Over 30 design graduates focusing on the wider issues of sustainability and presenting a cleaner, greener way to live will showcase their work for the first time at Planted, the first zero waste design event in the world from 25-26 September
Green Grads will take place at Planted from 25 – 26 September
At Samsung KX, Coal Drops Yard
King’s Cross, London, N1C 4DQ
“Like most people from my generation, I am motivated by the climate emergency,” said Emma Appleton, a graduate of Kingston University in 2020, bringing her innovative idea for “green downpipes” to GREEN GRADS (#greengrads), a ground-breaking feature of the Planted event which will be held in the state-of-the-art Samsung KX experience space in Coal Drop’s Yard, King’s Cross, over the weekend 25/26 September 2021.
Emma is just one of over 30 graduates who will take part. In keeping with the overall themes of Planted, they will show a broad and stimulating mix of ideas, products and installations. “Sustainable” and “circular” are their big buzz words. They will bring designs that reconnect us with nature, through plants, materials, craft and pattern. They will look at combating climate change and/or pollution. They have new ideas for saving energy, conserving or replacing scarce resources, inventing eco-friendly materials and making food. And they are waging war on waste. Ambitious, engaging, informative and inspirational, GREEN GRADS will present a cleaner, greener way to live.
The show will be fun, too. There will be large scale physical exhibits including art installations that highlight environmental problems. Making use of Samsung’s amazing digital resources, ideas will be expanded on screen with lots of films to watch: eco-reportage from around the globe, proposals for problem solving, insights into hands-on making, and imaginative animations. Designers will be there in person primed to chat through their ideas, with samples and power point presentations. There will be demos, workshops and seminars, and lots of information on the Planted website. An exclusive collaboration with @illustratorsfair (hosted on social media 18-26 September) will show more than 50 recently- graduated illustrators who have risen to the challenge of depicting: “What does sustainability mean to me – and/or the world?”
GREEN GRADS is presented by Deborah Spencer, co-founder and director of Planted, and curated by design advocate and commentator Barbara Chandler (@sunnygran). Co
Curator Barbara Chandler has made numerous visits to universities this summer visiting degree shows if running or seeing graduates in personal briefings. She has been to Plymouth, Loughborough, Leicester, Manchester, Kingston, Brightoand Stoke, and to many events in London. She said “New Designers, the annual show for new graduates in design, has been cancelled two years running, though strong online. Two cohorts of graduates have not had a central platform physically to show their work. I call them the lost classes of 20/21. I’ve previously curated shows of new talent – and of course written extensive newspaper reports over the years – so I looked for a central venue to do this again. Deborah at Planted was more than enthusiastic, and, in keeping with the ideals of her ground-breaking show Planted, GREEN GRADS was born.
A striking part of our GREEN GRADS weekend are the installations/films that draw attention to the problems – ceramic ‘fossils of the future’ polluted with plastic; illustrated plates that plot the decline of biodiversity; film reportage from around the world. Then there is our legion of problem solvers, presented through exhibits and on screen, tacklthe wider issues of sustainability, with detailed research and original solutions for the world’s sadly every-expanding environmental problems. I have been inspired, awed even, by our graduates’ forensic approach, lateral thinking and professional expertise, tackling not just the problems we know exist but also identifying new ones. The ‘industry’ owes a huge debt to the excellent design talent graduating within the UK each year. I thought it was time to show our support, come together and give back to the next generation – so thank you to Deborah for making this happen, to our sponsors, Ercol and Anglepoise, and to Studio Tucktite for hand-holding all the way.”
Graduates participating include:
EMMA APPLETON
Emma graduated from Kingston University last year, where she developed her Green Pipe concept. Her research showed that London has suffered from illegal levels of air pollution since 2010. Around 1.4 billion kg of air pollution are removed by vegetation each year; and, in the same period, even in dry districts, 24,000 litres of water could be collected from every roof. Her water collection and filtration panel system, bringing plants to underused vertical surfaces, atches to gutters and directs water through the root system of plants growing on the panels. “Greenery can remove Co2 and other pollutants from the air,” said the designer. “It benefits our mental health, and slowing down water diminishes the risk of flooding.”
@emmaappleton_design
ANDREW SCOTT & ANDREAS KAMOLZ
Andrew and Andreas have graduated from the RCA this year and live in a shared house. During lockdown they made the “SE17 chair” entirely from local materials. Pallet wood for spring pole lathe came from nearby East Street Market with turning gouges from a discarded clothes rack. Greenwood came from Burgess Park, with a woven seat made from plastic bags gathered at the market and made into rope. Andrew’s Instagram plots more projects from found materials.
@andrewpiercescott
LAURENCE PARENT
Living Blocks are the invention of Lawrence Parent, developed from his degree project at Brighton University last year. This an “open source” (ie freely accessible to all) recipe for modifying simple moulds with balloons and discarded fruit and veg to mimic a natural stone that harbours vegetation and wild life to soften harsh urban landscapes. This will be the basis of a new business called Wild Structures, aiming to bring nature back into cities. “I have a passion for biodiversity and want to connect humans and nature.”
@lawrence.parent
CALLUM WARDLE
Plastic ocean waste, the scourge of the planet, is under attack from Callum Wardle, a graduate this year from Kingston University, with a workshop in his back garden. His project Ocean Bucket has been running “beach cleans for beach toys” across North Devon. Collected waste is sorted, graded and made into robust buckets, spades, rakes, moulds for Devon beaches to hire out on a daily basis, thus closing the loop. Callum is committed to “social values.” He believes that “designers have a responsibility to create better, more meaningful solutions.” He is also making by hand elegant stools and a trestle table in cork and oak.
@callumwardledesign
SIMON REDSTONE
Biophilia is a central theme of GREEN GRADS – fined as a “reconnection with nature, natural materials and craft.” Simon is a skilled willow weaver, who has just graduated as a 3D designer-maker from Staffordshire University, and pushing his craft in new, even modernist, directions. “Willow and coppiced wood are beautiful natural sustainable materials and I have extensive
@simon_redstone
RŪTA IRBĪTE
A 2021 graduate from Material Futures MA coue at St Martin’s, Ruta has been meticulously documenting her personal waste – “and there’s an awful lot of it” – putting samples in jars and labelling them, and then feeding them fungi to see what would break down. “Fungi are nature’s great recyclers – they even break down tough materials like lignin and cellulose and can change their DNA to adapt to new conditions – for example, if plastic is the only available food…” Her installation of stack upon stack of jars has its own beauty.
@rutairbite
MATHILDE WITTOCK
“They’re just tennis balls cut in half and eco-dyed,” says Mathilde Wittock, who painstakingly collected old balls from local clubs. Halved with an ingenious S-cut, these are slotted into plywood, for a softly textured sound-absorbing screen. And apparently there are not a lot of other uses for redundant bounceless balls.
@mwittock
MANDY BISCOE
Mandy Biscoe co-founded the Exeter seed bank in 2020 “to share community knowledge about plants and seed saving and to support mmunity resilience.” She will bring her Storied Seed Bank to King’s Cross. Enclosed within a wooden box are small plant samples, connected to plant samples. Listen in and someone will tell you why that plant especially matters to them. “The Storied Seed Bank shows the importance of plants in people’s lives and the connections we have to them in the 21 st century,” says Mandy. Have you got a pet plant and a story to tell? Let Mandy add it to her recordings.
[email protected];
YASMIN MORJARIA
Shown at UNMUTE, St Martin’s summer degree show at the top of the Bargehouse Gallery at Oxo Tower on the South Bank, Yasmin’s display was door dropping. For her project RAW (Rebellion Against Waste), she’s constructed a large collection of ingenious furniture from stuff salvaged from building sites and demolition dumps including striking assemblies of old doors.
@yasminmorjariadesign
IRENE ROCA MORACIA
Irene, an architect and designer from Spain, has recently graduated from Central St Martin’s. She has made beautiful, strikingly original – and “technically illegal” – modular furniture with materials rejected from building sites. “Appropriating the grid” has 11 building blocks that can be combined/joined with metal clips for seating, storage and so on. Materials had been discarded “often simply because the packaging was damaged – therefore, following strict EU quality controls, the contents were also deemed damaged.” Such materials are often simply dumped by the building contractors. Irene has used metal grids, hand-welded and patinated, cement, sand, insulation panels and brick dust. “Sustainability is as much a matter of operations and behaviour as design and technology,” she observes. “We can keep improving our materials and building systems, but we have to change how we consume them, too.”
@i.rocamrc
EBONY-KATHERINE
At her recent degree show, St Martin’s graduate Ebony-Katherine showed a huge woodland mural hand-painted with mushrooms and silver birch tree trunks. On it hung ten second-hand plates each adorned with an illustration of an endangered species, its “threat-level” meticulously researched, and then pixelated and faded accordingly – as charted by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (that’s the International Union for Conservation of Nature). “I’m using stories to show the loss of diversity and our symbiosis with nature,” says the artist – “and ceramics are my voice. She adds: “The decline of detail in my work shows the impact human behaviour has on plant and animal species.”
@ebonykatherine.studio