ITV Creates

NEON was founded to elevate the everyday. They empathise and listen to ensure their projects resonate with people who use them. They manipulate familiar materials in ways previously un-imagined. They design with every sense in mind. They deliver once in a lifetime emotional experiences.

NEON is an award-winning design practice based in Margate, UK. The studio was founded to investigate the territory between architecture, art and design. NEON has worked on projects ranging in scale from objects up to monumental art installations. Alongside the team in the studio they work with a highly skilled team of engineers, interaction consultants and fabricators to deliver their projects.

Noëmi Lakmaier's work explores notions of the ‘Other’ ranging from the physical to the philosophical, the personal to the political. The individual's relationship to its surroundings, identity, and perception of self and other in contemporary society are core interests in her predominantly site-responsive, live and installation-based practice.

Noëmi’s work aims to emphasise and exaggerate the relationship between object, individual and space. Through the use of everyday materials as well as her own body and the bodies of others, she constructs temporary living installations - alternative physical realities - exploring the psychological implications of power, control and insecurity, the drive to belong and succeed as well as feelings of self-doubt and otherness.

Stuart Robinson is a mixed media sculptural installation artist currently living and working in Penryn, Cornwall. Having studied Fine Art at the University of East London, Stuart relocated to Cornwall where he lectures on the Foundation Diploma Art & Design at Truro College.

Stuart describes his work as predominantly installation and sculptural objects informed by, and utilising photography as an important element of the working process. He likes to produce objects and environments that are intriguing but overall visually engaging, often using seemingly familiar objects and shapes.

The work explores imagery and inspiration from a wide range of sources across art, media, landscape and popular culture digested and condensed into object and form. It explores familiar shapes, colour and materials from our daily encounters with media, signs and surroundings.

Fernando Laposse is a Mexican product and material designer who works between Mexico and London. He trained in Central Saint Martins and holds a Bachelor in Product Design.

Fernando’s work focuses on transforming humble natural materials that are often considered waste into refined design pieces after extensive theoretical and practical research. The resulting objects which are often self-produced follow the principle’s “endemic design” where the location of materials and their historical and cultural connotations take centre stage.

Fernando’s work is preoccupied with sustainability, the loss of biodiversity, community disenfranchisement and the politics of food. In his projects, the final pieces are often accompanied by an element of informative narration about the historical context of the material that they are made of and its contemporary complications.

Yinka Ilori is a London based designer. He specialises in up-cycling vintage furniture, inspired by the traditional Nigerian parables and African fabrics that surrounded him as child. Humorous, provocative and fun, each piece of furniture he creates tells a story.

Yinka is passionately against the unnecessary waste he has seen in European and West African consumer cultures, driving him to reuse discarded furniture and other found objects. With each custom-made piece inspired by a parable, Yinka restores new life and purpose to reclaimed materials. His furniture takes on new meanings depending on how it is used or positioned.

Yinka is interested in playing with the relationship between function and form and his work sits between traditional divisions of art and design.

Louise was born in London and studied painting at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology before moving to Brighton to study printmaking at Brighton University. She has lived in Brighton ever since, helping to set up and run a group studio called Maze, and later joining Phoenix Brighton.

Louise is inspired by urban landscapes and enjoys witnessing the varied ways that humans make and build things in different cultures; the specificity of an Egyptian bus shelter compared to a German one; the idiosyncratic design of a Polish kiosk or the Art Nouveau façade of a Viennese apartment block.

A large part of what drives her interest in the built environment is how its design and form communicates the values of the society that made it. Eastern Europe and the Communist experience hold a particular fascination for Louise. This isn’t due to any biographical connection, other than that she grew up during the end of the cold war, and the conflict between East and West was part of her ‘psychic landscape’.

Based in the Peanut Factory in Hackney Wick, East London, Russell Bamber makes sculptures that flirt with function, cavort with scale and frolic with surface. He has an eloquence, confidence and originality with form, material and colour that teases, amuses and beguiles.

Within the complexity of colour, the simplicity of form acts as a vehicle that shouts of the hierarchy of sculpture but whispers of the utilitarian function. The viewer is enticed on a journey of questioning, unsure quite which discipline his sculptures occupy. Are they sculpture, painting, design or architecture?

Russell sees his work as sculptures. Form is primary, colour secondary and function . . . way down the list but crucial to his thinking. The absurdity of a decision is often his reason for that decision.

Russell's craftsmanship oozes care, seduces us and captivates us; his excitement and joy of materials is infectious.

Florence Blanchard is a French painter, muralist and screen-printer based in the UK. She began writing graffiti in the early 1990’s under the name Ema, and spent ten years based in New York where she graduated with a PhD from New York University in 2008.

Florence’s work is directly inspired by her past experience working as a scientist and writing graffiti and depicts abstracts molecular landscapes questioning our idea of visual perception.

For her ITV Creates proposal, Florence has produced an immersive and abstract 3D installation which shows the ITV logo only if the viewer is in a specific position. This played from Florence’s fascination with how reality may appear differently depending on the angle and the level of magnification of an artistic piece.