Preview Some Captivating Art in This Year’s London Design Festival

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the largest museums in the world for decorative arts and design. So it’s no surprise that during the upcoming weeklong London Design Festival, which kicks off Saturday, September 19, the venue will host some of the most fun and eyebrow-raising exhibitions in town.

Visitors will be able to picnic atop a major art installation, raid a designer’s closet and even purchase pieces of a featured exhibition. For those not able to attend, here’s a look at some of the museum’s must-see shows.

Event at a Glance
Dates: Saturday, September 19 through Sunday, September 27
Location: Throughout London
More info: London Design Festival

Reflection in a Courtyard

Step right up to the the outer pavilion of the museum, where you’ll find one of the first major installations at this year’s festival. Artist Frida Escobedo has embedded layers of reflective surfaces throughout the public space for visitors to explore, populate and engage in conversation about identity.

The installation takes its title, You Know You Can’t See Yourself So Well As By Reflection, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It refers to the literal reflectivity of the platforms as well as Escobedo’s philosophical intentions. She says the mirror-like surfaces illustrate conflicting self-identity: how we imagine ourselves, how we project ourselves and how others perceive us. “It is the similarities and reciprocities — both real and illusory — that help us to understand how we are building a collective reality,” Escobedo says in a statement.


Crystal Construction

An 59-foot-tall double-sided monolith embedded with 600 oversized Swarovski crystals will greet visitors as they enter the museum.

This totem-zoetrope (Zotem), created by artist Kim Thome, is “a play between how something appears and how it actually works, a bit like an optical allusion,” he says in a statement.

Inside the matte black aluminum frame is a looping mechanism that sends a sheet of prismatic colors up and down the monolith. Those patterned colors are reflected and refracted by the embedded crystals as light shines through, giving this analog installation a digital look. When a dark patterned portion rolls through, the piece appears to be turned off — another optical illusion.

Thome says his work is meant to create a visual link between two extremely separated spaces in the museum: the grand entrance on the bottom floor and the ceramics gallery on the sixth floor. “When visitors enter the museum, they rarely look up,” he says. With Zotem drawing eyes upward, visitors will experience both the art and architecture of the museum from a new perspective.


This is a close-up of one of the Swarovski crystals Thome used in Zotem. Each is 2.2 times larger than normal size. The crystals sit on a portion of the patterned sheet that runs through the center of the piece.





Wearable Art

Enter The Cloakroom, not to hang your jacket but to grab one. Bridging the worlds of furniture, fashion and art is furniture designer Faye Toogood, who invites guests to wear one of her 150 coats during their museum visit. Each coat contains a sewn-in map, guiding guests towards 10 galleries where they’ll discover 10 of Toogood’s sculptural garments. Each of those garments, made from nontraditional fashion materials, such as wood, fiberglass and metal, directly relates to a neighboring, permanent museum piece. “These are 10 of my favorite objects within the V&A, and I’ve responded to each object’s material, craftsmanship or artisan maker,” Toogood says in a statement.


Ancient Alphabet Turned Architecture

Inside the museum’s tapestry gallery, you’ll find The Ogham Wall. Grafton Architects worked with Graphic Relief to create this piece inspired by the Irish ogham alphabet. The architects have translated the ancient language into an architectural construction, with each of the alphabet’s 20 letters formed into 10-foot-tall “fins.”



According to legend, each letter’s name coincides with the name of a sacred tree. To incorporate this concept, the artists polished each fin in certain parts to contrast with the imperfections in other parts and create the illusion of tree bark. Visitors are welcome to walk among the pillars, touch them and fully engage in the combination of art, history and architecture.


Bug Out

As you enter the museum’s darkest room, you’ll have a chance to engage with Curiosity Cloud, by Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler of mischertraxler studio.

The installation is made of 250 mouth-blown Viennese glass globes, and inside each is a single hand-fabricated insect. There are 25 insect species in three categories: extinct, common and newly discovered.


Upon entering, you’ll find the room quiet, calm and completely dark. As you walk toward the installation, a few insects will start to move, their vessels emitting a soft, glowing light. As you get closer, the insects come to life, moving more rapidly, emitting noise and colliding into the walls of their glass capsules.

The design duo say they want their work to be a playful but thought-provoking experience. “Curiosity Cloud is about celebrating a moment in nature and the relationship that humans have with the entomological world,” Traxler says.


Happy Birthday, Robin Day

Say “happy birthday” to one of the founding fathers of furniture at the Robin Day: Works in Wood installation. Day, who would have been 100 this year, is best known for his polypropylene (plastic) stacking chairs, popular in the 1960s. What many people don’t know is that he had a lifelong love of woodworking. “I think his use of wood is a neglected aspect of his work,” says Day’s daughter, Paula Day, in a statement.

The exhibit will explore Day’s use of wood in both his professional practice and his personal life, along with writings that reveal his deep connection to nature. His daughter will also display her collection of “quirky wooden objects,” as she calls them, and drawings by the late Day that she believes will further educate visitors about her father’s personal creativity.


Shop the Shops

Ceramicist Barnaby Barford’s Tower of Babel is made of 3,000 unique bone china models, each depicting a real London shop. The bottom layer of the tower is composed of the less prosperous businesses, while those at the top represent the most extravagant and successful boutiques and galleries.


Barford says his work stands as a monument to the well-established pastime of shopping. He compares our society’s attempts to find ultimate happiness through retail with the biblical characters who attempted to find heaven by building the Tower of Babel. To further blur the boundaries between art and commerce, each shop in The Tower of Babel will be for sale during the exhibition and priced according to its “value” as displayed in the installment — the higher the shop, the higher the price.


Art in the City

Step outside the Victoria and Albert Museum to experience other design events, exhibits and installations throughout London. There’s so much more to be seen that the London Design Festival coordinators have created Design Districts to help navigate visitors toward the venues they’ll be most interested in.

Visit the Chelsea Design Quarter and get inspired by some of the most established interior design specialists on the planet. Go furniture shopping in the Clerkenwell Design Quarter, and when you’re ready for a little wine-and-dine time, stop by the Brompton Design District, where food and fashion come together.

But it seems no matter where you are in the city, there’s one work of art you can’t miss: sculptor Alex Chinneck’s Bullet from a Shooting Star, shown here, this year’s Landmark Project.

Located on the Greenwich Peninsula, the piece, towering at 115 feet tall, casts a dark, maze-like shadow across the surrounding city, engaging all those who travel beneath it. “Greenwich is the center of world time, and I’m interested in the idea that the sculpture intersects the prime meridian line, acting as a giant sundial,” Chinneck says.

For more information or to plan your tour, visit the London Design Festival website and download the event guide.

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