10 Unmissable Highlights from PLATFORM: Simone Brewster

Beautiful design suggests we think about how objects make us feel as much as how well they work. Jewellery goes beyond surface aesthetics, often reflecting a psychic connection to how we want to be perceived and remembered. Brewster’s crafted objects play into hair’s associations with spirituality deeply embedded in tribal rituals, from communities in the South Pacific to Africa. She developed her comb series through research into hairstyles and symbolism. Each of the three shapes is unique, a testament to cultural specificities and particularities, that speak to finding beauty, value and power in everyday rituals. The combs are part of the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool.

Brewster was inspired by breastplates worn by warriors in the South Pacific, where the materials used, including hair, embodied the status and spiritual ranks of those who wore them. Brewster found a resonance with tribal practices in East and West Africa where hair is a symbol of beauty and identity, charged with spiritual significance. She experimented with horsehair and fine Swedish linen before employing the synthetic hair she sourced for her breastplates.

Brewster constructs jewellery like an architect designs a building. A balanced design requires materials fit for purpose, scouted like tools to support even small structures. Properties like density and durability matter as much as colour. Brewster experiments to discover what could be too heavy as a bracelet, could be transformed into the perfect weight for a ring. This Major Architects ring plays on the shape of a chaise longue by modernist architect Le Corbusier.

Metropolis Grand necklace is formed from powerful shapes. It is part of Metropolis series that includes rings and earrings. Rectangular blocks recede like steps, creating an upside-down pyramid that surrounds a miniature skyscraper. ts repeating lines recall the skylines of business districts in London or New York, where mirrored buildings reflect our own images back at us. The Metropolis Grand necklace, like the Major Architects ring, is a clear example of architectural principles influencing Brewster’s design, across multiple scales. The skyscraper was of interest to architect Rem Koolhaas, explored in his book 'Delirious New York.' The skyscraper rapidly becomes known as the destabiliser in Koolhaas' mind, programmatic instability within architectural planning. The skyscraper is an important symbol of the city, an appearance of control, a deceptive veneer.

Modernism that Brewster absorbed as an architecture student celebrated buildings on monumental scale. Figures such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius were revered as auteurs imposing a perfect vision upon an existing civic context. Brewster felt conflicted in her desire to create architecture where intimacy became more important than monumentality. This journey of shaping her visual language came out of experimentation through public space. She wanted to create architecture that played with scale and that emphasised human connection. This ambition to carve an urban sanctuary in the middle of the city inspired the seating of the Temple of Relics summer pavilion, commissioned by Brookfield Properties and first presented in Principal Place, at the 2025 London Festival of Architecture.

The ability to play with scale in her jewellery, is key to Brewster’s architectural design approach. She works influence the space she is in, working in different environments, different mediums. Her public architecture works consider how to ornament a physical space with objects imbued with meaning, reintroducing intimacy and emotion are missing from architecture. Hausa mud architecture and vernacular architectures for West Africa inspired the cork elements from the Temple of Relics summer pavilion, commissioned by Brookfield Properties and first presented in Principal Place, at the 2025 London Festival of Architecture.

Modern architects like Frank Lloyd Wright emphasized how the inherent quality of materials limit how they are employed—he called this plasticity. Brewster studied architects like Wright and she was fascinated by wood’s plasticity. She experimented transforming its scale from long bracelets to towering step stools. She creates steps in the structure, receding levels as seen in the pyramids, to create a more sculptural presence.

Brewster explores how the natural landscape can expand with the connection to the internal landscape. She was inspired by encountering the cork trees in the forest in Portugal. They surrounded her like spirit guides, almost appearing to breathe, creating a sense of place and grounding rhythm. When she learned stripping the bark from the tree allowed it to draw in more CO2, she was inspired to seek materials that cared for the environment by using them. She presented this work at London Festival of Architecture in 2023. The pillars in Spirit of Place tower like figures around us, placing us within a grander scale of design, permanently installed at Oxo Tower. One pillar from Spirit of Place stands as part of PLATFORM 2026 this year.

We understand a modern human representation of touch as boundaries of intimacy in how we relate to each other. The representations of bodies in museums are often sculptures but you can't touch them. Brewster is fascinated by where you see bodies and what type of bodies you see. Fascination with body parts and how they are perceived became central to Brewster’s design practice. In 2010 Brewster was struck by 18th-century figurines in a museum’s collection, made by plantation owners to flaunt sugar, banana and coffee fortunes. These objects turned Black women’s bodies into exoticized, comical props trapped in colonial fantasies. Brewster designed the Mammy side table and the Negress Chaise Longue to draw attention to the irony of collecting these museum ‘treasures’. Negrita was made for the PLATFORM 2026 show as part of this series.

Brewster goes deeper into deconstructing the black body by reflecting on how they are represented in institutions employing outdated racist language to challenge viewers’ perceptions. She is empowered as both designer and subject to readdress colonial perceptions of Black people’s servility, forcing us to confront why institutions still collect and display such imagery at all. She provokes the passive onlooker by making us part of an encounter with functional objects. The speculative sketches and prototype emphasize the nipple as a symbol of eroticism but also a twisted motherhood, facing towards the viewer at different angles, the eye of the nipple arresting us with its gaze.