The David Collins Foundation celebrates creativity in all its forms at London Design Festival

At London Design Festival 2025, The David Collins Foundation presents 'Convergence', an exhibition featuring a curation of talent it has honoured through its support of the Arts Foundation's annual Futures Awards. Presented at The Lavery as part of the Brompton Design District, the exhibition also marks the 40th anniversary of David Collins Studio.

Set up in 2016 to commemorate the late David Collins' passion for culture, creativity and the arts, the foundation that bears his name supports artists working across different fields resonating with Collins' passions, to help them develop their practice. 'We wanted to take David's passion and curiosity for culture forward,' says the studio's founder and CEO, Iain Watson. 'Our partnership with the Arts Foundation has evolved in very inspiring ways over the years, exploring areas of creativity where much support is needed, from poetry to biodesign.'

‘Convergence’: The David Collins Foundation at London Design Festival 2025

Each year since 2017, The David Collins Foundation and the Arts Foundation have partnered on an annual award. Curated by broadcaster and author Ellen E Jones, the new exhibition seeks to find connections between the works of past winners, who represent a variety of fields, from design and craft to film, sculpture, bio design, set design and poetry. On display is the work of artists Ayo Akingbade and Savinder Bual, designers Jochen Holz, Louise Lenborg Skajem and Aura Murillo, Max Frommeld and TK Hay, poets Ella Frears and Will Harris, and filmmakers Cherish Oteka and Onyeka Igwe.

The exhibition started with a question: 'Can an object lend permanence to an otherwise fleeting human experience?' All the works on display form connections with each other and with the mission of the foundation, in an attempt to 'archive emotion, memory and time'.

'I see my role as curator as something akin to a host or facilitator, entrusted with helping to bring together a group of extraordinary guests for a moment of shared connection,' says Jones, who over the past few months delved deep into the works of the talents on display.

'I was in awe of The David Collins Foundation and its work,' she continues. 'I wanted to explore how the idea of legacy develops for contemporary practices.'

The exhibition, designed by London-based studio Bibliothèque is staged as an 'imagined gathering'. Says Jones: 'The guests are the works themselves, each one representing an artist the late David Collins once met, admired, and was moved by. My hope is to arrange them so that a conversation begins to take place, until the room feels alive with connection.'

Among the pieces on display is the work of German designer Max Frommeld, the partnership's first award winner, in 2017; Frommeld used the prize money to travel to the US, where he created an object a day for a month. 'In a different place, your work changes: you soak up different inspirations around you, like a sponge,' he says. His featured set-up includes a toilet seat made with an elaborate wood inlay technique, which he describes as 'marquetry, but very lo-fi', and 'not so much “a piece”, but actually more a process'.

The most recent talent to be honoured is theatre designer TK Hay, whose set model for Scenes from a Repatriation questions the concept of exhibition. What is interesting is that although the maquette is presented as an artwork within the exhibition, it is actually a tool, an object, he explains, 'through which I am communicating what the space is going to look like’.

Shown at the Royal Court Theatre, London, the play by Joel Tan is about the controversial journey from China to the UK of a 1,000-year-old statue, which remains on view but wrapped, mummy-like, for the duration of the play.

No Archive Can Restore You, a 2020 film by Onyeka Igwe, is also concerned with hidden historical objects. Shot at Lagos’ now defunct Colonial Film Unit, the nearly six-minute film is 'a sonic exploration of the archival space', accompanied by a reimagined audio track for the now-unavailable colonial-era films.

The Guinness brewery on Lagos’ Ikeja Industrial Estate (the first brewery Guinness opened outside Ireland, in the early 1960s) forms part of the photographic work of visual artist Ayo Akingbade. Working with personal and family archives throughout her practice, she has created a triptych that layers images from Ikeja with personal photos and pop-culture icons, as Jones notes, 'playing with the idea of archiving as a connector of themes'.

Merging memory with bio design, Memorial Reef addresses 'the whole bureaucratic process of a funeral and realising that death can be taboo'. The project by Aura Murillo and Louise Lenborg Skajem is based on a novel take on a traditional funeral urn: using a 'bio-receptive formula' to protect and restore the oceans, the sculptural pieces have been used for a pilot underwater cemetery in Bali, where they have become home to a variety of fish, coral and other species. 'It’s very beautiful, because in the end, it represents how an end of life is creating new life.'

Also looking at Bali for inspiration is Savinder Bual (who, according to her bio, 'doesn’t mind if you think of her as an artist, or a designer, or even an inventor'). Her simple mechanisms, made with found and reclaimed materials, are based on the rattles used by Balinese farmers to scare away birds.

'I'm not precious… My main thing is that the work doesn't just sit in my studio; that it’s shared,' she says. 'It’s so important to try and find pockets of joy, or bring ourselves to the present.' Visitors at the exhibition are able to try the objects.

On display nearby are new glass pieces by London-based Jochen Holz, the UK’s only master practitioner of lampworking (a form of glasswork that originates from the manufacture of scientific equipment). Experimenting with form and colour, Holz creates pieces that can't easily be categorised, beyond their obvious function as vessels: 'You don't categorise it too closely… Sometimes you have this function just as an anchor,' he says. His objects are conceived as spontaneous expressions of the material.

The second video on display, a BAFTA-winning film by filmmaker Chez Oteka, explores inter-generational connection and empathy. The film is an intimate portrait of Gamal 'G' Turawa, an ex-Metropolitan police officer, struggling with themes of identity, homophobia and racism. '[In life] we go through things and feel like we're the only one, when actually there's generations of people who've gone through that same thing before,' Oteka comments.

It is unusual to see poetry presented within a London Design Festival exhibition, and the two pieces by Ella Frears and Will Harris are a welcome surprise. 'Blue Acres' started when the two poets did a shared freewrite on the theme of ‘blue’ – a shade that was also associated with David Collins, and remains important to the studio. This poem in two parts offers a view of memory around a specific colour. 'You're taking in as much as possible of a moment or place, in order to then try and reflect some element of that in poetic form,' the pair say.

Addressing the diversity within the exhibition, Iain Watson reflects on how the fields covered by the award with the Arts Foundation have broadened over time. 'We started with furniture, and the award evolved over the years – every year, we review the categories, to understand which areas of creativity need more support. The roster of talent on view here is a great representation of the passion for culture and art that drives us, and it's been great to have Ellen research parallels within them.'