Of the moment
With VIP fans and pieces in some of the world’s most notable institutions, the multidisciplinary designer Simone Brewster is the name we’ll all be hearing
The artist and designer Simone Brewster would love to share how her various collectors around the world display her creations – from jewellery and paintings to sculptures and furniture – but she can’t because she’s signedNDAs.Yes,Simoneiscontractually bound not to reveal the identity of her VIP fans who have paid up to five figures for her work. It’s yet another indicator of success for the 40-year-old polymath. Others include the acquisitions of her work by notable institutions, namely the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum and theMuseumofLondon, and that in May, she’ll be releasing a rug collection for Habitat.
Genre-defying, politically engaged and high-concept, Simone is one of the most exciting design names of her generation. Although she trained as an architect, she confidently switches between fine art, woodwork, metalwork, furniture design and now textiles. Talking to me from her home studio in Tottenham, where she lives with her tree-surgeon husband and their one-year-old son Omar, Simone admits that being uncategorisable ‘confuses’ people. ‘If you look at Michelangelo, da Vinci, Vitruvius, they were able to be scientists, architects, chemists, physicists, whatever, and then bringallthatintodrawingthehumanbody. Theydon’thavesomeonetellingthemthey can’t do it, which I feel is the case now.’
During last year’s London Design Festival, finally all Simone’s different creative outlets were seen together at her first solo show, at NOW Gallery on the GreenwichPeninsula.Alsoforthefestival, she created a ‘forest’ of totemic cork statuesalongtheStrand,asacollaboration with the cork producer, Amorim.
Whatever the medium, however, Simone’s signature aesthetic – bold pieces in weighty shapes featuring abstracted femininecurves–remainsconstant.Sotoo does the narrative, which is a commentary, she explains, on the oppression of women of colour. It’s an urge within that she traces back to a 2010 visit to the V&A: ‘It’s one of my favourite places, but I realised there was nothing that was really contemporary African or African diaspora in its collections.’ Simone wanted to ‘fill the gap’. Sometimes her message is loud, as was the case with Negress, a chaise longue depicting a deconstructed black female body; ‘a contemporary take on the colonial domestic object’, she
