Faye Toogood on Creation as a Form of Connection

Faye Toogood is perhaps best known for her Roly-Poly chair, among the more famous pieces of furniture to come out of the 2010s and take over the zeitgeist, but the London-based designer’s artistry and craft runs much deeper and spans much wider. She began finding, collecting, cataloging, producing, and editing her “assemblages” long before she ever had a name for them, and her design career has been marked by exactly that, beginning with the debut of Assemblage 1 (2010) and through to her latest, Assemblage 8: Palette (2024). On the whole, Toogood’s creations serve as material investigations and discipline-defying attempts to better understand herself. Without formal training in design, Toogood—who was the Designer of the Year at the Maison&Objet design fair in Paris this past January and the Stockholm Furniture Fair’s Guest of Honor in February—uses what she describes as the feeling of being “a fraud in the room” to her advantage. Through her work, she is an enigma; with projects across furniture, interiors, fashion, and homewares, she’s unwilling to be defined by a single output and has instead built a multilayered practice and belief system that allows her to be “all heart and hands.” 

On this week’s Time Sensitive—our debut of Season 11—Toogood talks about the acts of creation and connection, and how each underscores the enduring play that’s ever-present in her work.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Faye Toogood

Toogood

[3:49] Assemblage 1

[7:43] Assemblage 7

[13:28] Seamus Heaney

[14:50] Isamu Noguchi

[14:50] Kan Yasuda

[17:23] Roly-Poly chair

[18:06] Rachel Whiteread

[20:07] Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden

[22:45] Matisse Chapel

[25:40] “Ways of Seeing”

[29:57] “Womanifesto!”

[36:55] Assemblage 8

[52:17] “The World of Interiors”