HOME | Nick Wright

Written by Nick Wright

Images captioned by Gareth Williams.

Cover by Ben Kelly.

Images of the book @ Ed Vince.

Tom Dixon, Liliane Fawcett, Gareth and 1 were seated in a brasserie in Notting Hill. Tom mentioned he had gone to nearby Holland Park Comprehensive and I recalled Aswad had gone to the same school. It turned out Tom had been in the same class as Drummie Zeb who, he remembered, had borrowed his bass cab and was yet to return it. That was start of Cut and Shut. “It comes from London and it comes from the music business…”.

Prior to its publication, the designers featured were seen in terms of their individual output. Tom Dixon is a brand, Andre Dubreuil a great French maker, Mark Brazier Jones the creator of objet d’art for rock stars. As our conversation with Tom continued, however, it became clear that all three had worked collectively, first on illegal warehouse parties, then welding furniture made from scrap.

The interview with Tom ended when the waiter noticed the miniature poodle in his pocket. “But I didn’t know any of that,” Liliane said as Tom and dog left. Neither did we.

One conversation followed on from the last. Mark told us more about the warehouse parties, the chopped car racing, welding as spectacle. Nick Jones lent us the Creative Salvage manifesto on which he had typed the intention to produce designs of scrap. He told us too of the hip hop night he and Tom put on in a strip club on Meard street. A narrative was forming. Assemblage, hip hop. Even Ron Arad, an AA educated architect and no fan of baroque – “I don’t like wings” - had put on a show for Tom Dixon. Caroline recalled the “one eyed Mutant fish” in Tom's leaking tank. Ron had in turn worked with Danny Lane. Danny took us around his studio, recalling his meeting with Ron, (which differed from Ron's recollection) then directed us to a traveler's caravan parked beneath the Westway.

“Joe Rush is the Daddy of them all” said Danny and so he is. Joe, a squatter in Frestonia when it declared independence from the UK, had taken a convoy of trucks across Europe. On route they stole tanks and Planes from ex-Soviet military dumps and used them to built momentary monuments beneath which to party. Best of all Joe had taken pictures. The image of stolen MIGS crashed in front of the Reichstag begins Cut and Shut because making art from scrap isn’t a lifestyle choice for Joe. It isn’t a choice at all. It’s his life.

"Cut and shut" describes both the early working practice of now famous designers and the way the narrative is constructed. Recollections differ, there were tensions, arguments, contradictions, so to reflect this I wrote each chapter from the point of view of its subject. When Andre Dubreuil is snippy about something Tom Dixon made, my text gives full voice to him. Like wise, I share Ron Arad's issue with "wings" in Ron's chapter. In Mark Brazier Jones' chapter, however, I share his love of the mythic. The nature of the work was cut and shut. So was my writing of the narrative.

If you want to share the exhilaration felt at the recount of a then unknown origin of British design – from warehouse parties, though speed fueled nights making furniture of scrap - to the heights of fashionability;

Buy it here

There is only one London Gallery for me. Lilianne Fawsett opened Themes and Variations in 1984. She showed Tom Dixon’s early work, Mark brazier-Jones', Danny Lane's, and Ron Arad’s. She represents Fornasetti in the UK and produced the first edition of Andre Dubreuil’s Spine chair. Lilianne is also straightforward and honest, characteristics which, on arriving with my first “design”, I was grateful are softened by kindness.

I said I had invented a process for solidifying steel rope and made a chair from the material. She said the form was derivative of Andre Dubreuil. I showed her a knot in hemp rope suggestive of the possibilities in steel. She liked the knot. I showed her a drawing on an envelope. She made a French sound. Then she said, “If it’s new material, you should exploit it unique properties.”

That the resultant chair is going in the window of Themes and Variations is something I find so unbelievable, I have to mentally retrace my steps to understand how it could possibly have happened.

My first memory is the foghorns on the Mersey. As a kid, my sole talent was for art, my favourite place, Liverpool’s derelict Albert dock. After school, I would go sit beneath the vaulted colonnade looking out onto the rain plucked basin, drawing alternately on an exercise-book meant for homework and an Embassy Filter. The deserted building was a lesson in proportion, the rusting boats sinking in the basin held up by hawsers stretched from the iron bollards. The strength of that steel rope, enough it seemed to hold the weight of the whole sinking city, appeared miraculous.

During lockdown I took to walking along the Lea River Navigation where I again noticed steel rope coiled on the decks of Dutch barges and, still the kid who can’t sleep for stupid ideas running around in the dark, played with ways of “freezing” those shapes.

An idea gelled and I went to James Garner, a metal worker who has with Tom Dixon since the 80s. The initial idea didn’t work. We tried again. We tried every which way until …. Having perfected the process, I paid a patent lawyer. There were no patents on my process. Nor were there the thousands needed to protect it. Besides, I could think of no use for it that might reward even the smallest investment – except maybe a chair.

I’m not a designer. Rather than going to art school as my sole A Level - art - implied, I moved to Hulme in Manchester in 1982. I studied philosophy at Leeds then University college London and, after graduating, (not necessarily in that order) started Broken Lives studios. My wife and I sold the business mid 90s and took on an space in Camden selling furniture and it was there beneath another brick-built arch, that past and present met.

Liverpool’s architecture - Jesse Hartley’s dock, the Georgian terraces on Hope Street, the storehouses on Mathew Street – had imbued in me a sense of proportion that has a physical pull on me when I see it in furniture. That same pull took us picking across the world; to France and Belgium, the US, Canada, and down farm tracks in Denmark. We shipped our first container of Danish modern in 1999.

It was that same pull that drew me towards the idea of writing Cut and Shut. Interviewing Tom Dixon, the scrap metal mountains on Chelsea harbour sounded little different to the derelict docks in Liverpool. I understood too what Andre Dubreuil meant by “nice and Rusty”. That the cover of Cut and Shut is Ben Kelly’s redesign of the cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart is still a source of wonderment to me. The Hacienda was my local in Hulme.

I was also privileged to be with Ben as he considered the 5 metal plates James Garner made for that cover. Identical in size, font and wording, they differed only in patination and, as Ben appraised each, I realised design is as much about an openness to accidentals as original intent. Ben chose the plate resembling a Manchester sky. It makes a beautiful cover.

All of this - the sense of proportion gained from Liverpool’s architecture, the desire to record something fleeting in Cut and Shut, the mental library of chairs bought and sold over thirty years – and Lilianne’s advice - was brought to bear on my chair. So too was Ben Kelly’s openness to the accidental.

I had knotted steel rope on the floor, my intention to make a flat seat and, happy with the result, I picked it up by the sides only to find the seat bellied – and the back rose. That accidental form suggested a more elegant chair than any intended. In that sense I didn’t design this chair. I’m not a designer. Rather, I chose to fix a form I found beautiful. And I’ve been doing that since I first wandered into the Albert dock.

To buy please contact Themes and Variations

Images copywrite Barley Nimmo

Written by Nick Wright

Cover by Ben Kelly.