Peter Marigold is one of several young British designers showing new work at Grandmateria, an exhibition at Gallery Libby Sellers in London this September during the London Design Festival and the Frieze Art Fair.
Marigold will be exhibiting a new collection called Octave - shown here - which combines wood cut from a fallen tree with elements taken from musical instruments.
See more work by Marigold in our earlier stories: Make/Shift shelves for Movisi; Split series; and Peter Marigold at Great Brits in Milan.
Grandmateria is the inaugural exhibition at the gallery, established by former Design Museum curator Libby Sellers.
Below is a press release about the exhibition, which runs from 19 September to 14 October in a temporary space at 1-5 Exhibition Road, plus some info about Marigold:
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Grandmateria
19 September 2007 - 14 October 2007
Temporary Exhibition Space: 1-5 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2HE
Opening hours 11-7pm each day of the London Design Festival and Frieze Art Fair (11 - 14 October). For further opening hours please call.
For further information and images please contact libby [at] libbysellers.com / 07774 113 813
Gallery Libby Sellers presents Grandmateria, an exhibition of new design commissions from emerging designers, all of whom are exploring materials and forms that challenge and excite our expectations of design.
Works will include limited edition lighting designs from Stuart Haygarth, concept furniture from Julia Lohmann, storage solutions from Peter Marigold and a series of interactive chairs from Moritz Waldemeyer.
Grandmateria, a title borrowed from the 2005 album by Swiss band Morgan Lafay, acknowledges the album's thematic exploration into the mythologies of the Philosopher's stone: a stone said to have alchemist powers to transmute lead into gold. By working with often humble materials, or materials out of context, each of the designers represented in Grandmateria elevates the ordinary to spectacular effect.
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Peter Marigold was born in London in 1974 and studied 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.
Peter has said of the piece, "The Octave series combines divided and inverted tree branches with forms and components derived from musical instruments to create anthropomorphic twisted growth like furniture. The proposal is that three dimensional structures which we would normally consider to be of human invention (such as the sound box on a guitar) are in fact driven by phenomena such as sound and that they are something that has been arrived at rather than invented."
The wood used in Octave was collected from Hampstead Heath after a tree fell from private land into the council's land. Peter was given sole permission to take sections of the tree away for use in his work. As he says, "the use of found branched and logs is not only convenient, but more importantly, there is something beautiful in the thought that scattered around the forest are an infinite variety of angles held within any one of the lopped logs."