Faye Toogood: Assemblage 3

At the end of September, one of the most important exhibitions of world design was held. The London Design Festival is increasingly perceived as the second most fundamental event of the year, right after April’s Milan trade fair. It is certainly true that the London Design Festival has become a particularly important event in the field of experimental and limited design rather than traditional series-produced furniture. This was also confirmed by the excellent exhibition in the gallery of the auction hall of Phillips de Pury & Company, located just behind the corner of the famous and fashionable Bond Street.

The young designer and stylist Faye Toogood, who decided to design furniture a year ago, introduced only her third furniture and lighting collection here. After her successful operation as a stylist of interiors and editorials for prestigious magazines, but also for international brands like Comme de Garcons, Tom Dixon, etc., Faye has thrown herself into her own author’s production which, however topically and visually, still follows her activity as a stylist and creator of installations. 

In the collection for Phillips de Pury & Company, her unmistakable approach to furniture design has taken its most considerable shape thus far. After her previous projects, Assamblage 1 and 2, introduced last year, the designer has come up with Assemblage 3 with the subtitle Delicate Interference. The author has created a unified series which includes a dressing table, a jewellery stand, several low tables, a free-standing lamp, a wall lamp and several other objects which, in their forms, literally reveal the hidden features of the materials used. The thing is that the entire collection is inspired by natural mimicry and surfaces of insect bodies, non-recurring visual features which she tries to transform into absolutely new creative relations. All the objects, made for the most part from crude metals, are subject to a sort of current designer alchemy, in which the designer applies a whole series of chemical procedures to them, uncovering original visual features of the aluminium or bronze used. They then create a sort of luxurious and, at the same time, crude housing for the resulting objects which are created in a strictly limited edition. Most objects from the collection are thus characteristic owing to their iridescent rainbow surfaces, which the materials used have acquired thanks to chemical treatment.

Furniture under the baton of Faye Toogood becomes a creative experimental tool to form a certain specific atmosphere and original visualization. It is also included in her latest collection, Assemblage 3, which is one of the greatest surprises of the current design-art scene.