British furniture designer Matthew Hilton adds sculptor to his resumé
You only need look at classic designs such as Matthew Hilton’s sensually rounded, almost bulbous ‘Balzac’ chair (first produced with SCP in 1991), the curvaceously carved backrest of his ‘Manta’ dining chair for De La Espada, or the sleek, barely-there planes of Case’s ‘Cross’ extending table to see that his work has always resonated with sculpted tactility.
‘I have wanted to do sculpture for a long time, but you know how it goes, I’ve been making a living from designing furniture, and so I quietly put that idea to one side,’ says Hilton. Lockdown brought the opportunity to put aside the day-to-day and play with sketching freeform on his iPad. Slowly, he realised that he wanted to transform the abstract shapes and patterns he was drawing into something physical.
‘I started making very small models out of bits of wood and plastic with car-body filler joining them all together, before having some 3D printed,’ he explains. The next step was approaching a handful of expert foundries, fabricators and welders from around the country to help bring each piece to life. Some have been built up from hundreds of layers of thin metal sheets, some carved from stone or cast in iron, and others hand-fabricated from Corten steel so they could be left to rust in Hilton’s garden.
‘The way the surface and the form work together was very important,’ he says. Some gleam, some are quite rough, as if in decay. ‘Like they might have been found in the sea or on a beach,’ he notes.
There are influences of great sculptors such as Eduardo Chillida and Isamu Noguchi, as well as the visually pleasing floating and cantilevered roofs and staircases of mid-century architecture. ‘And there is some very vague sense of human proportion there too,’ adds Hilton, of shapes that intimate the familiarity of two people hugging or a woman walking.
The art of sculpture requires ‘a completely different thought process to furniture making,’ he muses. ‘Design is about problem solving, trying to make a functional object which is manufacturable for the right price, that people can sell and people will like. With sculpture, it’s very much in my head and completely personal. The whole point is having the freedom to do what I want. I’ve been trying to make interesting forms while dealing with proportion all my life, so I like how you’re not quite sure how some of these pieces are going to stay standing up. If things are too beautiful, too balanced, too calm, they’re actually a bit dull.’
As one of the UK’s leading lights in design for almost 40 years, we doubt ‘dull’ has ever featured in Hilton’s vocabulary. ‘Tough Moment’ is on display until 31 October at Paul Smith, 9 Albemarle St, London. paulsmith.com; matthewhilton.com
