The extremely talented Paul Cocksedge is creating this year's Size + Matter commission, the magical Drop for the London Design Festival, a outsize coin 'which has fallen to Earth from a giant's palm'. He's also working on an installation A Gust of Wind for the Festival's V&A programme. The Festival recently spoke to him about both pieces – and about his methods. This was one bit that reveals something of his processes:
You've talked about the importance of maintaining a climate of freedom in design. Where did that start for you?
It's from the Royal College, I suppose. We weren't told to do anything. We were given starting points and weren't told what the ending should be. We were given that space. I left college and I never worked for any designer. Joana [Pinho] and I set up this Studio and the way I work has always been like that. I'm just creating things because I want to do them. Of course briefs come along and they input materials and spaces... and big budgets sometimes which helps the creative process. But I think too many restrictions wouldn't really suit my way of working. I try and keep away from that rigidity.
And presumably that's a constant tension...
I don't feed off the work I've done before. Every time I get a new brief or start something new I don't have a formulaic way of working. There isn't a process. It mostly comes down to how I'm feeling or what I want to explore. As you say I was fascinated by rain for a bit so I then had to speak to different people about rain and electrostatics. On this one I'm having to worry about copper coins and brass and magnetism... and then it's Corian® and free-forming and how we're going to shape three hundred of these things. So it's not a conventional studio in that sense. There aren't zones; 'Here we do the brainstorming, here's the mood zones and there we do the rendering.' It's not now I like to work. I'm just a bit nervous about creating a structure that rules out chance encounters. We all have that, don't we?
The space for happy accidents...
Yes, happy accidents. I love those. They're given to you. I like to justify my work that way.
