisfaction in the way porcelain and stone-
ware add warmth to low-energy lightsources that have historically been considered undesirably harsh. In her LDF show this year, Freud pre- sented a collection of pieces exploring our interaction with nature and our attempts to control, contain and label it. With its compartmentalising of ideas, it is also, she says, quite a personal expression of how she imagines her own mind. With all these themes in play, her choice of Camley Street Natural Park as the location for her event seems particularly appropri- ate. Run by the London Wildlife Trust, the park has been a source of both materials and inspiration for Freud and so the show was in part her way of raising awareness of the Trust and its Camley site. A range of different light pieces were in- stalled around the park. Among them were the Nest wall and pendant lights – glowing knots of sticks constructed around a central light source – and the Humming Bird collec- tion of white pear-shaped pendants each with a rough circular hole from which the internal light can escape. Elsewhere caged clusters of glowing porcelain butterflies could be found swinging gently in the breeze, and wooden pigeon-hole racks filled with LED-lit tea light pots were installed around the site - each pot stamped with a plant shape or in some cases with a differ- ent word (the latter versions turning on and off in sets to spell out cryptic messages). Aside from private commissions, her work has recently been installed across town at another educational centre, this time at Royal Park, an area within Hyde Park. “For the moment, I’m really enjoying being on this path,” she says. “I still think there’s lots more I can explore and a lot more ideas I want to try, so I’m definitely not finished with it yet, but who knows what will hap- pen in the future.”
www.marthafreud.com
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