Faye Toogood on Creation as a Form of Connection

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Faye. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

FAYE TOOGOOD: Oh, thank you for having me. It’s really lovely to be here.

SB: I’m really excited to have you here and in town from London. I thought I would just start with the term assemblage, because that feels like probably the most obvious or natural place to start with your work. It’s how you’ve classified your “collections,” I guess I would call them, from the start. This is a term that says so much about who you are, how you think, how you do what you do. Could you share why you use this description, and also what, for you, the roots of the term assemblage are?

FT: Oh, that’s such a poignant question to start with. You’ve got me there, you’ve nailed me in a second. Tied up in that word, I think initially when I started to use it, I didn’t feel like I had the confidence to call it a collection. My background is in history of art and fine art. It’s not in design. I wanted to start making, I wanted to start producing, but I didn’t have the confidence to use the word collection. I felt like my work wasn’t worthy of it. I wasn’t there yet. And that, actually, the word assemblage would really sum it up much better, bringing together the different elements. It was a way of me understanding that I hadn’t come from the Royal College of Art. I hadn’t come up through the usual course of design and that I needed to create my own way. Actually, almost the first thing I did was say it’s Assemblage 1. So it’s collage. It’s bringing together different elements, I guess a sense of editing, in a way.  

But the history of that word for me and the meaning of that word for me, I think, does come from my history of art background, the combination of found objects, a collecting, a re-edit, a reshuffle. I feel comfortable with that. Probably always I’m looking for a new container, a new place to feel safe. And that word, assemblage, makes me feel safe.

SB: This notion of assemblage also stems from the idea of creating a “total work of art,” which is also what you do, working across various mediums. It’s this very kind of medium-agnostic, almost, approach, sort of Wiener Werkstätte, Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, that kind of—

FT: Yeah…. I think, again, when I started working, I didn’t realize that, really, my career was going to be investigating all of these different areas. It wasn’t part of the manifesto. It wasn’t something that I set out to do. It’s been curiosity, essentially, that’s led me through these different disciplines, different genres, different mediums. It’s more childlike, in a way. It’s investigation and curiosity. 

I think, for me, having the space to be able to do that was the most important thing. I guess I was aware of Wiener Werkstätte and the Black Mountain School, but again, it wasn’t really part of the agenda. At that point, I was just going to be making furniture. I didn’t even know I was going to be making clothes with my sister. I didn’t even know that I was going to be doing interiors. It just felt comfortable. It’s kind of amazing that your intuition is able to pick up on that even at an early start.

SB: Yeah, it was maybe a lower stakes “I just want to make things.”

FT: Yes, just a sheer desire to make things. I’d been working at a magazine beforehand, as an interiors editor, and that in a way is also assemblage, curating and putting things together and editing. But it just felt right, that term. That term felt right.

SB: You’ve noted that one of your latest assemblages, Assemblage 7, which comprises pieces made of English oak and Purbeck marble “holds and shows time.” Could you share the ways in which time manifests in this body of work? How do you think about the temporal aspects of Assemblage 7?

FT: It’s only after you produce the work and when you have to put the catalog together, and you sit with someone smart who knows what they’re doing to help you talk about what you’re doing—it’s only afterwards do I realize what it means. But I started to produce that collection straight after lockdown. So it has that loaded within it, but it has a sense of reflection. I’m about to move into the second part of my life, and there’s a feeling around and a sensibility around age and the beauty of age and what that means. I guess for me, that’s where the time element is. There’s definite influences around landscape and the kind of topographical element that’s in the work.

But actually it’s more about the choice of the Purbeck, for example, the Purbeck marble, which is actually—it’s not marble at all, it’s limestone. It comes from only one quarry in the country, off the Dorset coast. And it’s absolutely stunning. It’s just filled with shells and fossils, and when you polish it—it’s a very hard stone to work with. I’ve been through about four or five different stonemasons to actually work with it. So it’s really challenging to work with. It’s ordinarily used in ecclesiastical buildings. So you see it in Westminster Abbey and—

SB: Canterbury Cathedral.

FT: Canterbury Cathedral, yeah, exactly. Places like that. So it has a kind of natural spiritual quality about it, just inherent in it. It’s amazing. There’s something about it that I just feel so connected to. So there’s this timeless age there. There’s also the collection—when I started making the collection, I had small blocks of clay and small blocks of wax, and it was about trying to reveal what was in those blocks. It’s the most sculptural collection I’ve done. I was literally chiseling away at these little blocks of clay and wax to reveal the shapes within. It was amazing watching them come out, almost like an archeological dig that was excavated out of the modeling material to reveal the shape.

There’s something there around the state of mind that I was in when I was creating it. I was feeling very peaceful, but also very reflective and not sure about what was coming up in the future. There was a kind of nervousness there, and the whole collection is called “Lost and Found.” It’s this idea that things have been lost, but hopefully we can find them again. It is one of the more poetic collections that I’ve done, and it’s definitely reflecting how I feel right now.

SB: You talked a little bit about the sort of spiritual element of this stone, but this is probably perhaps your most sculptural assemblage to date, I would say.

FT: Definitely.

SB: Could you speak to how you went about achieving this spiritual quality to the sculptures? How did you know or how do you know—as a designer, maker, creator, artist—that you’ve made something with resonance? When is it like— [Laughter] I know, it’s a sacred question.

FT: Yeah, we don’t know. That’s the whole point. We don’t know. When you’ve done it once, all you want to do is be able to create it again, because it’s absolute magic—gold dust, sprinkles, whatever it is that you’re after. And that connection, it’s one of the reasons why I’m a designer, not an artist, I think, is that connection with other humans and watching how they connect to the work is so important to me. I realize that that’s kind of why I’m in it. It’s the reason. It’s the one reason why I’m doing it because I need that connection to other people, the humanity. It was interesting, actually, talking to somebody this morning about the works. I realized that there’s an intimacy there. The pieces are…. They’re landscape-based, but they’re also quite bodily. It’s almost like there’s two bodies connecting together in creating a landscape. They’re sort of almost like puzzles in a way, interconnecting.

There’s a sense of intimacy; there’s a feeling of age in the patina. The mark-making that has to go on when you are creating those stone pieces—you have to work so closely with the stonemason because I’m not actually doing it. He’s kindly providing himself almost as a vehicle for my mark-making. I had to create almost topographical maps of the mark-making and creating one-to-one models of how I wanted all the marks to be. And he was there sort of faithfully trying to reproduce those marks because it’s the mark-making that feels important. And as you say, it’s the most sculptural collection I’ve done. Although it’s not my hand that’s literally chiseling away—and each of the pieces are really heavily marked, actually—it’s quite amazing working with a craftsperson to do that for you.

So there’s the stone and there’s wood. There’s quite a few pieces in English oak, which are all then hand-shellacked. There’s a beautiful reflective quality of shellac from 19th-century English furniture, fine English furniture that has been placed on these pieces. We’ve also used bog oak, which is—just talking about time, that just blows your mind. These wonderful pieces have been dredged up from peat bog, and they’re just extraordinary. There’s so much in those, so much poetry already in those. I feel like the little stools are kind of…. I think of a Seamus Heaney poem when I look at those.

So you don’t know—in sort of a roundabout way of trying to answer your question—you don’t know. All you can do is put your full self in, and that’s all I know how to do. I have noted that the more of me that goes into the work, the more it connects. That’s the resonance. It’s not about: what material I use, is there a magic in the geometry, Is there something in that particular way that I’ve packaged it, marketed it, distributed it? No, it has nothing to do with that. It’s literally to do with how much I’ve put in of myself. That, I think, is how it resonates.

SB: So when I was scrolling through your Instagram, not that I need to mention Instagram, but— [Laughs]

FT: Oh, no.

SB: You post all kinds of—

FT: I’m not on Instagram, actually. Someone else does that. [Laughs]

SB: Well, your team posts all sorts of art references and influences.

FT: Yeah.

SB: You really wear them on your sleeve, which I appreciate. I think a lot of makers, creators, they tend to say, “Oh, I’m interested in or influenced by,.” but they don’t necessarily…. You’re really even showing specific works that inform your— It’s like a visual conversation and, perhaps not so surprisingly, there are works by Alexander Calder, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Isamu Noguchi. But I was pleasantly surprised to see works—this was going deeper into your feed—but by two lesser-known artists, among others: JB Blunk and Kan Yasuda. These are artists who I feel like are unsung. So it was nice to see the heroes and then maybe some lesser-known, unsung names. But they all share, I think, a certain sensibility that also I feel in your work. Which I love, this sort of connection across time. It’s an actual conversation with these other makers who existed in another time. I guess I wanted to ask, and this is a tricky question here—

FT: Oh, good. [Laughs]

SB: Because it’s a little loaded, but could you speak a bit about how you’ve shaped your taste in art?

FT: Okay, that is such a big, loaded question. Thank you for that, Spencer. [Laughs] 

Going back to the idea around being transparent about it, I have that art history background. It’s so important to me and the way that I view the world. I view the world in visual terms for me. I’m married to someone that sees the world in terms of literature and words, but I am just so much in the heart and the hands and the eye. That is kind of where I am. 

I feel that my work needs to sit in its time, it needs to be relevant, and it needs to—as we talked about—connect. But I can’t hide the fact that I’m part of the history, that I’m part of the context, and I am aware of these references. I feel that that’s important to share that because we all are. I feel like everyone in design is aware of their references. I’m not more educated in my history of art than others. It’s just I do feel comfortable sharing that, and I think that’s because it’s part of the work. You don’t need to know those references. But if you do, somehow I feel that you’ll connect even further to it. 

It’s funny, something like the Roly-Poly chair, who— I feel like that chair walks into the room before I do now. [Laughter] Everybody knows it more than me. That chair, some people see an African primitive connection, some people see something Art Deco, some people see something sixties Pop. And I have to say that there’s probably all of that within there. It’s that layering—and it’s, again, maybe going back to the word assemblage—that allows me to shuffle and play. Knowing that you know that reference allows me to be more playful, in a way, and I enjoy that element.

SB: Who are some sculptors or artists that serve as your North Stars?

FT: There are a lot of strong women in my life. I’m really led by strong women. 

I’m surrounded by books in my house, actually. I’ve realized the other day, I think I’m building a book collection for the time in my life when I can actually have time to read, and it’s not right now. Because I have three children and a lot going on. But I have a huge number of books. Most recently, I bought all the books I could find on Maggi Hambling. I just love her work. And Phyllida Barlow. Just everything about Phyllida’s work and the fact that, actually, as a woman, that she started working much later on in her life and went somewhat unrecognized in her field. She was doing something completely different. Rose Wylie, again, another female artist that was working much later in her life, painting just extraordinary—her naïvety, her character, the way that she gets that childlike quality across. Rachel Whiteread, for her use of materials. Just extraordinary. Actually, my studio in Camden is opposite hers, and I haven’t had the courage yet to go and knock on her door.

SB: Oh, man, you’ve got to knock. [Laughs]

FT: I don’t know why I haven’t. Gosh, to go and meet her would be incredible.

SB: Her show at the Tate Britain a few years ago was—

FT: Just mind-blowing.

SB: Extraordinary.

FT: Absolutely. So I grew up with Rachel Whiteread in that sense. She was definitely a North Star when I was a young student. And then Louise Bourgeois is in there. A lot around materials, actually, the sensitivity of materials, particularly with Phyllida and Louise Bourgeois and Rachel Whiteread using materials. But I guess also—maybe because they are women—there’s something there that I’m connecting to that they are able to, I feel, give something in their work that I’m connecting to beyond the work itself.

SB: Well, and I know early on in your life, going much, much further back, you had early dreams of becoming a sculptor and had this transformative, I would say even life-changing, experience visiting the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, in St. Ives. Could you share just a little bit about that experience? What did it for you?

FT: Yes. Growing up, my mother was a florist and my father was a mathematician and academic, and they were sort of working class, aspiring middle class. My father was the first to go to university. He is very bookish, and our house was filled with books. Books are so important. I think that’s why I was talking about still constantly collecting books and wishing I had more time to read them, but they’re so important to the way that we grew up. But also, they became very interested in poetry and art. All of their own volition. They didn’t study that; they weren’t aware of those influences. It wasn’t part of their childhood. 

So they started taking us to the National Trust houses and different exhibitions. They took us to concerts. I remember going at the age of 7 to a Benjamin Britten concert—just things that you wouldn’t normally take children to. But I was 8, and I remember them. We had the holiday in St. Ives. They took us to the Barbara Hepworth space there, and it just blew me away. Just blew me away. I just had no idea that you could create these things. And it just had such a profound effect on me. And also seeing the pictures of her in the museum, this really strong woman chiseling away. I decided at that point, “I want to be like Barbara. Please make me like Barbara.” [Laughter] 

Then obviously you go through your education and life and everyone tells you that it’s a mistake to become an artist and, “You’re a clever girl and maybe you should be more academic in your approach to your life,” and “Why don’t you go and study English literature?” or “Okay, go and do art history.” That was just about acceptable. But it’s interesting that, yeah, it feels full-circle. The chisel has come full-circle back into my life. I’m not there with the chisel in my hand. Maybe that’s the next step. But yeah, I think that 8-year-old self, she knew where she wanted to be.

SB: While we’re on it, I wanted to ask if there were other transcendent or even mystical experiences with art and architecture that come to mind for you that you’ve had and would want to share here? I mean, I know there’s actually one we both share, which is the Matisse chapel in Vence, in the south of France.

FT: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how certain things really move me, and it’s music and poetry, but actually architecture can be equally moving. And I’m married to an architecture nut, so I cannot avoid it. [Laughter] My husband, Matt Gibberd, from The Modern House, his father was an architect; his grandfather was an architect. There’s almost no choice in our household but to be dragged around architectural…. Our holidays are our architectural pilgrimages.

That Matisse chapel reduced me to tears. I’m not religious, but that Matisse chapel, just the fact that he had worked on everything from the stained glass to the altar, the textiles, just everything had his hand. He spent his life trying to get back to a sort of childlike quality and naïvety in his way of working—the abstract. It was all there in that chapel, and it moved me.

I’ve been moved in that same way in some of Le Corbusier’s—Ronchamp, for example, that has really moved me. Kettle’s Yard, it’s an obvious one if you’re a Brit, but it’s just extraordinary, the layering, the sensibility. I think the sense of the…. I’m wearing a necklace today, actually aren’t I, sitting in front of you with a necklace made of pebbles that my daughter has picked up from the beach and she’s been carefully collecting them over years because they have holes in them. She strung this necklace for me before I came to New York and gave it to me just before my show and said, “This is good luck for you, Mummy.” I’ve worn it today and everyone’s commented on the necklace, not the chairs and the tables. [Laughter] But there’s something that I learned from Kettle’s Yard around that connection to nature and that, actually, a collection of stones is as important as anything else.

That’s how I feel in my house. There’s very little design in my house, in the way that we live. There’s an inherited Marcel Breuer chair. There’s a few of my bits because actually they’re prototypes, so it means if we can have one of my sofas, we don’t have to buy one. Then there’s a whole lot of found objects, and it’s those found objects that mean more than anything to me. Actually, the children know that you can’t take that stone of Mummy’s because she’ll get too connected to it. I guess it’s the architecture and landscape together, Ronchamp being a perfect example of that, that gets me right in the heart. [Laughs]

SB: Well, and you mentioned books, so I wanted to ask, are there texts that come to mind for you? And maybe texts that have shaped your way of seeing? Perhaps John Berger’s Ways of Seeing would be an obvious— [Laughs]

FT: Yes, that’s actually—you have some witchy quality today. Ways of Seeing is on my bedside table. I’ve read it so many times and it’s there and it just feels quite safe to be there. It’s one of the first books that you have to read studying the history of art. I read it over and over and over again.  

In terms of other texts, I recently went and bought a lot more of Seamus Heaney books. I found some really beautiful volumes that were really beautifully bound. And again, it’s interesting, isn’t it, how everything that happens in your first eighteen years so informs everything in the rest of your life. The world seems to be about childhood and old age. Everything else in between is just you’re either coming out of your childhood or going towards old age. I’m realizing it’s those two points in your life that are so crucial. And the texts that have the most meaning for me, I think I read before I was 18, so yeah, it’s Seamus Heaney poems and—

SB: “Digging.”

FT: Margaret…. Yeah, “Digging.” Yes.

SB: I think I probably read that at 17 for the first time, and I still remember the lines: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

FT: Yes. I mean, whoa, so powerful. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale. That disturbed me beyond belief. At the same time, I was reading Naomi Wolf. Becoming a young feminist, it was a big part of what I was reading. There was a lot around the masquerade and psychoanalysis. Cindy Sherman. I was studying Cindy Sherman at university when everyone else was studying Rembrandt. The kind of Faust-y guys in my Bristol University were a bit disappointed that I wasn’t studying Rembrandt, that I was studying Cindy Sherman and the plastic surgeon Orlan—do you know that artist? She was playing with her face through plastic surgery, and I was reading so much about identity, I guess.

SB: And image, yeah.

FT: And image.

SB: So this episode will come out in March, but I think it’s worth mentioning anyway, that you’ve got a particularly busy start to 2025.

FT: I know. Yeah, something’s going on this year, there’s something in the water.

SB: You’re in New York for this show you have at Friedman Benda, and then next week you’ll be in Paris for Maison&Objet, this furniture fair—for the uninitiated—where you’ve been named Designer of the Year. Then a few weeks later you’ll be at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, where you’re the twentieth guest of honor. In the world of design, these are pretty high-praise posts to get. I wanted to ask about those two specific honors and also what you’re presenting. One of your projects or installations is called
“Womanifesto!” [Laughter] And in Stockholm, you’ll be presenting “Manufracture.” I like the wordplay. Could you speak to these two honors, these two installations, and how you’re thinking, actually, also about this moment in time?

FT: Yeah, this moment in time. I don’t know, part of me is thinking, If you’re around long enough, I guess, you start to pick up some awards. [Laughs] As someone that’s basically felt like I have worked on the fringes, I’ve worked on the borders in depth, but still on the fringe. I’ve often described myself as a “tinker.” I can’t find a word for it. We were talking earlier about, is it multidisciplinary, is it interdisciplinary? I don’t know. Is it experimental? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how to describe how I started working. But when I started working, there were very few women in design for me as my heroes and icons. There were fantastic female architects, Zaha Hadid, Patricia Urquiola and Amanda Levete. These were in my time, when I was in my twenties, they were working and they were doing some design and furniture, but they were primarily architects and therefore came with a certain label and stamp of approval there.

There weren’t really many other female designers. I felt like I was walking into a room where I wasn’t quite welcome. A, I hadn’t come from the Royal College of Art, and B, I was female. So I probably took matters into my own hands, not just in terms of assemblages, but quite physically in terms of my identity. I cut all my hair off. I set up a brand of clothing that was dealing only with unisex clothing. I decided that gender wasn’t going to be part of the equation, and I refused any interview that even remotely asked me about women in design.

It was sort of something like, how can you take my gender into the equation? It is not relevant. I won’t take on textiles, I won’t take on decorative arts, I won’t take on color, I won’t take on decoration, I won’t take on pattern. It’s going to be black and white. It’s going to be heavy. I’m going to work with welding and bronze and materials that this room understands and I’m going to show them. [Laughs] This young 27-year-old was really going to show the rest of the guys what it was about. And it was hard. I was surrounded by industrial designers.

Today is a completely different world, and I’m so happy to say that. There are a lot of fantastic female designers out there. I feel like I realize now, perhaps I haven’t done everything I want to do. There’s not enough time, not enough time or hours in the day, but I feel like I did bang down a door for those coming up behind me, and I haven’t resolved everything. I haven’t managed to, as I say, do all the things that I want to do, but I am thankful that I got to bang that door down. I think the “Womanifesto!” project that’s coming up in Paris for “Designer of the Year” is that, okay, this is the time now for us to write our own manifesto, our new manifesto. What is it to be a designer now? Is it about solving problems? Is it about the rigor around finding solutions? Maybe. But maybe it’s also about something else. Maybe it’s about humanity, connection, emotion, bringing something else into our home and living environments.

I feel like many women can help with that. In a world where A.I. certainly can design a better ergonomic chair than any of us soon, but can they design something that is filled with emotion and humanity? No, not currently. That potentially is the role of the designer. 

“Womanifesto!” is tongue in cheek, but it is saying the role of the designer is changing. I’m excited about that because women really have such a big part of that, not just those that have their names and lights, but also the CEOs—I’m meeting many more female CEOs now of really big Italian companies. Even on the manufacturing side, which has always been the side where it’s difficult to find the women, they’re there. That feels really good. Part of this installation is—it’s not really looking back. It’s actually looking forward and it’s filled with color, decoration and all the things that I had actually removed from my toolbox and it’s coming back in huge volume, turned up to the max. [Laughs] Now I’m not feeling like I need to be ashamed of that or hiding that femininity, which I definitely did feel.

Stockholm is different. Stockholm, there’ll be an exhibition there, mostly a delve into the archives. So that one probably is more about looking back, looking at prototypes, looking at things that never worked, looking at things that never got off the ground. It’s a celebration of that, but it’s also a questioning around not just the role of the designer, but more about, how are we going to manufacture moving forward? At every point, at the moment, there are roadblocks I’m finding. Every road I go down, there are roadblocks to actually make anything, distribute anything, logistics around sending things around the world. It’s not working. Why? We need to listen to that. We can’t be making things in one country, importing material from another, and then shipping it across the world. We know that. We’ve worked that out with food. We found a way to make locally, but we haven’t worked out how to do that in terms of the things that we’re surrounding ourselves with.

SB: I mean, what you’re describing, in a way, is a form of slow design.

FT: Yes.

SB: It’s sort of like what Slow Food did, but for design. I think there are totally economies for that. It’s just a matter of figuring out the systems.

FT: How we do it. Yes, the system has to change. It’s broken and hence the “Manufracture” because, until we acknowledge that it’s broken, we are not going to start finding solutions. I don’t have the solutions. I don’t think any of us really do yet. But there’s starting to be more solutions.

As a designer, perhaps I need to spend more time working with an American manufacturer, for example, to spend more time here working with it so it’s made locally with those local materials, selling to Americans my American design. Then perhaps I have a different design in the U.K. using British— Does it make sense that I ship things across the world? It doesn’t make sense. From a designer’s point of view, I think we might have to look at things differently. We might have to be more mobile in that sense.

SB: I also wanted to bring up Assemblage 8 here, the theme of which is “Palette.” This launched last year. The pieces, in a way, go back to your roots of working. They’re wood, and they also embody this sort of evolution of your work, which became softer and rounder over time. In the case of the coffee table, I would say, there’s even something Noguchi-esque about it—

FT: Yeah, definitely.

SB: These interlocking parts and the way this thing lives together. Could you share a bit about this assemblage and just your thinking around it?

FT: Yeah. Normally, assemblage is reserved for the limited-edition pieces, but actually this, I’ve applied it to the production pieces. So there is definitely a difference between the work that I do that is limited and then the more production pieces. This is actually a production collection, but it felt like I needed to draw a line in the sand. Going back to the “Manufracture,” this is probably my first step into doing that. It’s an upholstery collection based around only using natural materials, using a local upholsterer. We found a way to get around the chemicals in terms of the fire retardancy, so there’s no fire retardancy and chemicals in that. The cocoa fiber is fire retardant in itself.

Then on the Palette…. I’m working with British elm and sycamore, and we’ve just done some oak pieces, but they are all locally sourced. I’m working with Sebastian Cox, who is an amazing designer and manufacturer in his own right in the U.K. It’s interesting, wooden furniture for the last, I’d say ten, fifteen years has really been quite out of fashion. They haven’t placed any value on wooden furniture. It’s been difficult to sell wooden furniture, I’d say. But I think, now, we are beginning to see the value in that. If we work locally and we stop replacing things so quickly, then this has to be the way forward.

It’s been a line in the sand, I think, in terms of the way that I realized I can produce things myself. So this is my first production, set of production pieces. I’ve done production pieces through big manufacturers, but this is something that I’m trying to produce myself. It’s a big learning curve [laughs], a massive learning curve. It may be idealistic to some extent, but I don’t think so. I think we will get there with that.

SB: You also just celebrated the tenth anniversary of Roly-Poly, this chair which is, as I think it’s safe to say, one of the most famous chairs of the 2010s, certainly your most famous chair—as you said, it almost precedes you. Tell me about the evolution of Roly-Poly? Conceiving this chair in the first place, crafting it, releasing it, the response—why do you think it has taken off the way it has?

FT: Again, as a designer, you’re always trying to work out what it is that—

SB: “What did I do?”

FT: “What did I do there?” Because I need to repeat that. It’s so fantastic. I want to repeat it. Roly-Poly came out of that period of time where I was basically working with welding and steel and heavy metals and putting my middle finger up to the industry. I had my first child. I was in my late thirties when I first had children. Becoming a mother—motherhood has just completely changed my life. Not just in terms of my personal life, but also in terms of my work. The creativity that’s come from having children has just been extraordinary and completely unexpected. I didn’t expect that. That took me totally sideways. When I started to get back to the studio—and I was probably a bit quick in getting back to the studio; I got back to the studio after three months, that feeling that I had to get back, that I couldn’t take a year off. I had to keep working—I started making models and the maquettes in the studio. I wanted to work with clay and they started coming out almost like plasticine models. They were childlike in that sense. They were naïve and hand-molded and fat and plump. It felt good. It felt good and natural to start making things in that way. And, very quickly, the Roly-Poly chair came out of a clay model. I looked at it and I thought, “It looks like a baby elephant!” and it made me smile. It literally made me smile and laugh.  

There were other pieces as part of the Roly-Poly collection. I hadn’t even thought about what material I was going to make it out of because I hadn’t worked with curves. I hadn’t worked with anything that was round before. And it was whilst going around a boatyard that I found this guy working in fiberglass who was making hulls for boats. I realized we could get these amazing curves. I thought, okay, we need to start working with the fiberglass to create these shapes that now seem to be coming out of my hands. Created this collection, took it to Milan [Design Week], again, naïvely, not really thinking about how I was going to sell it, who was going to buy it, just sort of creating it and putting it in the stand and thinking, okay, go. At the same time, I was launching the clothing as well. So it was quite a big year. And the press liked it; they took pictures. It was the antithesis of all the marble and all of the straight lines and the angles that were going on at the time, the brass. They liked it, but nothing happened. Literally nothing happened for two years. 

Then one day, this Italian guy came, knocked on the door—from Driade—and he said, “Oh, what’s happening with that Roly-Poly chair?” I said, “Well, nothing much, but…. Yeah, nothing’s happening.” He said, “Well, we would like to reproduce it.” So I handed over the rights to the Roly-Poly chair, for good or for bad, and then Roly-Poly started appearing in people’s flats all around the world. I started seeing pictures in magazines of this chair. I still felt so connected to the chair. It was strange to me that no one else had felt that connection before, because I was still creating it in my limited edition. I was doing it in bronze and cast glass and reinterpreting it in different materials because it has such a different personality—same shape, but different material.

It just blew me away. It blew me away that suddenly this chair was running. I love it for that because, as difficult as it is to look at that chair, sometimes for me. Because it’s a moment in time and, being me, I always want to move on to the next thing. I thank her, the Roly-Poly, for all that she’s done, because I feel that she has brought joy. That’s one of the things that I seek to do, is to bring joy.

SB: It’s good, too, that maybe that two-year incubation period or whatever was a good thing, because it also shows you just how random sometimes something that becomes a hit actually is.

FT: Yeah, no, absolutely.

SB: You might love a song, but the mechanisms for making that song a hit are kind of out of your hands.

FT: Yeah, out of your hands, exactly.

SB: Then it becomes a hit and you’re known for that. But in your case, that’s not where you stayed. You’ve evolved greatly since then, which we’ll definitely touch on. But first I wanted to get back to your upbringing, in Rutland, this rural English countryside town.

FT: Yeah. Does anyone know where Rutland is? No.

SB: Probably not. Most of our listeners, maybe a few people in the U.K. might know. [Laughs] But, in addition to your father being a mathematician, as you said, he was also an ornithologist—which, for those who don’t know, is an expert in birds—and craft was really central to your household. Your father made pottery. Your mother cooked these meals in his cookware.

FT: Yes.

SB: And you and your sister spent so much time outdoors. It was a life of the country, really.

FT: Yeah.

SB: You were gathering flowers, stones, rocks, glass, fossils—also foraging for mushrooms. It does sound quite idyllic, I have to say.

FT: It does, doesn’t it?

SB: You’ve also described your childhood self as a geek. So there’s this geek roaming for mushrooms and flowers. [Laughs] Reflecting back on it now, could you speak to this upbringing, the impact of who you are today, your values, your approach to life and work, how the roots of it kind of started in Rutland and how they still live today?

FT: Still emanate, yes. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier those formative years. Sometimes even between the ages of 5 and 15, it’s such a short period of time. When you look back as an adult, you’re like, well, it’s only ten years, but it informs everything. And we know that. But I don’t know if we think about it enough. Yes, it does sound idyllic. And it was, in so many ways. As you say, everything was homemade, partly for economic reasons, it had to be. We didn’t have that much. For example, I didn’t even have a television until I was probably 8 or 9. Imagination was really called upon and making sense of the world around me was done through collecting. It was done through nature and landscape. I realize now, meeting a lot of creatives, that collecting is a really big way of trying to understand the world and make sense of the world.

There was a huge amount of— My mom made our clothes. It was everything. She had this cookbook called the Cranks [Recipe Book]. Before there were vegans and whole-food shops, she was making that stuff. My packed lunch was a stinky hummus sandwich. No one wanted to sit next to me because it wasn’t a Wagon Wheel. It was amazing, but also maybe slightly alienating in a sense. I definitely felt my difference. I felt different to others. We lived in the middle of nowhere, so I would say I am still very much an introvert, which surprises people because I come out of my box to do things like this, and today, I’ve got my opening later on. But it takes quite a lot of energy for me to do that.

I still feel very comfortable being alone and with my own things and making my own lists. I’m obsessive about making lists and organizing. I think part of that childhood also came frustration. I wasn’t able to work out what to do with this creativity and imagination. And actually, I think one of the things people don’t realize is that, as a child, when you’ve got masses of imagination and creativity, it’s like driving a supercar or a fast train. It’s sometimes really scary and really hard to control, and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s all-encompassing and it makes you feel different. I think for a long time it was actually not a superpower. It was something that I felt I wanted to hide. It’s only later in life that I’ve managed somehow to make it a superpower. But I guess me sitting on the fringes and the borders, digging deep, was something that I was doing as a child and still feel that that’s my safe place to work and be.

Interestingly, I think I’m doing the same thing with my children—for good or for bad—but they are total country mice. We live in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps because I grew up with it, I feel like I need to give that to my children, so I make all the sourdough and the yogurt and everything is made by hand. Even though I have no time to do it, I will still stay up until midnight doing it because I feel like I need to do that. I need to uphold that. It’s—

SB: A way of life.

FT: It’s a way of life, yes, it’s a way of life. I am all about preserving childhood. I just feel that it’s just one of the most amazing—

SB: Well, play is a central conceit of your work.

FT: Yes.

SB: Actually, I was…. So I just got your book [Faye Toogood: Drawing, Material, Sculpture, Landscape] and there’s a little bit about play in it. And I was reminded that I asked you to do something for Surface magazine when I was the editor there, and it was this concept called “Clayscape.”

FT: Yeah, I remember.

SB: Where you basically created this imaginative playground out of clay.

FT: Yeah, I remember it very well. I’d love to make that playground come true.

I think it’s essential to find your flow, to find your way of working. Children are so amazing the way that they create. Picasso was right: We are all born as artists. We are. And somehow the world starts to take that away when you get older. I try so hard to hold on to it, and it’s not easy. But that’s the gift I want to give to my children—is childhood. Some people have really awful childhoods, and home is not a safe place. I was lucky enough to have home as my safe place, and I’m so thankful for that. If I can give them that, I feel that they’ll be set up.

SB: I would argue that you’re, in a way, through your work, too, there is a sense of childlike wonder. The Roly-Poly chair, that is— It’s a mature piece of furniture, it’s not immature, but it is playful. There’s something childlike about it.

FT: Yes. And there is a difference, isn’t there? Like you’re saying, the difference between childlike and kind of naîvety and then childish. It’s not the same thing, but yes, it is something I hold on to. Even at work, I’ll just say, “Please, can I have my Lego, just give me this to play with.” [Laughter] Because I still need to ask for my Lego because even in a big studio, you can sometimes have your Lego removed. So, yeah, I will still stomp for my Lego. [Laughs]

SB: So you go on to study art and art history at the University of Bristol, and after graduating, you show up for this interview at The World of Interiors, where you’re interviewed by Min Hogg, this imposing late editor Min Hogg. How’d you land that interview? And also it seems like it went so well, you just got the job, you got the gig.

FT: I got the gig. I know, again, I don’t know how I got that! 

So yeah, I’d finished university. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. A friend of mine said, “I think you should go and check out The World of Interiors magazine,” because she was so astute. She felt like it was right for me. I was lucky enough to get some work experience there. I stayed for about a year in the building doing work experience, and I heard that there was going to be a job at The World of Interiors magazine. The World of Interiors magazine at Vogue House was a world onto itself. It was a bubble, is a bubble. I imagine it’s still very much the same. The rest of Vogue House was Vogue and other fashion magazines and everybody behaved and looked in a certain way. But there was this group of a mix of academics and old-school art dropouts that were holding up The World of Interiors and essentially doing whatever they wanted to.

The moment I arrived in that room for my interview, I felt at home. It felt like I had finally found my tribe. I think up until that point, I don’t think I had. I felt like they got me and understood me, and they said, “Yes, you need to have an interview and can you bring something to the interview?” So I brought an old suitcase filled with stuff that I had collected. I essentially emptied my bedroom into this suitcase, and all the things that I collected, including—

SB: [Laughs] Interesting “résumé.”

FT: Including scraps of antique textiles and photographs of my favorite antiques and found objects, sketches. I felt like if I was going to get this job, I had to really give my whole self.

SB: It was a visual conversation.

FT: It was essentially a self-portrait in a suitcase. I emptied it onto the table. Min Hogg was standing there, smoking her Gauloises cigarette, and she looked me in the eye and said, “Can you tie bows and can you sew?” I lied. I said, “I can sew.” I couldn’t, but I knew my sister could. [Laughs] So I felt I could fudge that one. And bows I was going to be able to learn that. So that was fine. That was it. Then she said, “Well, yeah, you can start.” So I started and no one told me what I was going to do or what I was supposed to do. I arrived and I was told I had eight pages to fill and I had to get on with it. But honestly, it was absolutely amazing. Eight years of my life.

SB: It became this eight-year journey.

FT: An education, essentially.

SB: You were traveling the world, true to the magazine’s name. You went to Mali, to Rajasthan.

FT: Well, it was the nineties. We had the budget for that. So yeah, we were going to these incredible places. I’m so truly thankful for that. I’d never even traveled before. I think I’d been on a plane once.

SB: Is there a story or two that still sticks in your head as…?

FT: Well, I think it probably always involved vomiting, actually. It was always in places like India and Djenné in Mali, we went to once, and it was just having to produce all these shoots with very little budget. It was just always me and—the creative director at the time was Jessica Haynes—and a photographer. We’d put ourselves in these situations where we had no idea what we were doing. Now you’d probably have a production company and it’d all be worked out before you were there, but we literally got the tickets, arrived and then started talking to people.

But I think the best time that I really remember was this market that we were in in Djenne, amid the beautiful, amazing mud architecture of Djenne. There was this market, and we were clearly the exotics that had arrived. I think some of them hadn’t seen any Westerners before, even then. There was this market going on, and they were selling the most extraordinary clothes and jewelry, and they dressed us up. They were laughing and laughing and dressed us up in the most incredible, incredible clothes. I just remember the response that we got and the lovely people that we met. But it was a unique journey and experience that I’ll always remember.

SB: Sort of a Ph.D., in a way. Eight years.

FT: Yes, totally. Yeah, totally.

SB: As a designer, you’ve always seen yourself as an outlier or a sort of outsider, you’ve said, “like the fraud in the room.”

FT: Yes. The fraud in the room.

SB: As someone who didn’t formally train in design, who studied art history, what sort of advantages do you think this has given you? That plus this World of Interiors experience?

FT: No rules, she says, holding up her two fingers. [Laughter] No rules. I think that’s the main one, that I don’t feel like I have a rule book. I notice that because we do have a lot of people come for work and work experience from Eindhoven and fantastic design schools. But I feel like they firstly haven’t really read a book about anything that dates pre-1910. The references are not there. But also, they’ve come with baggage. I feel that, although many times I’ve felt like it’s been a disadvantage, I haven’t had that baggage carrying with me, that there’s a tutor in my head that I have to eradicate, a so-called philosophy or concept. I’m able to literally work with my heart and my hands, and sometimes I make mistakes. I’m okay about that. It’s fully transparent. It’s kind of the only way I can do things—otherwise it stops me working.

I feel that really deeply now for young people, is that they’re so bombarded, they’re so aware of what everyone’s doing. Somehow I was able to get into a bubble and create my own bubble. I think that’s essentially what my studio is. There’s not arrogance there in terms of, “I’m not looking at everybody else’s work.” It’s just that I can’t create in the way that I want to if I’m too aware of what’s going on.

SB: This is a great segue because I wanted to ask you, in this world that seems all too thirsty for the next trend—

FT: Whew. 

SB: It’s just constantly this firehose feeding us. I don’t believe in trends. I know you don’t, either.

FT: Yeah.

SB: That’s just marketing-speak. But you understand them for the passing fads that they are, and I think, getting back to time, there’s something about your work that connects to the ancient, to the timeless, to this almost across-time, but also out-of-time, perspective. You said, “When you look at ancient furniture and objects, it makes you question how far we’ve really come.” I see this sort of throughline of the ancient into the present with your work. I was hoping you could just talk about that for a minute, how you think about time and making in terms of the ancient.

FT: That’s so interesting. I haven’t really thought about that since…. It’s a context thing, isn’t it? I think it’s realizing how small we are. Even if we’re shouting loudly, we can’t create those sorts of waves. We’re just a speck in this huge, vast world. That connection with the ancient—or even something from three hundred years ago—makes me feel grounded. I have a feeling it probably makes others feel grounded, perhaps knowingly or not knowingly. It doesn’t really matter. But having these references, having this sense of place, having a sense of history, trying to be—not part of history, but to contribute to it, I think I do feel that. I do feel the…. Is it a weight? I don’t know. I just feel that there’s some purpose there for me to make connection with the past and the present.

That’s definitely what I’m doing with my children—and maybe I’m doing it with my work—because I am genuinely fearful about the next fifty years, even the next twenty, actually. Without that human connection to what we’ve been able to achieve in the past, we’re going to get lost. We have to retain that, whether it’s through a chair, I don’t know, whether it’s through objects, but it goes deeper than that, I think. I think it’s going to be the thing that saves us, this connection with history essentially.

SB: Let’s end on the subject of silence. [Laughs] I won’t leave a long moment of silence here, but you’ve been a proponent of boredom for a long time.

FT: Totally.

SB: And this idea of being true to who you are without letting others influence you, the noise around us, influence you. There’s this sense of nothingness, almost, to what you do, which sounds like a diss. But no, it’s actually—

FT: I try not to take it as a diss. [Laughter]

SB: I think it’s like this idea that being quiet can be revealing. So I guess I wanted to ask, looking back now at your past fifteen years since you started the studio in earnest, really, how important is noise reduction? How do you approach the silence?

FT: It’s everything. It genuinely is everything, I think, for creativity. I think strangely, people understand that painters, musicians, poets, writers have to have silence in order to get into a flowlike state. But I don’t think that it’s applied to other creative industries in the way that it should be. I actually did a workshop on this at Nike headquarters, had some of them crying by the end of it, because they’re not getting any silence. You cannot get into a flowlike state and create unless you have that silence. It’s so important. I know that because if I don’t do it, stuff doesn’t come out. Literally, it won’t come out.

Writers understand it, but I don’t think other creatives always are able to create that, maybe. For me, I battle to keep the noise out. It’s a constant struggle to do that. It will be things like—I’m not on Instagram. I don’t have notifications. To be honest, it’s all to do with tech, if I’m really honest. It’s to do with reducing the amount of…. It’s not the noise of my children that’s making me not work. It’s actually the tech.

SB: There’s a great book, Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport, that really gets into this. And I agree..

FT: And I’ve read another book called Stolen Focus, which also gets into this. I think we’ve all read the books.

SB: We all know it.

FT: We all know it. But I see it and I know it. My 12-year-old doesn’t have any tech. I tell you what, that’s a bold move right now with being a parent. I’m really digging my heels in, and she may come back at me another time with a pointy finger, but the best thing I can do is to cut the noise out for her, because she’s such a creative being.

SB: She’ll hear this episode in twenty years and be grateful.

FT: Well, one hopes! Otherwise, she’s definitely—

SB: Maybe there’ll be a few years where she’s less so.

FT: She’s not so thankful now. But yeah, I think the noise is coming from the tech, and we must work so hard to reduce that.

SB: Well, this gets me thinking about an interview that I had years ago with Yoko Ono, and it was about storytelling. And she told me, “One of the reasons that I get so many incredible inspirations is because I keep my head empty without crowding it with, I don’t know, quotations of Shakespeare. I like to forget everything, just have it empty, and a lot of incredible information comes in.”

FT: Flows in. Yeah. I very much identify with that. It’s interesting. Again, I think that’s when I said I was married to somebody that’s all in the head, and I’m all in the hands and the heart. Is the head empty? Maybe. [Laughter] It’s certainly got a wind tunnel. Wind can come in and take over. I think you have to allow a takeover because it gets you into a different state. Presumably that’s what the surrealists were doing, as well, with automatic drawing and all of that. They were getting into a state of mind where the input could come in.

SB: Back to assemblage, right where we started.

FT: Yeah.

SB: Well, I think let’s end there. Thank you, Faye. This was a pleasure.

FT: Thank you, Spencer. Thank you for having me.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on January 10, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, Kylie McConville, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Genevieve Lutkin.