Kate Brewer, founder of Look Like Love, profiles a different new designer every week. With the tagline “support, nurture, promote” echoing confessions of a design geek’s own “discover, champion and inspire” and a similar commitment to advocating for emerging talent, the parallels between Look Like Love and confessions of a design geek are clear. Watch out for her features every Thursday afternoon. This week’s designer? The inventive designer Michael Carroll…
Michael Carroll graduated from Plymouth University in 2011 after studying 3D design, with a desire to follow his passion for creating inventive hand-made objects. His exploration into the properties of materials and clever joining techniques have become key to Michael’s inspiration and focus. With an interest in responsible design, be it reducing waste or energy consumption, his graduate pieces were designed and constructed without the need for traditional fixings, glue or screws.
The inspiration for his key graduate piece the ‘Peggy’ Bench came from a paper clip, which became the basis of the design for the spring-like clamp metal legs that holds the oak top in place, resulting in a piece of furniture evocative of a clothes peg. Each bench is made completely by hand, including the metal base, with the oak sourced from a supplier local to where Michael is based in the north of England.
“I hope that solutions such as this one can reduce the environmental impact of my work and result in more elegant and efficient solutions in the construction of furniture.” says Michael of his design.
As well as his growing furniture collection, Michael has also worked on a series of small boxes, each made from a single piece of oak combined with pewter sourced from old tankards that Michael salvaged from flea markets and bric-a-brac and antique shops, smelted down and cast directly into the oak. Each piece is different with the recycled pewter detail holding the lid in place.
On opening the boxes, the negative detail of the pewter stamped out of the timber is revealed. Available in three sizes, as a set or individually, the boxes work as desk tidies or mini jewellery boxes.
The boxes evolved from one of the key pieces in Michael’s collection shown during New Designers – a chair entitled, ’22 Tankards’. As the name suggests, the only fixing method for the chair came from molten tankards, with the lines of pewter forming an organic pattern within the finished chair.
Since graduating, Michael has set about showcasing his work at a series of exhibitions across the UK, including the appropriately titled Furniture Forwards at the William Benington Gallery in Islington, London, for which emerging British designers were selected because of the respect they each paid to the history of furniture design, while “challenging preconceived notions of how furniture should be constructed and presented.”
Michael’s hand-crafted approach, using honest, natural materials, has a sensitivity as well as an industrial edge. His fascination with inventing and engineering makes the process even more intriguing, determining a more organic approach and aesthetic to his work.
To find out more about Michael Carroll, and to purchase pieces from his collection visit Look Like Love.
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- look like love :: samuel bellamy
- look like love :: sophie cobb
- look like love :: tom hutchinson
- Look Like Love launches talent search for new designers
