‘I’ve never shown my work in this way before’: Mac Collins on his prizewinning furniture

Design “is a way to understand the world and how you can change it”, according to London’s Design Museum. Every object, from the mobile phone in your pocket to the chair in your living room, has something to say about contemporary society.

In the past year, the museum has illustrated that idea through exhibitions of 20th-century innovators such as Charlotte Perriand and Margaret Calvert — designers whose work illuminated something of how people lived.

But the institution does not just look back at what has already taken place. It seeks to celebrate the next generation of emerging talent as well.

The museum’s new annual Ralph Saltzman Prize will honour this contingent with a £5,000 bursary and the chance to show their work at the museum. Created with the support of the Saltzman family, it recognises the legacy of the late cofounder of Designtex, Ralph Saltzman, who died in 2020. Designtex, known for its extensive catalogue of textiles and applied materials, is a familiar name to product and interior designers around the world.

Five nominees were chosen by a panel of established professionals and the inaugural prize has been awarded to Mac Collins, a furniture and product designer who splits his time between Newcastle, Nottingham and London. Collins first made an impact with his 2018 Iklwa lounge chair, a large, throne-like chair originally in ash wood, stained a deep blue.

Conceived when Collins was still a student at Northumbria University and named for a type of short Zulu spear, the Iklwa chair takes inspiration from the aesthetic of Afrofuturism, as well as from the designer’s own family history. The blue used on the first Iklwa chair was the same colour as the suit worn by Collins’ grandfather when he emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. The chair was Collins’ way of exploring his heritage, the African diaspora and how his own family came to England.

It was Collins’ clear execution of big narrative ideas that captured the attention of the prize’s judges, who included the museum’s directorate and external experts. “I think what’s interesting about Mac’s work is not just the way he is interpreting African cultural forms, but the way he references the history of the African diaspora in his storytelling,” says Justin McGuirk, chief curator at the Design Museum. “It gives the furniture a political potency that one does not see very often.”

The prize means that Collins will exhibit his work at the Design Museum from February 2 to April 2. “I’ve never shown my work in this way before,” he says. “It’ll be presenting, perhaps, a bit of a story, in terms of how I reach conclusions.”

Collins has been busy since he graduated in 2018. His Iklwa chair went into production with British furniture manufacturer Benchmark in 2020. The following year, he won both the Emerging Design Medal at the London Design Festival and Elle Decoration’s Young Design Talent of the Year award.

With these opportunities came some tough decisions about the directions his career might travel in. “I’ve been fortunate in that there have been a number of different paths that I have been able to take,” Collins says. “Which then brings the issue of how best to use your time. There have definitely been opportunities that I’ve swerved, intentionally.”

Ideas are at the centre of Collins’ practice. For a chair, bowl or any other piece to be successful, for him it needs to communicate an idea while also being physically experienced. In short, while the chair might have big concepts behind it, it should still be able to be used as a chair. His talent lies in how he finds this balance in a single everyday object.

Collins was nominated for the Ralph Saltzman Prize by Industrial Facility, a London design studio founded by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin. “Young designers naturally ask different questions,” says Hecht. “But only talent is able to answer them differently too. What Mac seems to be very good at is both of these”.

Mac’s results “are not always easy on the eye”, says Hecht. “But that is exactly what we should expect — it makes you stop for a moment and try to understand his language. That’s ultimately why we nominated him — we want to see this language developed further.”

He references the history of the African diaspora in his storytelling. It gives the furniture a political potency that one does not see very often

For Collins, what comes next is an exploratory stage, where he discovers how his intentions can be executed. “I think I’ve got a lot to say,” he says. “And I’m still in the process of defining the best way to communicate these ideas.”

The prize, he believes, will allow him to work without restriction. “It’s financial backing that gives me the freedom to push my work in potentially more speculative or holistic directions, and not into a direction that feels like I have to produce numbers to get financial reward. So it feels a bit freer, and I’m going to make the most of that.”

At the moment, Collins works from a Newcastle studio shared with the designer Joe Franc, a friend from university. Collins teaches at the University of Northumbria and particularly likes that it gives him a chance to converse with students who think differently from himself.

He says students now come to the classroom already aware of what it is that they find interesting — that social media in particular is giving people access to ideas and knowledge earlier. Collins finds that exciting. Similarly, he thinks that the lines between creative mediums are thinning, and is keen on collaborating with like-minded people from other disciplines.

There are advantages, he says, to working away from London — usually seen as the place to be when working in creative fields. “[I have] a bit more space for liberated thought and action. Things feel a bit slower and a bit calmer. Although I’m resisting the pull of London residentially, I still visit regularly. But I do find it a privilege not having to be in London constantly.”

His next project will keep him working in the north of England, having been commissioned to make new work for Harewood House, the country estate in West Yorkshire built by Edwin Lascelles. Lascelles, a wealthy plantation owner, made his fortune from sugar and slave-trading in the Caribbean, and the estate, like many of its ilk, has recently been confronting its problematic history, investigating the connections between the house and the sources of its wealth.

Its art collection includes work by El Greco, Titian and Giovanni Bellini, as well as furniture produced by Thomas Chippendale, who received the largest commission of his career to furnish the house. According to York University’s Lascelles Slavery Archive, the family sold its last plantation in the Caribbean in 1975.

Collins is creating an installation that he describes as “an antithesis to the thin, intricately carved forms” of the house’s Chippendales. “It will be visually heavy, deliberate and uncompromising — with straight lines and an obtrusive silhouette.”

Conversations around colonialism and the history of British art and design are difficult to navigate. Collins is interested in taking a wide view, noting that culture more generally has some course-correcting to do. “British material culture is becoming more of a physical representation of the breadth of British sociocultural structure,” he says. “I don’t think this has been reality, historically. But I think it’s becoming more reflective of the cultures that thrive here.”

There are more stories to be told, and as the work of Collins’ generation indicates, design has a big role to play. While personal stories have long been explored by British artists and designers with connections to the Caribbean and African diasporas, it’s only in recent years that they’re being treated with the same urgency by the nation’s cultural institutions, from the Design Museum to the country estates that dot the landscape.

Spaces such as Harewood House, Collins points out, have long been taken as representing only one type of British identity. “But there are so many different cultures and identities that all thrive within this society,” he says. “I want to open that up — not through a negative angle or perspective, but through a positive narrative.”

The other Ralph Saltzman nominees

Alexandra Fruhstorfer, nominated by Anab Jain, Superflux

Working across various disciplines, Fruhstorfer has created projects that explore the home, the world of work and human relationships with the natural world. Her textile and fibre projects, which focus on innovative circular processes and the impact materials have on the planet, have been featured at the Porto Design Biennale and the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. Fruhstorfer studied industrial design at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts.

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Francisco Norris, nominated by Matt Jones, Google AI

Originally from Buenos Aires, Norris co-founded Zelp, a “zero-emissions livestock project” in 2017, while studying information experience design at the Royal College of Art. At Zelp, scientists, engineers and product designers work together to develop new ways to neutralise the methane emitted through cattle farming.

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Marion Pinaffo and Raphaël Pluvinage, nominated by Doshi Levien

The only duo on the list, French designers Pinaffo and Pluvinage have worked together since 2015 on a wide range of multidisciplinary projects, all united by a sense of curiosity, colour and movement.

Interactivity is a real focus for the pair, whether it’s in paper toys that come to life with the addition of sand, or a dynamic dancing “blueprints” installation commissioned by Hermès in 2020.

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Sky Lucy Young, nominated by Michael Anastassiades

A textile designer who graduated with an MA in mixed media textiles from the Royal College of Art in 2019, Young uses both analogue and digital processes to explore innovation in fabric. Currently working as design co-ordinator at Kvadrat, the Danish textile company, she balances colour, material and purpose in her design process.

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