Paul Cocksedge - Manifestation of Authenticity

Paul Cocksedge is one of the United Kingdom's most imaginative designers. He is known for developing sculptural furnishings and large-scale public interventions that communicate complex concepts through clear, simplified forms. For Paul Cocksedge, each artwork is a vehicle for narrative, drawing inspiration from and abstracting the physical process of making. In this interview, Yoko Choy is looking to understand more about Cocksedge's search for hidden values and properties and how he transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

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Yoko: Everyone, welcome again! Today we have Paul Cocksedge, British designer and artist, with us. Hello, Paul, how are you?

Paul: Hello there. Very, very well, thank you so much. It's really great to be talking to you. I'm in London, and it's a great day because finally the sun has appeared and everyone's in a very good mood here.

Yoko: Yeah, weather is very important in times like this.

Paul: Very much so. What I've noticed, even just this morning and over the weekend, is how London as a city is a place full of people desperate to interact and be together. And the sun really helps that.

Yoko: Great, to start with, tell us something about you. Who are you, what do you do, and how did you start what you are doing?

Paul: We describe the studio as a design studio, but design as a word is very far-reaching in many directions.

So, we work on many different types of projects from industrial design, product design to public art, sculpture, one-off limited edition collectible pieces and everything else, and small- scale architecture.

The spirit of the studio is ideas and creativity. That means that if I have a thought that I feel could be an exciting project for the studio to work on, we give it a go and we experiment and try new things and try to bring ideas to life. And that means the studio is full of experimentation and excitement really because we're kind of working in unfamiliar territories.

We're trying to do things that haven't been done before.

Yoko: Well, the installation you had at the V&A museum in London, maybe 2010 – It's called "A gust of wind," and I remember the very beautiful sculpture, like a pile of paper being grown into the area, like to capture a frozen moment of time. That's a very beautiful project.

Can you tell us something about this project?

Paul: Yeah, it was really a very kind of organic project actually, because it was during the London Design Festival, which has been it's been very supportive of our studio and being in London obviously means that kind of creative links and discussions happen very fast. We had this venue, the V&A, as an incredible place to show design in front of many different creative people from all over the world during the London Design Festival. And there was a material sponsor who had, in a way, a relatively new material for designers at that time, which was Corian®. I was given a little piece of it, a little block like this, and they said, can you think of something to do with it?

And I thought to myself, you know, my associations with it are kind of very flat, heavy pieces of furniture; let's say kitchen surfaces, which is not my world at all. And I wasn't particularly excited about doing something like that. I sort of did the opposite: to make it appear as though it is floating, moving, and as you say, creating this kind of still moment. We started to heat it and hand-shape it, and work on the suspension of these shapes. And, you know, it's an old project, but what was really exciting about it is that people like yourselves can describe it and it's something that has an association with a lot of different people. And it's actually been a connector to a lot of clients actually. They see this image and they've been interested in discussing and meeting me in the studio and seeing what we can do on other projects. But it was a project from 2010, a long time ago, but it is always with me somehow.

Yoko: It is memorable. And to be in that space and to experience that relationship you built with the pieces; that's the beautiful part of it. And many of your projects are based, as you say, on material; how you interpret a material, or resources, and time and space. Is that right?

Paul: All projects have different layers of meaning. Some people experience all of them and some people, for different reasons, just experience certain dimensions of it. I'm trying to give as many layers as possible because the more layers you have, the stronger a project is. And the more resilient it is, the more timeless it can become.

We always think about where the artwork will be placed, where the lights are coming from, etc. And we're thinking about how people will be around it, about scale, sustainability and materials, and all of these different types of things.

But, in a way, I rely on my basic instinct. I'm just trying to sort of bring joy to people. I'm trying to make people feel good and improve people's lives somehow. It always starts with that simple feeling because that's what, ideally, I want from my home, city, and world.

Once an idea starts to bubble up, we give more to give it that strength.

Yoko: Very interesting. So, each of the pieces you created is actually for a specific space or time, so it can't be copied or recreated. Right? This reminds me of another project of yours; this is insane but so brilliant, Excavation: Evicted. Tell us about those stories.

Paul: I was approaching 40, I was at that moment where I've been doing this for a long time. Creativity was definitely "me"; my jacket is creativity. And my studio, my creative home, is also a part of my identity. And as London was going through a really interesting time, we had political kind of dramas here a few years ago. We had Brexit, and it was an interesting place.

But we had London, which was still pushing forward, being costly. A lot of developments in the area of town that I was in, Hackney - a very creative place, was going through a transformation. And we had our landlord knock on our door and described how he wanted to demolish our studio and build some luxury apartments.

That's a brilliant idea for him, commercially. Fantastic. And I have a good relationship with him, by the way. So I was, in one way, very pleased for him because that was his dream. But on the other side, I imagined my studio just disappearing, and that feeling was quite difficult to grasp.

After we had that conversation, I said goodbye, but I remember walking around the studio and looking at the walls and the floor and thinking it's all going to go. My instinct strangely was before it disappeared, I would excavate. What I mean by that, I would dig onto the ground and take the concrete. All of those, as you say, it’s about time and meaning of the material. We took two tons of concrete, which was an incredible process, and then built some pieces of furniture, shown in Milan during Milan Design Week.

As I said when we first spoke, my ideas come from so many different places, and this one came from a situation I found myself in. But what an amazing kind of journey and that excavation process was so intense and insightful in terms of material exploration and discovery.

Yoko: It is also incredible teamwork because we can imagine that the process is not easy.

Paul: When you look at the pieces of furniture, there's a kind of stillness and calm feeling about them because they are finished. And we wanted to work with the concrete and the stone in a very sound way and kind of perfect form. But to get to that point was incredible energy and, in some way, aggression. We had big machines that were drilling into the ground, and they made the sound of five sports cars driving down a street. You had to cover your ears as we were cutting into the ground, extracting these cubes of concrete.

It was passionate. We financed this project. We stopped the studio; we stopped all work. The phones were disconnected; my staff was working from their bedrooms on the laptop, just writing emails, but they were drilling and excavating in the daytime. We had a fascinating three or four or five months.

Yoko: Well, that's a really long process. And I remember I asked you this question, but I don't remember if you answered me. Were you doing it kind of secretly?

Paul: Well, the interesting thing is that it's no longer a secret because I've spoken about it, but my landlord, who, I must say again, I have a good relationship with, actually lives on the same street as the studio. We were in this quite awkward situation where I had my car parked against the gates so that he couldn't come in because if he did, he would have been like, what is happening? You are meant to be a design studio working on computers. Why is it a building site?

We had this quite interesting time where we were sort of hiding. And I remember it overlapped Christmas and he wants to give us a Christmas card, and I was like, "oh, I'm meeting on the street, let's go for a walk." So, it was interesting; there's a performance to this as well. And funnily enough, the pictures that document the process somehow are as good, or if better than the pieces of furniture. They really show the energy of the performance of the excavation.

I've said it on the last project. Still, this one is really with me as well, because when we work on other projects, we take that kind of inspiration where we are trying to make something site-specific trying to really consider the local conditions and culture.

The environment makes projects, as you say, very unique, and if someone does something like it can't be described in the same way because they come from a different place, you know?

Yoko: It's a very beautiful closure you had with the space. Do you know where the pieces are now?

Paul: The pieces ... Well, we showed the work during Milan (Salone del Mobile), and it was a very noncommercial installation. There was no branding, and there was no sponsor. It was just in the basement of a building. We showed the work, and we had a video; it was raw. And it was very interesting because a lot of Milan Design Week is very commercial. After all, it has to be, but we were operating in a slightly different rhythm. If you like, we were just people who just wanted to show their work to a large audience. That was our idea. And people really liked them and wanted to buy them. And this is where you know, it is awkward for me because I didn't want to really sell them because they meant so much to me. They were like pieces of furniture that just had so much like emotional connection.

There are a few pieces in museums, which is fantastic because it means that they're open to the public. One piece has been sold, but with the idea that they could all come back together if I wanted to have an exhibition. Which is important because, you know, people like myself and many other creative people who are very genuine with their creative expression are not commercial. We're not given briefs many times, and the work should be able to sort of have a connection to the public, not just hidden in one place for one person. But that's another discussion.

Yoko: That's very true. And I found that one of your most recent collection, The Slump Rock table collection, has the same kind of flavor compared to the project we just talk about. The brutality of the material and the precision of the process. Can you tell us something about that one?

Paul: This piece of work was a collaboration with our London gallerist Carpenter's Workshop, which is a very new relationship, but a very exciting one because they're just in central London and they're very ambitious as a gallery. They want to achieve a lot and they're very passionate.

That was a very nice emotional connection to myself because I have a similar kind of energy. And this project came about because I was looking at industrial glass, a glass that you see in buildings and facades. Can be very functional pieces of materials.

Which in a way, I forget how beautiful glass is. It's transparent, it's strong, it's architectural. But like most materials, if you heat them up, they become soft and they move. And I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that kind of giving energy into some material and seeing what happens.

And that's what we did. And we took sheets of industrial glass and heated them up and let them fall over these natural materials. And I was going to quarries and getting big rocks and then heating glass and allowing them to slowly move over the glass, then I turned off the oven and then they froze, they’re still.

We created these pieces of furniture called “Slump”, and the idea is about contrast, it's about transparency and kind of perceived lightness against raw rocks and nature. It’s human-made materials with natural-made materials and these contrasts and these transparencies and layers.

In a way, quite importantly, so many people talk about it's a one-off, but actually many things people say are one-offs can actually be duplicated and they all look the same. Whereas with this particular body of work, every rock obviously is unique.

Yoko: You have kind of an obsession in terms of processes, right? This is something I found out in all of your projects. You always try to find a new way to do things. You don't follow the old ways; you don't use anything old.

Paul: That is definitely my design background. I went to the Royal college of Art. I was taught by Ron Arad who is, for me, still such an inspiration because he's a free spirit, he can operate in many, many different fields. And I suppose what he gave us a bit of himself to his students was: why would you want to do something that's been done before? Like why would we waste the small amount of time, this unique opportunity we have being alive and being created and being lucky enough to pursue our creative dreams? Why would we do something that's being done?

That kind of puts us under pressure because it means we have to sort of become inventors as well. I sometimes say it, I collaborate with science as though it's an invisible collaborator because I'm trying to do something and configure things in new ways to see what happens.

And that journey with science and engineering is quite fascinating. And that kind of allows our studio to bridge between all these different kinds of discipline as well.

Yoko: And recently, one of your public artworks, Please Be Seated, is traveling in China now. That’s also a very interesting project to understand your way of how you interpret the public space and how you create things for a mass audience.

Paul: So, this project with a very polite title, “Please Be Seated”; I thought was quite a nice title, which gives you a hint at what to do with the work. And that's quite important because it's a public project and we wanted it to be something that is for people.

These waves of sustainable timber, that kind of loop up and loop down. And the loops up, allow you to walk through and the loops down, allowing you to sit and rest and visually it's very seductive. We did the computer render and I couldn't stop looking at the screen.

I was like: Wow! I was so intrigued by it, but it's such a simple shape as well. You go to the top, and it's three circles, but you come down and it's almost something very sculptural. It’s very seductive. You kind of want to walk through it and it's got a center point, it's almost like a mini stadium let's say.

And so we did this piece and we made it. And what was interesting is that when it was released to the public, people really took hold of it and it became theirs, it became part of the community. People were sleeping, lying, interacting, people were dancing. It was such a joyful kind of experience.

And that started in London as a temporary piece. And then our friends, Swire properties, contacted and they were quite intrigued by it as an object because they, as a company, have many different public spaces and they thought that China could be a great place to tour it. And I was very open to the idea.

Now I said: look, for me, this is about reaching as many people as possible. So, we made one, we made two. There might even be another one somewhere or they moved around different cities. And then their final resting place will be in two cities.

It's actually quite kind of exciting for me to be working on something on a computer in Hackney in London, and then suddenly, I checked my Instagram and I've been tagged in all these pictures of all these people, having a joyful time around something that we've designed. And it's strength that beauty isn't what me or my students have done, it's actually how people have taken ownership of it, and it became a part of a community.

Yoko: This is great because even now it's a bit difficult to travel, but your work can reach people far, far away, that's really amazing.

Paul: And those types of projects that we do, especially coming out of this strange year and a half that we've gone through, most of the things that go through my head when I'm trying to forget these things that’s about social distancing, and don't be here and don't do this and don't do that.

And now we're kind of hopefully confidently moving into another space. These objects in public spaces or good architecture or basically good design and art, if they can somehow enable that coming-together again, in a safe way of course, people really need that. Even if they don't feel as they do need it, once they experience it they will realize what they've missed, and personally I've missed that.

Yoko:. Very true. Do you notice that there are any differences between people in Europe and people in China? How do they interact with the piece? Do you see any differences?

Paul: To be honest, obviously there's different surprises, there's a lot of dancing, and a lot of romance. There's a lot of people who have first dates there, and there's a lot of intimacy. And we were in London when it was near a bar, so there was a lot of drinking, but I suppose we're quite obsessed with drinking over here.

But it's hard to define. One thing that is happening a lot is conversation and laughing and talking, and interacting with people in a different way, and that's the thing that connects. But I haven't actually been to China yet, so it's such a shame. I used to go there once a month or once every two months. And I haven't seen the work firsthand, but from the photographs it's got that kind of human touch, that connection.

Yoko: That’s also very interesting. The work, when they traveled to different places, it has a very different life for itself.

Paul: Exactly. Obviously, the backdrop is very different, in London, although we talk about London as having a lot of towers, but it’s quite low compared to some of the cities in China, and that's really interesting.

We have something that we're operating on the horizontal, and it's surroundings are very tall buildings. And that's quite interesting because we did consider what it looks like from the top, from people in apartments or working in offices, looking down onto it.

That's quite important. When you look out the window, you just don't see other buildings, you see street life, because otherwise you sort of get lost in this tower. Just looking out and seeing laughter and markets and people and trees and all those kinds of things is very healthy.

Yoko: And what do you think? Because I can imagine, moving forward, because of the pandemic, people might develop a different relationship with public space or how they understand the relationships or the interactions. Do you think in the future, the demand for public space will change and will it affect the work that you're doing now?

Paul: This wasn't a conscious move. What we've done and we've started quite small in a way like objects or just pieces of design, let's say, which were never described as functional pieces, but they had the kind of scale of design and then we naturally moved into public projects, and that was because I was just getting a little bit bored about just seeing an object in a magazine and just no one around it. I wanted to kind of create experiences and pieces of design that interacted with the public. And we naturally moved into that space.

And because of that - as we've spoken about - I'm so interested in materials and experimentation that we started to move into architecture and small-scale architectural projects. But then there comes a point where to do big pieces of architecture, you need a huge team, and you need to really up the game.

And I suppose it didn't necessarily feel as though we wanted to move in that direction because I really just needed to feel very close to the projects I was doing. And so, we started to do big pieces, but they weren't the buildings, they were the things outside the buildings. They're more kind of public art projects. It's quite fascinating because suddenly we're operating almost like architects, but we have a lot more freedom and things are faster and there's a much closer connection to the client. And that's really interesting.

So we're in this space now and because our clients are developing so many different types of things, there's always public squares, there's always lobbies, or we need canopies, we need these kinds of in-between bits, which for me, is fulfilling the architectural ambition.

But without the hundred people in a studio in central London with all of the pressure that comes in. Because remember, I'm trying to protect creativity, and to do that; a smaller team can be, sometimes for different people, more beneficial.

Yoko: That's very true. Talking about architecture, you did something – it's one of your biggest projects to date in terms of scale, scale of the building. And you're one of the finalists of the Expo 2020 in Dubai for the British Pavilion. But sadly, we're not going to see your work because you didn't get it at the end, but I really liked the concept of what you created because to have a space for unity, possibilities, and collaborations, these are the exact things we need now. Can you tell us something about the project?

Paul: This was a collaboration with Arup, which they are engineering partner and IDOM, which is an architectural company. So we needed that sort of team to deliver the projects because, as a studio, we couldn't do it, but we were leading the creative side.

And it was again, a fascinating time, when we were thinking about, you know, what could this pavilion do, and the theme of the expo was about how countries can work together, collaborate to innovate and come up with solutions to help all of us tackle some of the serious problems that we've got coming as a world. And that kind of had an emotional connection to me because these are the important things, and that idea of collaborating was something I wanted to capture with the pavilion. So, I had that as an inspiration, but I also had some of my walks around the marshes. I walk the dog and my dog loves the kind of forestry bits. And when you duck in the trees, there's always these beautiful colors and there's always sunlight coming through leaves and these layers of color. And it just makes me feel good. And I've witnessed that people love being around color because it somehow connects us to our emotions.

What we did is instead of just designing ourselves, we looked at all of the participating countries of the expo and we took inspiration from their flags because they're outside every pavilion, everyone has their flag, and each flag has its own colors. And so, we took all these different colors and then we brought them all together into a living watercolor facade of the pavilion, and that was cool.

I still think it's quite a beautiful idea because you can see the British flag colors, but they're kind of blending into all these other things. The original idea isn't as important as the way it feels, but it somehow captures the participation of all these different countries.

I've said this a few times before, but although we didn't win because we were working with Arup and IDOM, we designed this building and we considered everything, it was fully budgeted, we knew how to make it, we had tests of the facade, and I sometimes forget that it's not built because in my head I can clearly see it.

I do actually one day hope to be able to do something with that concept, because I still think it's something that people will be observant to, but full with that part of it.

Yoko: Because you have created it, that you can actually place it wherever you want, this Pavilion.

Paul: It's really interesting. But also, as I was talking about, the Slump pieces and Swire and some of the clients that we work with.

It's also important to talk about Friedman Benda, which is my New York gallerist and especially Mark Benda, who's been someone does this with many people, but with myself, we've really collaborated on so many different projects from the very, very beginning. And some excavation eviction was part of the freedom bender collection.

It's just, it's nice to acknowledge actually for someone like myself who is so passionate and has a lot of energy and dedicating their life to that craft, let's say when they meet people or companies with that same enthusiasm, that's a really magical moment, because that's how ideas start, and they're born.

Yoko: That's very beautiful how you describe the relationship. Are there any new projects you can share with us? Are you working on anything with them recently?

Paul: There’s always things happening with a Friedman Benda in New York and what's really fascinating is that their clients - not just them - but I see it all around that everyone is getting more ambitious, the scales are changing.

Even if we're talking about a table, it's not a table for five people, It’s a table for 25 people, it's like people are trying to create interior spaces that are not just about function; they're about telling stories

And, if these opportunities come our way, that's a delightful thing because suddenly we're not talking only about the practicalities, we're talking about the poetry or the idea and the sculptural side of these pieces.

We're working on some public projects. We’re launching a new piece in Hong Kong soon as well. And yeah, there's a lot happening and I'm very pleased personally that London is finally getting back because London is a very global city, and I suppose we can't wait to get working and get connected with the world again.

Yoko: Great. Thank you very much and hopefully we will see you soon, If not, your pieces. We will welcome you to Dubai.

Paul: Thank you so much. I'd love to love to be there. And it's been lovely chatting. It's always nice to talk about work cause I'm usually just doing it and actually to talk about it and reflect actually makes me see it in a different way, thank you for your time.

Yoko: It's always very fascinating and inspiring to talk to you. I enjoyed it very much.

Paul: Thank you so much. See you soon.

Yoko: See you soon, bye-bye.