Ernest Scheyder is an author and senior correspondent for Reuters. His new book, The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, looks at the impact of the green transition in the US – and, more particularly, the tensions over the increasing need to mine for metals to decarbonise the grid (and power a plethora of devices) against the nation’s desire to conserve the environment.  The book illustrates how materials effect geo-politics and the urge for energy security, inform the national debate, and impact at a very local level. It also suggests that  becoming ..read more

Adi Toch is one of the world’s most fascinating metals artists, who over the years has buried her pieces for months on end before digging them up, and even made them reaction to sound. She has also taken part in collaborations with furniture makers and glass artists.  Adi has work in the permanent collections of the V&A, The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland, and the Jewish Museum in New York. She won a Wallpaper Magazine Design Award in 2017, and in that same year was a finalist of the Loewe Craft Prize.  She has also exhibited around the world f ..read more

Adam Yeats is co-founder and managing director of Bert Frank, one of the UK’s leading lighting companies. Yeats started the brand with designer, Robbie Llewellyn, in 2013. Since then it has gone from strength to strength, opening a showroom in London’s Clerkenwell in 2019, exhibiting at home and abroad, and winning the Elle Decoration British Design Award for Lighting in 2016. The company was also the headline sponsor for last year’s Material Matters fair.  Craft has always been an intrinsic element of the brand and Yeats comes from a family steeped in making and British manufacturing. So ..read more

Sara Grady and Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather in 2020. The duo aim in their own words ‘to link leather with exemplary farming and, in doing so, to redefine leather as an agricultural product’. All of which means creating a new network of systems within the industry. Essentially, the pair are attempting to make the material we buy traceable in the same way food is.  In 2022, they created an exhibition, entitled Leather from British Pastures, during the London Design Festival, which included collaborations with the likes of Mulberry and New Balance, as well as Material Ma ..read more

Ptolemy Mann is a British artist who came to widespread attention with her woven textile pieces, often stretched across a frame and notable for her extraordinary use of colour.  More recently, her practice shifted and she has turned to painting on paper with fascinating – and inevitably colourful – results. Her latest pieces combine the two, as she paints on her hand-woven artworks.  Ptolemy is hard to avoid at the moment. Currently, she has a show of paintings at the Union Club in London’s Soho. During May, there will also be a solo exhibition with Taste Contemporary at Cromwell Pla ..read more

Bas van Abel founded Fairphone in 2013. The company attempts to transform the way our smartphones are manufactured, by reducing e-waste, sourcing conflict-free minerals, and improving working conditions in its supply chain. It creates a product consumers are encouraged to keep longer and which, importantly, they can also repair themselves.  Fairphone was an immediate hit, attracting 25,000 orders when it launched its first smartphone via a crowd-funding campaign. It has now sold over half a million phones and employs 150 staff.  In 2018, Bas stepped back as CEO of the company – altho ..read more

There have been over 100 episodes of Material Matters but, for listeners who might be new to all this, the idea is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist, or architect about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers.  However, once in a while I break my own self-imposed format and interview someone I’ve always wanted to meet. This is one of those episodes.  Architect John Tuomey is the co-founder of multi-award winning practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, with his wife Sheila O’Donnell. The firm has designed the Glu ..read more

Sara Grady and Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather in 2020. The duo aim in their own words ‘to link leather with exemplary farming and, in doing so, to redefine leather as an agricultural product’. All of which means creating a new network of systems within the industry. Essentially, the pair are attempting to make the material we buy traceable in the same way food is.  In 2022, they created an exhibition, entitled Leather from British Pastures, during the London Design Festival, which included collaborations with the likes of Mulberry and New Balance, as well as Material Ma ..read more

Christien Meindertsma is a Dutch designer who has a fascination with materials. She currently has an installation at the V&A, entitled Re-forming Waste, which shows new work based around her interest in linoleum, as well as technological advances with the material she has described as her first love, wool. Christien came to wider attention initially when she graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2003, with a book that catalogued a week’s worth of objects confiscated at security checkpoints in Schipol Airport. She followed that up a few years later, with PIG 05049, an extraordina ..read more

Florian Gadsby is a bit of a phenomenon. The ceramicist currently has a new show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and has also published a memoir, By My Hands, that charts his formative years with clay, including apprenticeships in the UK and, most intriguingly, Japan.  Essentially, it unpicks his route to becoming a fully, fledged professional potter, while at the same time, providing tips about his thinking and process.  Since he started on Instagram a decade ago, Florian has built up a social media following that can only be described as formidable. He’s part of a generation that ..read more