From being inspired by traffic cones to working with rare elements, these designers are pushing creative boundaries with their projects.
Tucked between the A40 and Grand Union Canal in west London, Park Royal’s 1,200 acres of land form London’s biggest industrial area. However, hidden among the warehouses, filled with food production lines and towering data centres, you’ll find a thriving design district.
As part of the London Design Festival running from September 12-20, the Park Royal design district is opening itself to the public with an exhibit called Manufactory, a giant invitation into the hidden folds of production, lifting the curtain on studios, exhibitions and industrial spaces.
With cheaper rents fuelling creative freedom, this scruffy area is full of up-and-coming designers and artists hidden among established creatives such as Bill Amberg, Russell Maliphant and Henry Krokatsis.
On the western fringe, you’ll find Queensrollahouse, an industrial 1950s warehouse with 12,000 sq ft of space — home to 30 resident artists and designers. Krokatsis, a London-based artist, bought the warehouse from Rolls-Royce and rebuilt it using found materials. Sheets of glass were rescued from a glass toughening factory down the road, creating a mosaic of odd-sized windows alongside mismatched doors, bed frames and aeroplane seats, reflecting the raw, industrial manufacturing aspect of Park Royal.
“It runs really like a social sculpture,” Krokatsis says. “It’s a way of putting stuff together, people together.” They don’t charge much for their studio spaces, which can be rented for as little as £470 a month.
The area is protected as Strategic Industrial Land (SIL), a designation designed to protect the capital’s most vital industrial areas from high-value housing developments. It employs over 40,000 people.
With low costs, designers are free to experiment more without having to fit with commercial norms. “At that point [when Krokatsis bought the warehouse] it was really cheap and they’re still a third of the price of Hackney,” he says. “There wasn’t some mad idea that you’ve got to push to make money with it, so you could just look at it like a sculpture and just do it in its own way.”
“You’ve got to have somewhere in London to make stuff, and there’s not really anywhere else.”
FOUR TO WATCH OUT FOR AT LDF
Woo Jin Joo 'I'm Drawn By Myth and Folklore'
After moving to London in 2014 to study at Central St Martins, Woo Jin Joo realised that her passion was in the materiality and craft aspect of textiles. She went on to study an MA in textiles at the Royal College of Art and has since been developing her craft, using embroidery as a sculptural form, complemented by ceramics and watercolour paintings and drawings.
“I work very much drawn into myth and folklore, especially from Korean, Chinese and East Asian myth,” says Joo, who grew up between Seoul and Shanghai. “A lot of it is around myth-making and these stories that I was brought up with, but also it combines and collides with my living in London and that distinction, but also how it comes together.”
Her solo exhibition Bodily Inbetweenness, displayed at the gallery Ruup & Form as part of Shoreditch Design Week, centres on emergence and transformation, with figures emerging from the walls. I hear things existing with me, made of viscose embroidery, stands 155cm tall and was made to embody auspicious animals and represent the year of the Blue Snake in the Chinese Zodiac signs. White Feet, with a similar viscose thread embroidery look, is based on a dokkaebi, a mythical Korean creature.
Joo, 30, has found London the perfect place to develop her art. “I think if I were to be an artist back home, the works I would be producing would be completely different,” she says. “Because then there wouldn’t be that outside perspective that I am able to bring in, by kind of stepping away from that cultural inference and making it something that’s completely unique. I feel like it’s true to me.”
Running from September 11 to November 13 at Ruup & Form, 7 Tilney Court, London EC1V 9BQ, ruupandform.com
