December 2024
FAYE TOOGOOD ON LANDSCAPE
In a series of four features, Faye Toogood explores the guiding principles of the toogood studio: Drawing, Material, Sculpture and Landscape.
I feel very comfortable outside. More than inside. It's where all my ideas and information come from: space, smell, sight. With each Toogood collection, connection with the landscape grows. It could be a city allotment or rolling patchwork hills.
Erica and I grew up in Rutland – the smallest county in England. Wind-whipped, rain-soaked and with nothing to do. We didn't have a telly and were kicked out into the countryside each day. A few years ago, I moved back to the middle of nowhere, finding myself surrounded by barns like those of my childhood – black, wooden, wobbly structures that looked like they could have been drawn by James Castle. I picked up charcoal and started drawing my own naïve barns. I'm married to someone that's obsessed with architecture, which is so important in our world. But when it comes down to it, we both just completely drool over a barn.
Palette Console Table, Gummy Sofa
My dad was an avid bird watcher, so we were always out walking and foraging. Erica and I didn't have many toys; instead we collected natural things. One day it might be a bundle of sticks that we’d tie up, make something with them. Another day pebbles from the beach. It was this idea that you collect it, and then you do something with it. In my case, that would mean arranging the collection, or trying to find patterns.
The ritual of collecting and obsessing over natural objects, rearranging and trying to make sense of the world through them has an enduring influence on my practice. Although I’ve moved house many times and live with a minimalist, the tiny treasures gathered from nature remain. My daughter shares this obsession, meticulously rearranging her own collections into secret typologies.
Faye Toogood, Assemblage 7, Lode and Trove 02, 2023 Photography: Genevieve Lutkin
Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched boundaries between the urban and the countryside blur. I feel connected to the city, but it’s been a long time since I’ve reached for a pair of shoes that aren’t my pull-on hiking boots. It’s not just me; teenagers ride London buses in Gorpcore jackets, and septuagenarians mix tweeds with sneakers. Sartorial rules have relaxed, embracing practicality, yet this shift feels deeper.
I am drawn to vernacular, untrained artists who capture untempered nature. Alfred Wallace, a Cornish fisherman who painted the coast on old grocery boxes, given to him by shopkeepers, using spare paint from the local boat industry. His palette of kelp, khaki and faded copper-green is uniquely English and deeply inspiring, shaping colours I return to again and again.
When I render a landscape … in torn strips of paper, or quilted fabric, or smushed urgent dashes of pastel…they often emerge from imagination or memory. Constantine Bay in Cornwall, a wild stretch my family loves, often inspires me. Dirtied colours, craggy rocks and wild winds that take you from the side. Or it might be a place I’ve never travelled to, other than in books and dreams. Like the huge curtain at Sessions Arts Club, hand-painted in response to Jonny Gent’s lyrical description of the Scottish Highlands and Moray Firth.
Nature writer Robert Macfarlane sums it up perfectly: “The real subject of landscape writing is not landscape, but a restructuring of the human attitude towards nature—and there can be few subjects more urgent.” The Oxford Junior Dictionary removed words like buttercup and acorn to make room for broadband. Acorn, beech, bluebell, conker, cowslip, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, ivy, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. Gone. Our relationship with nature is complex and mutable, like the weather-beaten landscape.
I think I’ll end here with the beautiful words of a young Paul Nash: “I have tried… to paint trees as tho’ they were human beings… because I sincerely love and worship trees and know that they are people.”
FAYE TOOGOOD: DRAWING, MATERIAL, SCULPTURE, LANDSCAPE
This monograph explores Toogood's unique approach to design across fashion, furniture, and interior design, through the studio's guiding principles.
Edited by Alistair O'Neill and published by Phaidon.