James Shaw on plastic.

[Music] Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Material Matters with me, Drung Gibson. We've been going a while now, but if you haven't heard the show before, then the idea is that in each podcast we meet a maker, designer, artist or architect who is intrinsically linked to a particular material or technique, discovering how they craft shape their lives and careers. Currently, I find myself in the South London studio of the designer and maker James Shaw. James graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013, and since then has made a name for himself by working with a material best described as a bit controversial, plastic. James's pieces have been shown in places such as the London Design Museum and the V&A, and his work is held in permanent collections of MoMA and the Vitra Design Museum. James, thank you very much for doing this. Hi, well thanks for having me. That's pleasure. I mean, can we describe in this podcast what we've tried to do is recording people's studios, which eating a bit, I'm going to confess because we're in the kitchen of your workshop. Could we talk a bit about your workshop to set the scene for listeners? Sure, yeah. Well, my workshop is in a shop unit of Brutalista State down in South London, which like like many kind of creative studios is set for demolition. And this shop unit was kind of built in the '70s with all these kind of fantastic dreams for the future, which somehow didn't quite work out. And now we've kind of taken that over and turned it into our studio. And so it's divided into two spaces. We've got a kind of like clean space technically, although often that's quite messy. And then computers in the clean space. But we have computers in the clean space. And then the workshop space as well, which is kind of where the exciting things happen. It's quite intriguing because obviously before I do these things I kind of do research on people. And all your press clippings seem to start from when you left the Royal College of Art. It's very little before that. So I'd quite like to discover a bit about your background and how you got interest in design in the first place, I guess. Well, I suppose I so I did exist before I graduated from Royal College of Art. But I suppose and I was in fact working as a designer before that as well. But I think that there was this kind of like transformationary experience of going to the Royal College. So I mean I come from a family where there aren't many kind of creatives. I mean it's a family of doctors mostly. Pretty much everyone is just dying to it. Yeah, really? Oh right. And apart from my sister who just before I went off to and she ended up going off to art school, she retrained as a furniture maker. And but but having said that, you know, I think everyone in my family has got this kind of like creative bent I suppose. I mean like we were always me and my dad were always kind of going off to art museums and going to look at interesting bits of architecture and kind of going on these pilgrimages around to look at stuff. But I think there wasn't really anyone who had considered it as a career. So but for me this was kind of I was always really firm that I didn't want to be a doctor. This was kind of like really clear to me from a very young age. And I think but because it was kind of coming from this sort of I guess professionals background I kind of always thought well I guess I'll be an architect then because that's kind of what you can do. Did your parents want you to be a doctor? I don't I mean I think they probably would have been quite pleased if if I had been but they were really supportive of whatever whatever I wanted to do to be honest. You know I think they would have been happy whatever I did. But yeah I'm sure in some corner of their minds they would have been quite happy if I'd been a doctor. My brother's a doctor and I think you know that it makes dinner table chit-chat quite quite good. I'm sure it must be the same in your family. When my family gets together we've got cousins like grandparents with doctors, both my parents and doctors, it's like an episode of ER they just talk in abbreviations the whole time. Exactly. It's a bizarre thing you sit there because you come like okay. And it didn't mean I was quite fluent in medical speech when I went to university I could you know have conversations with medical undergraduates quite fluently which surprised them no end. Sorry we digress. So yeah so I mean I guess like before I went off to art college I kind of had this idea that you know I was either going to end up being an architect or a painter because these were kind of like the only two things I sort of knew about that you could do. And then I went and did my foundation year at Falmas and just ended up finding myself in the workshop all the time just kind of making stuff basically. Did you have as a kid growing up at school had you been playing with materials where the tools around the house? Totally yeah. Yeah I mean I think that was always what I was doing was kind of like fiddling around making things kind of often often some corner making something. And yeah we actually did kind of have a bit of a workshop at the house. I mean which was mostly belonged to my brother initially and then I kind of took over a little bit. But he made a poll later in the basement which was kind of amazing. So I guess there was you know even though it was a family word that wasn't kind of the main thing it was always there in the background. And like my grandma also she did a lot of pottery so she made like a huge amount of the pottery that that we actually used at home and my mum did pottery at some point and my mum also has a she's a doctor but one of her hobbies that she has pursued for a long time now is spinning and kind of working with textiles. So spinning wool from from around around where she lives she lives down in Devon which was as well as brought up and kind of spinning in the knitting which is this kind of like hugely laborious acts but kind of very like wonderful experimentation of texture and colours and all this kind of stuff. You're in Falmouth and you're spending your time in the workshop. Yeah. What kind of things are you designing and making when you're in undergraduate? Well I mean I think at that point so I guess one of the one of the first things was I was kind of like okay well so then I'm not going to be a painter so I guess I'll be a sculptor then because that's another thing that you know we've heard of but then I just had this thing of wanting the things I made to have a function I guess or to have a reason to exist in the world you know. I couldn't kind of quite deal with making something that just kind of existed in a way for its own sake this was some kind of internal struggle that was quite hard to I found myself kind of grappling with so that's why I was kind of then always drawn to making things with this sort of functional element but then at the same time you know I didn't want to be doing kind of purely functional things because the sort of the message behind it the thinking behind it was always a very you know was was such a huge part of the reason why I wanted to make this stuff. So I guess yeah I kind of ended up making these kind of like quasi functional objects you know benches, tableware kind of chests of drawers and all this kind of thing and yeah so it wasn't until I was at Fountain that I discovered this thing called design and which I literally hadn't kind of heard about as a as a profession really up until that point and at that point there was all sorts of you know there was the sort of Dutch Dutch people were very big at that point so I guess they're very strict yeah so there was the droogs who were kind of like a massive inspiration I'd say but then also people like Andreas Etel and the American artist so all these people who kind of working on this hinterland between kind of the objects that we actually use every day and the objects that we want to kind of communicate and explore with as well and when you left film us so then when I left Fountain I what first of all I wanted to get out of Cornwall right and I mean I loved it but it was like having brought been brought up in Devon and then going two and a half hours further down into the corner it was like okay need need to get out of this corner and go and find out what's going on elsewhere so I went up to but so I wanted to get up to London I didn't want to go too much into London because it was a bit scary at that point so I went to Kingston which even even at that stage seeing buildings with four stories tall and things like that seemed extremely metropolitan and but yeah so I went to Kingston and did I found was this purely foundation course and then I did undergrad at Kingston in a course called Products and Fanage and Design which I think I also chose because they had a fabulous workshops there which I think still now it's cool because they have good stuff yeah really really good on and also yeah just this idea of trying to explore design more I suppose but that that was kind of an interesting one because so I went through through that course and I kind of had various wobbles along along the way I think like halfway through I was just like you know what is all this I kind of literally just didn't really understand and what the whole activity that everyone was trying to get on with was. So I ended up having this wobble and then taking a year out where I went and worked in a couple of different design studios and applied to go and study architecture instead. Where did you work? So I worked for a studio called Mark Gabbatast. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then I also, I did some work for this entrepreneur lady who was kind of doing a bit of pure product design. And then I also had this amazing experience going to Sri Lanka and working in a toy factory there. So which was really fantastic. It was this wooden toy manufacturer and I was kind of literally working in the factory, drawing stuff, designing a whole new range of toys for them. And it was just kind of an incredible experience for like a young person to have because I could literally kind of do a drawing, hand it to the foreman and then like we'd go down to the factory shop and kind of work through it with this team of people and then two hours later there'd be a thing, a prototype. So over that period of three months, we did a range of 40 different toys. So that means proper industrial design? Kind of proper industrial design. Which is not what you do now obviously. And yes, I suppose to complete the Kingston story. So then I kind of like came back, didn't do architecture, didn't go to Iron Daven, finished my degree there and came out kind of wanting to be a proper industrial designer. And that's kind of what I did for the time after that. So I worked in a couple of studios here in London. You know, on CAD, designing stuff for production. And it was fine. It was something, but it wasn't kind of what was grabbing me I guess. Oh, you're smiling, right? Well, I'm just, well, I mean, so there's, yeah, I'm kind of just remembering those days like sitting on solid works all day. And I mean, you know, just that feeling of like sitting on a computer all day and just realizing that is absolutely not what I want to do with my life. Which was fantastic, because that was really formative to be able to go through that and realize that it wasn't what I wanted. So then the Royal College? So then I went to the Royal College. And that was interesting because I think I kind of hadn't really realized, but in my time at Kingston, I think had been kind of quite dogmatized in a way. But I mean, maybe that sounds quite harsh. I don't want to be harsh on Kingston in any way. But I think it did have a very particular ideology at the time, which I think I like a sponge had just kind of absorbed. And then I had my interview with, with Todd Buncher and the other cheeses at the Royal College. The Royal College? The Royal College, the Royal College. So yeah, Todd was running the course at that point. And I kind of basically just regurgitated all this kind of dogma that I'd taken in. And which was sort of quite like design is this. And things should be like this sort of thing. And basically this interview panel just told me to pieces. [LAUGHS] And they were just like, what are you talking about? That is absolutely such a restricted view of the world. And so yeah, I came out of that interview thinking, Christ, there's not a chance that I've got in on that, you know, absolutely no way. But then a bit of time later, I got an acceptance letter, and I got in, which was, yeah, fantastic. And yeah, at the beginning, it really just kind of blew my mind because I was just sort of like, what the fuck is this? Like the first project that we did, I ended up spending entirely up in Epping Forest. And I just kind of went up to the forest and spent two weeks kind of like camping around there and like trying to make oil out of beach nuts. And I don't know, just like building little dwellings and being a bit of a caveman basically. Just with this sort of, what am I doing here? But then at the same time loving it. And then kind of bringing that back and presenting it. And then it was kind of, yeah, it was a really interesting experience for someone who's kind of come from this sort of industrial design background to just broaden things up totally into the idea of what an investigation can be. Well, it's quite interesting because when I started writing about design 20 or 20 years ago, the Royal College of Art still had a furniture department that was kind of broadly influenced, I'd suggest, still by Gordon Russell, at least in the staff, if not elsewhere. And there was very definite sense to the students of what they wanted to be, which was largely to produce furniture for large-ish manufacturers, probably Italian, possibly rotoplastic. Yeah. You seem to come from a different generation that was making where overconsumption was a key issue. We had so much stuff. And you seem to be part of the generation that was creating tools so that consumers could decide whether they made anything. Did you have a sense of the space that you are occupying or that you're going to land in while you're at the Royal College? Well, I think, I mean, maybe only in retrospect, I suppose. I mean, yeah, I think it's really interesting what you're saying, because I guess it's really true that we can see that path where it was kind of originally designed into doing things for industry. And then that kind of faded out. And then I guess you had the kind of generation above me, where there was people like Michael Marriott, who were kind of still working within this concept of industry and production. But we're kind of trying to make their own clever ways around it kind of things. So he would make his own small batch rotomolded stool as like a kind of ingenious way to sort of access the benefits of this. I mean, some of that generation came out of kind of a mini recession in the early 90s. Yeah. And there was no industry. They didn't have much choice, but to do their own thing. And so in a way, I think that there was possibly something kind of similar going on with me and with my generation, because we were kind of, you know, when I came out, it was kind of quite apparent that I'm not. there's no jobs going with vitro kind of thing like, if you want to do something, you're going to have to do your own thing. And so in terms of where I wanted to land, I mean, I think I was having kind of worked as an industrial designer within a studio and kind of four bigger companies. I was very clear that I wanted to work independently in a kind of small studio environment rather than kind of within a corporate environment. And I was going to need to do something that would kind of allow me to do that, to prepare me to do that. So that's. I mean, that is really where my final project that I had from the Royal College came from. And so that project was to make this collection of tools, which would allow me to produce things, basically. So the idea was it's a new tool. Well, the tool dictates the outcome, so a new tool allows new outcomes. And then if you can have your own set of tools, then that will allow you to kind of create things that, I guess, kind of give you new possibilities. And if those tools are kind of somehow have this, does this word "expedience", which I think I didn't hear it that from. If not Michael Mariet, then one of my tutors at Kingston was very good friends with Michael Mariet. Karl Klöken. Well, Karl Klöken was a tutor, but no, Simon Maidman. Okay. Yeah. And so, yeah, this idea of "expedience" in making, which was also something that I guess had kind of come along, come across a lot, kind of in my own making. You know, I love working with materials like wood, and kind of like traditional materials, but I guess I don't have much patience in a way. It's like three weeks of sanding, doesn't fill me with joy. So no solid works and no sanding. Yeah. Yeah, coming across very, very negative here. I mean, can we talk about that final project? Three stalls, three tools. Yeah. It was kind of quite provocative, because the tools you produce are all gun-like. Yeah, totally. And there's a quote on the Royal College website that I found, which I will read, which came from you. "We have an image of the craftsman or artist as the lone heroic figure striving for originality. I've produced a set of weapons, brackets, guns, of course, to become my arsenal. With these, I will fight the fight." So you're like the clean Eastwood. This is the thing. Yeah, I mean, you know, it was definitely provocative, and it was definitely tongue-in-tank. which I hope comes across because now hearing that again it sounds a bit cringy to me. But you know it was supposed to be this kind of like tongue-in-tongue cheek message. But yeah I mean I had been kind of, I'd been reading a lot of books about craft and a lot of books about kind of I guess yes sort of solo practitioners and artists and makers kind of thing. And so it was this idea of kind of like staking out territory in a way. But also just this kind of little observation I suppose that a lot of the tools that we have are shaped do have this kind of gun shape anyway. You know drills and things like this have all got this kind of like gun form to them. But then it was also because this that whole project started with this sort of weird fantasy that I had kind of being a bit fed up with, well not fed up with. But knowing that I wanted to get this kind of expedient production and not spend three weeks sounding things. But to have this kind of intuitive and instantaneous way of making things. So I was imagining this kind of gun that you can just sort of like squirt stuff out of or just kind of spray things with to kind of build these things that you have in your head in a kind of very like yeah exciting, exciting way. Which you did, I mean one was kind of squirting out papier-machille paint the other was a pewter. I think that's right. And the third was plastic. Yeah. Which kind of became a bit has become a bit of a signature I guess. Is that fair comment? Yeah definitely. I mean I mean so there was these kind of three tools and I actually kind of really enjoyed each one of them for for its own thing. But the papier-machille one which which that kind of co-sprayed this recycled paper fiber with with kind of blue binder. So they mixed up in the air and then hit whatever you were shooting at as papier-machille. That was just like horrendously messy. It was it was fantastic fun but it was so messy that when I came out of the the workshop at the Royal College of Art and went into my studio there just there wasn't a chance that I'd be able to do it there. It just would have not worked at all. And then the pewter, the pewter squirting device which is also great fun but it was just pewter was too expensive essentially for me to be able to access. And then the plastic on the other hand I was actually getting given plastic this waste plastic for free. Well can we talk about that because where does a plastic come from? It's quite important I think. Totally so I get it from a recycling plant in a deep East London in Dagonham and it's the stuff that kind of falls out of their system essentially. So you know they're aiming to become closed loop and they're taking in whatever kind of old shampoo and milk bottles and trying to turn them into I hope you can turn them into new shampoo and milk bottles. But it's it's just a fact that some of it kind of falls out. So it becomes contaminated in some way or it just becomes unviable for the very specific market that they have for it. So for example the stuff that I've got at the moment has been colour contaminated and I mean this is a kind of interesting little story that I've keep on wheeling out ever since I've had this batch in which I actually first got from Zoe over at Institute of Making. This stuff it's got this kind of greenish, blueish colour to it which is quite deep and what's happened there is a lot of the polyethylene H2P which is what it is that we have is milk bottles because we drink a lot of milk in this country and we mostly drink semi-skinned milk and semi-skinned milk has a green lid to it and it's just you know that the factory is trying to separate out all of these green lids but obviously some of them will inevitably slip in and what's happened there is a few too many have slipped in and it's contaminated the whole batch and that the crazy thing that's happening there is we don't have to have green lids on our milk like we could just as easily have a printed label or something but for some reason at the moment consumers have decided and the supermarkets have decided that we must have green green lids on our milk bottles which means that thousands and thousands of tons of plastic get wasted every year because this happens. So if you weren't doing what you do that plastic what happens that contaminated plastic that becomes landfill or it can become landfill it can get down cycled so I mean yeah the problem is that you know if you're if you're a plant that's working very tight margins and you're generally working like thousands of tons as a kind of like minimum order quantity that you'd even start thinking about if you've got kind of three tons of something that's been contaminated it's very hard to find something to do with that so yeah I mean it can get landfill it can get down cycled and used as an aggregate for something like put into roads and another kind of concrete mixes and that kind of thing and but essentially probably nothing good is going to happen to it but in your hands it becomes something else entirely yeah so I mean for me it's remarkable because they literally at the moment they've been giving me these kind of tongue bags which is just about big enough to fit into a zit fan or have you know and then that is kind of a huge quantity of material for a sort of small independent maker to be to be using and it creates you create with these kind of swirls of material of plastic that I mean it gets compared to squeezing stuff from a toothpaste tube I mean I prefer more to think of it as kind of cake decoration almost like icing or something it has like similar kind of effect so how does how do you do that well I suppose my intention with with the plastic has always been to kind of reveal its plasticity basically so I mean the kind of the thing that's happening is you know plastic is considered to be a bad material you know both both because of the environmental aspects which you know we're all kind of very aware of now but also I mean so I'm going to launch into the kind of the reason why I wanted to do plastic in the first place yeah absolutely which which was because of this it was a kind of perversity basically so this was whatever six years ago now that I first started kind of investigating plastic and it was actually because you within the kind of circles of making you have the kind of good materials which are kind of inadvertent comments like natural which is you know things like wood marble and glass kind of all these kind of materials and maybe even metal although why metals natural I'm not quite sure why metals any more natural than plastic and then plastic is kind of very low down on that scale it's kind of considered to be a poor material it's like a kind of imitation of something else I mean in fact you know plastic is actually kind of a byword for for something being negative if you if you use that as a description of a person or a thing then it sounds quite derogatory so I got interested in investigating this in a kind of perverse way because it's like hang on you know actually this stuff is surrounding us completely and you know it is actually very useful it is causing us huge problems but is there another way that we can kind of look at it and part part of the thing that I got interested in is the fact that it is kind of invisible you know generally plastic when it's a finished material imitate something else it'll be made to look like you know whatever wood or to look like tortoise shell or something like this but then when it's in packaging I think until this kind of very recent maybe post-attenbracing that we're having now packaging was kind of just invisible it was just this thing that surrounded everything but you paid zero attention to whatsoever you just kind of don't even consider it to be a a material in the same way that you'd consider wood to be a material and I guess that was kind of the point is that you can look at a bit of wood and go like oh that's a lovely bit of wood look at the nice grain on that kind of thing but it's you're not going to pick up a milk bottle and say oh that's a lovely bit of polyethylene well you do with bacon right but you do with bacon right yeah which was what Pate did in beginning of the 20th century which is another really interesting story on that kind of path in the development of plastics from being uh naturals you know things like rubber which is from trees up to polyethylene which is definitely not from well is from very very old trees but you know not from trees in the same way that rubber is um so yeah so when I started working with plastic. I wanted to try and explore its materiality based. in the same way that people who are engaged with craft and making explore the materiality of ceramic or wood or any of these other kind of typical kind of craft materials I suppose. And so, yeah, when I started using the extruder, the extruding gun, that was what I was aiming to reveal was the kind of plasticity of the plastic. How does that gun work? Okay, so basically it is actually just a kind of small version of the typical industrial machine. So extruders are part of injection molders, which is how most plastics that we use are made as through injection molding. But generally extruders are these kind of gigantic things that live in huge factories outside of town and cost 5 million pounds. And so this kind of takes the principles of that machine and then scales it right down to something that, well, the original ones were handheld. Now, I'm on my third one and it's getting a bit too heavy. But scales it down to a kind of handheld tool, which has those same principles. So it takes in plastic, small bits of plastic and then pushes them through a pipe, which has heaters around it, melting them down, and then it comes out as a kind of like sausage or a pug of melted plastic. So when it comes out as this kind of sausage shape and a lot of your work is in this kind of, I guess, agglomerations of these sausage shapes. How long do you have to work it before it sets? Well, it's pretty quick to be honest. I mean, if you just take one of those sausages out, it'll be hard in kind of about three minutes or so. So you have three minutes to sculpt it before you're done? Well, probably even less than that. I mean, because it changes its kind of surface and its texture. So really, you've got to be quite decisive about the way that you put it down. And you've got to kind of get it right the first time, because if you pull it off, you're going to leave all these kind of mozzarella cheese strings going all over the place and mess up the surface texture of it and things. So when you're creating a production, you create these amazing things from candlesticks to tables, all sorts of things. Do you draw first, say you know where you have a plan of what you're doing? Or do you improvise as and when you're making? Both. I mean, drawing is a big part of the decision making process for me. But I mean, I consider this like working with the plastic in this way to be kind of like drawing in 3D really. Or I mean, actually relate it to painting because you have to be so decisive about the way that you place these kind of sausages. It becomes like a gesture. And then that piece that you lay down becomes frozen in space and is a kind of like record of that gesture. And then you know, the kind of balances between the form and the colour of all of that is what's happening. So it's very different from yeah, making a piece of something out of wood. It's a very kind of yeah, intuitive like gesture or way of producing things. You talk about, you have talked about spontaneity and manufacturing. This is what it is. It's spontaneous. I mean, by its nature because this way of making things like I can't ever make two things the same. Like it's actually not possible. And I really enjoy that, you know, means that each piece has its own character. Even the kind of the candlesticks which are some of the smallest things that I make. And I'm actually kind of a byproduct of making the other things. Each one will kind of be like a little individual sculpture of its own. And it's really interesting to see when people are choosing a people want to buy one and they're choosing which one. It becomes kind of like a personality test in a way like which way, which direction they go in that choice. I mean, you call one series, some of your later work, Plastic Baroque. Yeah. The use of the word Baroque I think is kind of fascinating. Why did you choose Baroque? It came out kind of quite early. I mean, actually, I think it was from those, a table that I made in the first show, The RCA Show. And the guy who bought that table, it came from him because he was like, "It's so Baroque." Which was something that I hadn't really kind of considered at the start. And he actually commissioned me to make some wall pieces for his flat, which were based on Baroque sconces. And so it's kind of from that that I started investigating Baroque as a, in a kind of visual way. But then in parallel with this, I was also kind of investigating the ideology of Baroque. And that, for me, that's kind of where the real fascination is because Baroque is a movement. You know, it can be seen as something that emerged in opposition to Protestantism and the kind of reducing of form within the religious context that was there. But also this idea that Protestantism was kind of about being beyond the world, like being out in the next plain sort of thing, and rejecting in a way what was going on here on the planet. And I mean, you know, I'm an atheist, so this, it doesn't, I'm kind of speaking from a kind of non-historical perspective. That's where my interest in this lies. And Baroque kind of coming from Catholicism in contrast was about embracing the kind of abundance and sensuality. And just, yeah, this kind of incredible for kind of what's going on here actually on the ground. And so for me, I kind of related this to our relationship with plastic because this idea that like plastic is a single use material that's just to kind of get you to somewhere else is somehow completely denying the actual materiality, the reality of that kind of on the ground here, and is not recognizing the kind of abundance and the sensuousness of the material, which is what I want to bring out in it. So it was this idea that if we can kind of try and get to know what's actually here on here on the ground with us a bit better, then maybe we can start to form better relationships with this material and stop doing silly things with it, like using it for five minutes and then chucking it in the ocean. I mean, talking about that obviously the Edinburgh Blue Planet 2 caused a complete stir. You know Michael Gove started talking about the Theresa May gave the first speech primalist is given on the environment for possibly ever. I certainly for two decades. But people have viewed it and we live in our social media world. People tend to view things in a very binary way. And I've seen your work on Instagram and people have just gone, all plastic is wrong without really understanding what's going on. Yeah, post-Ethanbrough, have you found that people view your work in a different way? Well, I mean, I would say that there's been a kind of like, I'd say that my career is kind of like, kicks up a lot in the last two years. And I think it must have a lot to do with this kind of resurgence of interest in it. Because I think at the start, you know, people were kind of like, oh, plus it, okay, interesting. You know, there wasn't this kind of this depth of interest that's going on now. And so I'd say kind of for the first like three or four years that I was out doing my thing, there really wasn't that much interest in it. Until this kind of at the moment came along. And I think kind of, yeah, trying to do with some sort of wave of interest or realization, I suppose, then. So people understand what you're trying to do, change the perception of the material? I hope so, but I mean, you know, I think when you release your creations into the world, you can never fully control what the way that they're being received. So, you know, I'm happy to accept that people will recognize things on like a variety of levels. And probably, you know, not many people are going to understand or even be interested in me waffling on about the Brock movement. And see how that relates to tables of all things, you know. But I mean, yeah, for me, that basic thing is trying to have a complex dialogue about all this stuff, because I think last year when when the Attenborough stuff came out, there was this kind of as you said, a binary shift when everyone was like, "Oh, we need to get rid of all of this now." And it's like, "Wow, but we can't do that." And, you know, a lot of the people at have conversations with people say this. And it's like, but what are you talking about? You're wearing a Gore-Tex coat, like, and nylon trousers, you know, we're completely covered in this stuff. And a lot of the things, I mean, maybe we can do without Gore-Tex, maybe we can do without other fabrics, maybe we can do without a lot of things. things but there are some things that I'm pretty sure we definitely do need. And so in reality I think sadly it isn't just about getting rid of this stuff or we can't just get rid of this stuff. It's about increasing our understanding and creating better ways of dealing with it which do make more sense and are less wasteful. So I guess what I'd like to try and do is increase the complexity of the dialogue. Which I do think is somewhere where objects that talk about things can help. I think an object that people live with and have in their life for a long period of time is a valuable way to communicate an idea like that. So plus isn't the only material you're interested in though James. Two years ago I think I saw you working in, well you're growing bits of plywood in petri dishes. We talk about what you were doing there. Plastic has been kind of like a big part of what I do but really I'm interested in kind of the whole material landscape and finding different ways for us to interact with it. And so the bacterial plywood project was, it started off from this project with open desk, the CNC plywood making company. And they were looking at the future of work. So they wanted us to design some piece of furniture that would be for the future workspace. Using this kind of, yeah CNC plywood technology. Which is great because it allows you to decentralize production. So you can order a piece of furniture but have it shipped from your nearest CNC guy. But I kind of looked at this brief and the future of work and I was like okay yeah that is cool but actually maybe plywood is sort of the issue here and maybe that's actually the bit that I'm really interested in. Because plywood is great, it's one of the most commonly used materials in the world or sheet materials are you know plywood MDF, chipboard and they're great things but we have a basic problem with them which is that trees are not shaped like eight by four panels. So whenever you're making one of these sheet materials that we're using everywhere, it's this kind of struggle to turn a tree into a flat rectangular thing. And then the other problem is that trees take minimum 25 years to grow and generally the ways that we grow them is in these kind of like monoculture forests which are like killing out diversity and then every every 25 years when you do harvest them. I mean there's a lot of sustainable grants out there now but you know it can be problematic the ways that they harvested and I've kind of had this interest in bacteria already going before this project came about. So I just started thinking like what if there was a way that we could use bacteria to grow one of these sheet materials. Because the thing about bacteria is that they are very very small and they multiply very very quickly which is actually kind of magic for us in a way because it means that because of that size and that speed of multiplication it means that they can do things much faster than big organisms can. So I mean I'm kind of maybe going a bit backwards around describing this project but basically I started working with this particular type of bacteria which grows sheets of a sort of cellulose stuff as a byproduct from it's own life and it does this on the surface of a liquid, a nutrient liquid and then it just grows out to form to fill the size of whatever container you have. So you put it in a big tank and you end up with a big sheet. You put it in an 8 by 4 container, you end up with an 8 by 4 sheet, boom. And then it can do that in about 6 to 8 weeks which if you compare that to 25 years is pretty amazing. And then you don't presumably have to end up lugging large bits of plywood around the globe. Yeah so that then opens up all sorts of possibilities like you can actually be growing this because you can just ship the little spore sample instead of shipping a whole container full of plywood and then you can grow it close to the point of use for the use kind of thing. And then that nutrient soup that it grows off can all be made from lots of waste products, waste food or other kind of like byproducts that we have as well. So yeah I mean that was the concept essentially and I guess I got to, it's interesting because it was one of those projects that you kind of start off and you get it to a certain level and like okay cool but now if I want to continue this I would need a PhD and a couple of million of research funding from someone. I mean it's just a future role. This is how we wrap up by the word James, the future question at the end. Is this the future role you think of design to act as a kind of provocateur activist? I don't know if it's even anything particularly new. I mean I think people like Drug have been doing this for a long time you know acting as the provocateur and I mean you could even argue that within that field of industrial design it's what people have always done is kind of look to try and suggest new ways of doing things. I mean look at the eems is you know they were they were totally on this. I mean for me I think I guess like I said before I think I probably have quite a short attention span so it's important for me to be able to jump across different things and that was always a dream for me is to have a kind of diverse practice which where I'm not just sitting at a computer all day every day but also I'm not just up in the workshop all day every day where I'm kind of trying to engage all parts of my brain and all parts of my body and that's why it's really important for me to be able to kind of traverse across like making making things out of plastic up in the workshop all the way up to curating and kind of talking about stuff like this. James Shaw that was brilliant thank you very much. Great. And to learn more about James's work go to jamesmicroshore.co.uk there are images of the interviews as well as little films and other things on my Instagram page grant on design. 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