About
Over the decades of working with the Thomas.Matthews team I have designed and created so many exhibitions for clients across the world. You can look at many of these on http://www.thomasmatthews.com
I have personally been commissioned and been part of group exhibitions. These have shown all the different media I work in. Here is a selection of some favs from TM and my own work over the years.
All my glass exhibition work is shown in the blog pages.
What Comes Around Goes Around, 1997
What Comes Around Goes Around was one of the first installations I did and one of the first time Kristine (Matthews) and I worked together.
Created at the RCA in 1997, we hung a week’s worth of waste collected and washed from the college canteen and hung it in a gallery. At the same time we went through the catering depts accounts and pulled out the data on cost and impact.
We created a mug design and charged £2 for each mug. Overtime this cup was used, the owner got 3p off their drink (the cost of one polystyrene cup). The money raised was used to buy recycling bins and set up weekly collection of cans, glass, paper and cardboard. This saved the college £50 a week on their waste collection bill.
No Shop, 1998
No Shop was the second collaboration with Kristine and one of the first projects done under the name of Thomas.Matthews.
Our brief came from Friends of the Earth, when they were bringing ‘Buy Nothing Day’ over to the UK. First set up by Kalle Lasn of Adbusters fame the North American campaign attempted to show people how extreme our consumption habits had come, post Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas.
Our response to a brief that asked for a poster to put up in libraries – was to create a NO SHOP – that sold nothing. It pulled you in with enticing messages printed on redundant billboard sections with questioning statements confronting you when you walked out. You were given a bag that held a receipt at the bottom offering an alternative to mass consumption and added up to nothing. Buy Less. Live More. Relax.
Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean, 2014 –
A touring exhibition of the plastic pollution pieces curated into sets that
went with my talk about ocean plastics.
This small collection installation was interspersed with letterpress collages and posters.
It travelled around Europe and I took it to different conferences when I was talking about plastic pollution in oceans and the impact of design.
It also went to the RSA, Second Home, Pentagram and Shoreditch House.
Man-Made Disaster, 2020
The project “Man-Made Disaster” is an exhibition organized by the London-based environmental non-profit Do The Green Thing. It was designed to explore the role of patriarchy in climate change and featured the work of 30 women and non-binary artists who operate at the intersection of creativity and social change. The exhibition took place at Protein Studios in London and was part of a larger effort to address how gender norms affect the climate crisis.
Smash the patriarchy. Save the planet.https://manmadedisaster.art
The feedback for the exhibition was overwhelmingly positive, with more than 800 visitors. It received attention in the UK press and was regarded as an insightful and inspirational event that provoked thought and inspired action towards addressing gender norms and their impact on the climate crisis.
The letterpress posters were collages of messages from climate deniers, printed in black ink mixed from carbon black pigment extracted from old tyres (blackbear carbon). The final fluorescent scream came from Great Thunberg.
Accompanying these posters were hand blown hourglasses, with polluted sands.
Waste Age – What Design Can Do, Design Museum 2021
We are living in the age of waste. Is design the answer to leaving our throwaway culture behind?
We all know waste is a big problem. So how are we going to fix it?
A new generation of designers is rethinking our relationship to everyday things. From fashion to food, electronics to construction, even packaging – finding the lost value in our trash and imagining a future of clean materials and a circular economy could point the way out of the Waste Age.
The materials are a resource to better understand an extensive range of new materials and their potentials by designers and manufacturers. The process of transforming waste into a functional material is complex. By both hand and machine; it is collected, sorted and washed, a process that takes both time and energy. But using recycled and recovered materials greatly reduces the demand for raw materials and massively conserves natural resources and the use of energy.
I was commissioned to create a wall that displayed some of my ‘Re-materialise library’. These material samples have been collected over the years in different states of recovery, as examples of how our stuff gets disposed of, recovered or recycled.
The letterpress was printed using waste ink from the print industry and Carbon Black recovered from tyres.
Waste Age , touring and installing at Material Matters, 2022
Waste Age toured to Hong Kong and Paris between 2023 and 2024.
More was made of the glass globes when the piece travelled. These were created by Louis Thompson and held different material samples inside which magnified, showing the beauty of each material.
I also installed a smaller version at the inaugural Material Matters show at The Bargehouse in 2022. Showing alongside were films of collated video I have taken over the years from various recycling facilities and landfills across the world.
wasted talent 