Tent – London Design Festival 2011

Tent is really satisfying event during the London Design Festival as it seems to combine the idea of a fun venue showing lots of new, exciting, up-and-coming designers with a more professionally finished show. This year there were some good names in the mix including Ercol, 3form from the Netherlands and lots of smaller well-respected furniture companies.

One interesting project at the event was ‘Shelter’ organised by Curators Collective JJam. Using fabrics kindly supplied by Bute,  JJam commissioned 5 designers to make projects based on the idea of shelter to display at Tent. There were some interesting ideas but COVER like Henny Van Nistelrooy‘s textile covered screens in which he has unthreaded the original textile weave to make a series of graphic shapes in the material that created subtle opaque windows.

Abigail Borg makes beautiful floral textile and wallpaper designs. Her stand was a riot of colour and pattern, with a new collection to show off.

The work of Anna Glasbrook is hard to define but her fantastic installation pieces, wall-hangings and screen weave ribbon through textiles that play with the illusion of space.

Emma Elizabeth, from Sydney, Australia, showed her fabulous Round Diamond rug, which she also took to Milan earlier this year.

Naja Utzon Popov is a London-based rug designer and ceramicist. She had a large stand with her striking rug designs.

COVER likes designs of Vanja Bazdulj, who works with felt and resins to make furniture and interior products which have previously featured on the News pages of the magazine.

Also using felt is Penelope Jordan, whose wall panels are totally mind-blowing! The repetitive designs are formed by repetitively cutting and folding the felt. It is intricate and time-consuming work!

Rug designer Sonya Winner‘s stand looked fantastic, with amazing attention to detail. She used floorboard wallpaper onto which she mounted her colourful carpets like the popular After Matisse. She also had some brightly coloured rug samples made from recycled saris.

COVER really liked Naomi Paul‘s knitted lights.

And Naori Priestly‘s crazy designs.

Plus Bristol-based weaver Annabel Williams‘ delicate woven panels that deserved close attention.