Over the past few months, we’ve been celebrating the wonderful art of craftsmanship by visiting the creative spaces of a handful of artisans in our film series Modern Makers. So far, we’ve discovered the work of a glassblower, a ceramicist, a woodworker and a tapestry weaver. Concluding the series is this new episode, in which we spend some time with the furniture designer James Shaw at his workshop in Southwark, south-east London.

James isn’t interested in creating conventionally beautiful objects. But perhaps that’s exactly why his surreal and colourful forms have piqued the interest of the art and design world (you can see his work in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A and the Design Museum Ghent, to name a few). There’s something enticingly childlike about his work, too: it appears as if it could have been made using plasticine, birthday cake icing or somesuch. In actual fact, James crafts his pieces – which include everything from artistic tables and chairs, to everyday essentials like toilet roll holders and cutlery – predominately from recycled plastic. What started off as a cost-effective approach to design has very much become his celebrated signature.

James grew up surrounded by interesting, organic forms in the wild countryside of Dartmoor, Devon; the rocks, moss, heather and mud he would play with at a young age are an underlying influence on his wonderfully weird and wobbly work today. In a natural progression from these years spent making things at home, James went on to train in design products at The Royal College of Art in London. At his graduate MA show in 2013, James used handmade ‘weapons’ such as a papier-mâché gun as tools for creating his work. His self-made guns remain integral to his innovative creative process. “I think making is an intrinsically satisfying thing to do,” James explains. “I embrace the ugly – but embrace the ugly in the search for the beautiful.”

To learn more about James’s equally fun and functional furniture, be sure to check him out at work in his studio here. We hope you’ve enjoyed meeting the Modern Makers as much as we did, and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss a new film or series from us.