Why making the real thing still holds its magic: Isabel + Helen on a decade of putting impossible inventions into motion

It’s Nice That (INT): I’d love to jump straight into chatting about Motion Sickness – what a great name for a show of your work! Can you tell us a bit about what’s in store for this LDF display at The Conran Shop celebrating a decade of the studio?

Helen Chesner (HC): Our work is all about movement, we never really planned it to be, but it’s just kind of happened quite naturally. Over the past ten years, we’ve collected this big pool of references and a lot of models, machetes and tests of lots of different motion experiments that formed part of our research for different projects over the years – the studio is full of them! We thought that this exhibition at Conran would be a perfect excuse to show all of that to the public and reveal the behind the scenes in a way, as a lot of our work is hands-on and develops through the making.

This process side to the show is a bit of a nod to when we first started out – everything was quite low-fi and had this kind of relatable feel to it because we had no money or very little means to make something super complex or highly engineered. From the very beginning our practice has been about playing with the materials that we’ve had at our disposal and using all these low-fi tricks in order to create quite simple effects or motion in different ways.

Isabel Gibson (IG): The show will be a real mix of the old and the new! It’s also so great to be back at Conran. It’s such an iconic space for British Design and we did our first project with them, in collaboration with It’s Nice That round about ten years ago for LDF. So it’s really a full circle moment!

INT: Yes! I wanted to ask you how it feels to have reached ten years of the studio? Another part of this full circle moment for us is that you were both one of our Ones to Watch all the way back in 2016, and here we are a decade later interviewing you about ten very successful years of Isabel + Helen!

IG: It really is full circle! I guess we just feel really proud and just so lucky to be able to do this as our job. It’s been a nice chance not just to look back at what we’ve achieved and the real kind of mix of projects we’ve worked on, but also just a reminder of the fact we still get to experiment and try new stuff all the time in our practice and that’s really exciting.

HC: We’ve always kept everything quite broad and taken opportunities from lots of different mediums or projects that have come our way, which has been great. Now, we’re starting to kind of narrow it down a little bit into what we really enjoy doing or what really excites us but we’ve realised how nice it’s been to have had the chance to spread our roots quite wide over the last decade. I think that’s going to inform everything that comes next.

IG: We have been reminiscing on all the different projects that we’ve worked on. We’ve constructed everything from really large-scale installations at Coachella right down to developing small products of our own like our egg holder that spins.

HC: The fact that we get to dip our hands into these different pools is really nice.

INT: I love that spinning egg holder!

IG: We’ve had the pleasure of working with such a mix of brands and clients over this time too. We’ve created a spinning shoe sculpture for Converse but then also created a series of maypole weavings for Burberry that included 16 dancers! I think we’ve always been open to whichever form a project might take, whether it’s a film or a book, an installation or a toy.

HC: I think over the past ten years, we’ve learned not to take ourselves too seriously as well and not be too worried about where something’s going to take you or not too cautious to just say yes to things, not knowing what the outcome might be.

INT: I think that’s the thing that makes all your work so captivating. It’s so nice to hear which work has stood out from your perspective.

You’ve always said that play is a really big part of your creative process, that each project starts with these physical experiments (a lot of which are in the show!) that grow into something much larger. How do you think that process has evolved over the years as more and more projects have come through the door? I’m sure each new brief always presents very different challenges or problems to solve, especially when working at scale.

HC: That’s a hard one. I think over time in general you understand what works better and what doesn’t, we’ve probably become more efficient in our making and I guess we’ve got all these different projects which we can now reference and build on as well, mixing a few methods from this one or the other. It’s almost like creating our own set of references which you can then make new things out of which is quite nice.

IG: That’s where the archive and all these models and movement tests have helped feed new work in a way. They have become almost like our brain in visual form. That’s what’s inspired the show really – the idea that we have all of this stuff that we’ve made but maybe hasn’t always been seen. It’s all the stuff in the background.

INT: You share some lovely making tests on Instagram too, these kinds of quick iterations of things that are always a joy to see. It’s like a catalogue of experience and motion solutions and design ideas that becomes almost like a toolbox to sort of dig back into as you go on, I’m sure.

HC: Yes, that’s exactly it!

IG: We will always get to the point in a project where we’ll be on the computer sketching but you do just need to actually test stuff out or make stuff to understand if it’s going to work – it’s so integral.

HC: Whenever we test something, we stand back from it, look at it and ask: is it bringing that feeling of wonder or excitement that we wanted to share? You can only work that out through trying to make it.

INT: Yes, there are some days in the studio where you leave and think that the day was written off but it’s not because you tried so many things that failed and that’s the point.

IG: Totally, that’s probably what we spend 80 percent of our time doing: making something that didn’t quite work and having to make a new one. It always takes longer than you think but it’s worth it and if something completely fails it will always still lead on to something else. Things change so much and evolve as you go.

HC: We often find the simplest ideas to be the most effective a lot of the time.

INT: It’s always so interesting to wrestle with that gap between what you thought something would be and what it can be – what the practical limits of a project are.

HC: Yes, definitely. I think the trick is not jumping to that end point too early which is probably a bit more scary but in the long run it pays off.

IG: With what you were saying about how every brief being different I think that’s always been the nicest thing. You almost become a real expert at something or you really hone something and then you get another brief and it’s just something completely different. Like the brief for Burberry – we were wondering how to make a perfectly Burberry plaid on a pole? A skill we might never use ever again! But that’s the fun of it.