In the multifaceted world of Faye Toogood, clay is a material that is both recurring and beautifully shaped by the designer's hands. Her propensity for hand-prototyping is well-documented throughout her practice, and every project begins with an intimate act of creation before developing into fully fledged products. It is surprising, then, that throughout her career, the British designer had not yet tried her hand (literally and figuratively) at making tiles. 'As a studio, we have been asked by a few tile companies to collaborate,' the designer admitted earlier this week. 'But I turned them down in the hope that maybe one day I would get a call from Mutina.'
That call eventually arrived, and the pair just unveiled their first collaboration at the company's HQ in Fiorano Modenese, Italy. Titled 'Faces & Figures', the collection speaks the visual language of clay through a dual approach that is both discreet and boldly figurative, a testament to the designer's ability to shape her thinking into three-dimensional expressions.
‘Faces & Figures’ tiles by Faye Toogood for Mutina
The starting point for Toogood was a question: 'How can I challenge the industrial nature of Mutina to create something that felt like it had been touched by the hand?'
Hailing from Italy's centre for ceramic tile production, Mutina has perhaps been the company that most successfully continued the industrial tradition of its manufacturing district while opening up its portfolio to some of the most celebrated creative voices of today. From Patricia Urquiola to Barber Osgerby and Nathalie Du Pasquier, Mutina's collaborators have had a go at reinventing the tile both functionally and creatively.
The project started in Toogood's London studio, as the designer began modelling with clay, cardboard, paper and canvas – her usual palette of materials that helped visualise the collection's direction. The result is a full toolkit for creating a space: three sizes of plain geometric tiles in four colours (chalk, sand, clay and mud), each available in glossy and matt finishes, and two matching organic forms in a brushed matte clay effect, as well as a series of extruded bricks (bricks being a staple of Mutina, which has reinvented the genre creatively).
The human body was at the heart of Toogood's exploration, and the resulting collection features the subtle warmth of clay and the bolder expression of anthropomorphous forms. Sculptural eyes, ears, mouths, noses and nipples peek out from tiles, animating their surfaces, and serve as a complement to the more neutral pieces.
Although every tile in the collection is the result of Mutina's industrial process, they appear handmade, as if they just came out of the designer's studio. The idea is for every element to be able to be mixed and matched in both traditional and unexpected patterns, the more human elements able to insert themselves into the visual conversation quite seamlessly. 'Maybe the fact that I didn't study design means that I'm able to open a door without even realising I'm breaking a boundary, because I haven't had those boundaries and lines created for me,' notes Toogood, who started her career as a magazine editor before pivoting towards design.
It is an admirable feat, to be able to create something that is so warm and personal ('There couldn't more of me in this collection,' Toogood admits) and yet replicable on an industrial scale to be used effectively and efficiently to design a space. 'Could we create, on an industrial scale, something that generally felt like it just came out of my studio?' she asked earlier on in the process, and the answer is an astounding yes.
'When I think about a chair, I think about how the body connects to the chair, when I make a table, I think of how the legs sit underneath the table. It's all about how the body connects to furniture and objects,' Toogood shares of her process. 'And I wanted to do very much the same with a surface, so it couldn't be only geometric. I wanted it to feel like it had actually had a human touch.'