Portrait/Interview:
Riya Patel
The guests of this Portrait/Interview issue are Riya Patel & Ariana Mouyiaris.
A former senior editor at Icon Magazine, Riya Patel is the new curator at the Aram Gallery.
She talks to Ariana Mouyiaris about her first show and gives us a preview of her next, 2°C, that will be part of the London Design Festival starting in a few days.
Your first show, Extra Ordinary, at the Aram Gallery showcased an interesting cross section of designers working across different craft-based approaches: utilising industrial materials and processes as well as creating new raw materials for design products. Can you tell us a bit about your personal interests and inspirations in design?
It was a good show for me to start with as I’m actually very inspired by details of the everyday. I think there is as much value and richness in the design of things for mass production as there is for craft/bespoke… for something to be so well-designed, or serve its purpose so completely, that we actually don’t think of it as design any more. Like a coin that has to be made in a material durable enough to last a lifetime and communicate a lot of information about identity on a small surface area. I’m actually not so interested in craft, although naturally this is the area where experimentation often happens. Design in our time has become closer to art but really it’s a service: something that should serve everyone and do it well.
The popular misconception is that design is exclusive and for the rich; I want to show that it isn’t and that it affects everyone every day.
I think we’ve also become so detached from how things are produced and made.
We talk a lot about how craft is in decline but parts of industry are too, especially in the UK. Extra Ordinary had the effect of turning products and materials on their head to make us look again at them. And question why we think some things are more valuable than others.
I want the many young designers who come to the gallery to be excited about process, material and manufacture not just a fashionable end product.
Views of the Extra Ordinary show
How has your background in architecture and journalism influenced your approach to curation? Is working within an exhibition format the perfect bridge between storytelling and creating space?
It’s more about finding the perfect timescale for me. I studied architecture but never had the patience for how long it takes to see a complex building through to completion.
Working for magazines was great as every month you’d have this great feeling of satisfaction, and then be on to researching the next exciting thing. Although I still write, modern journalism can feel a bit too speedy sometimes. With the internet always demanding more words and faster, I felt like I wasn’t really seeing things or talking to designers in-depth, just skimming the surface. Curating The Aram Gallery is already proving a good pace for me: lengthy research, the time to talk with lots of designers in their studios, and of course the chance to see it all come to fruition five times a year. For me, all three things are essentially about a cycle of research, collaboration, and creative expression.
Can you tell us about your next show at Aram and what you’d like to bring
to your new role?
The next show at The Aram Gallery is called 2°C and it’s a collaboration with Disegno magazine and Universal Design Studio. For its latest issue, Disegno invited leading designers to think about how the issue of climate change could be more effectively communicated to the public. The title is a reference to the forthcoming UN conference on the subject which will aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the earth’s temperature doesn’t rise above 2°C, the threshold at which effects will be catastrophic.
Universal Design Studio have created a fantastic exhibition design and I’ve been working with the designers to develop the ideas into an exhibition format. Like the previous exhibition,
I love the questioning attitude all the participating designers have taken to the subject.
The exhibits are weird and wonderful, and perhaps not the usual thing you might see at the gallery as they are quite conceptual.
But as I mentioned the main thing I want to express in my new role is that design doesn’t exist in a vacuum… we have to think carefully about the time we are designing in, about context and wider issues too.
2°C at the Aram Gallery: 21 September – 31 October 2015
Interview by Ariana Mouyiaris, an independent Creative Director and Founder
of design and curating practice Haptic Thought.
Photography by Amandine Alessandra / The Interior Photographer