Gardens: Curiosity and Creative Research

Kalpana is a guerrilla gardener, technologist, nature rights activist, food grower, writer, speaker and founder of Play, a social enterprise championing urban nature. She campaigns for the right to grow, nature rights and tech for good, exploring how technology and nature intersect. Kalpana has delivered a global TED Talk, spoken at the United Nations, featured in Vogue and the Evening Standard, and advises corporations, governments, charities and grassroots organisations.

Christie is an artist and designer who crafts new stories from old ideas. Their work engages with how the Anthropocene’s separation of humans and non-humans produced our planetary crisis. Through counter mapping, their practice engages with ecology, technoscience and heterodoxy. Christie has undertaken residencies at the European Commission, the University of Birmingham and Hanger CIA.

Justina is an interdisciplinary designer working across materials and biodiversity issues. Her project Faux Flora proposes an artificial flower system that supports pollinators in air-polluted environments by guiding them towards flower-rich areas. Developed during her MA in Material Futures at CSM, it won the Mills Fabrica Innovation Award and the Chancery Rosewood Creative Transformation Award. She currently works in R&D at Carbon Cell, and has worked extensively with ethical fashion collective Colèchi.

Alisa is a socially-engaged, ecology-tending artist and facilitator working across public art, installation and participatory practice. She creates playful conversations about ecological and social dreaming, weaving collective experiences that rewild the urban mind and heart through intercultural and interspecies exchange. She has worked with the V&A, Barbican, Tate, Natural England, British Council, and the Mayor of London. She most treasures her dates with London's river Lea marshlands, her greatest teachers.

Jennifer is a Colombian and Chilean Fashion Designer and Creative Director with 10 years of experience in luxury Fashion, specialising in sustainable, circular and regenerative design practices. She has worked at Viktor & Rolf, House of Holland and emerging designers such as Richard Malone and Phoebe English. Droguett founded her brand, Anciela, in 2019, a circular luxury womenswear label that celebrates South American folklore and experimental tailoring through the lens of migration and childhood memories.

Sean is a designer and researcher who explores the boundaries between science, art and nature. He graduated from Material Futures in 2020 and has since worked with LVMH, Design Against Crime Research Centre, The Department of Education and the United Nations. His personal practice speculates on how biomimetics can be used to design regenerative systems.

Jaclyn is a multidisciplinary designer whose practice is rooted in a material- and process-led approach. She creates furniture that investigates the relationship between body, form, and visual language. Her move into outdoor furniture marks an evolution of her practice, which she describes as “an opportunity to start a dialogue with landscape design.”. Working in stainless steel, her pieces consider how furniture can inhabit and respond to gardens, architecture, and the shifting conditions of the landscape.

Mehlaqa is a London-based periodontist, researcher, chef, writer, and the editor-in-chief of Wataan, an online and print publication exploring themes of home in its many iterations. Currently, she is working on a gardening, research, and writing project, Stories of Spice. Her writings have appeared in Bia Zine, Chicken and Bread Zine, Service95, Toothsome Magazine, and Vittles.

Honesty, value and the questioning of conventions are common threads that run through Marc’s work. His innate curiosity to experiment with concepts, processes and materials results in a transdisciplinary practice with a tactile-rich aesthetic. With the belief that creativity is intrinsic to us all, he seeks out opportunities to create artistic interventions in the public realm, in order to engage diverse audiences and break down the barriers of the art world.

Rachy is an interdisciplinary artist, painter, design researcher and creative technologist based in London. Her practice combines art, interactive systems and emerging technologies to investigate urban ecologies, digital infrastructures and more-than-human interaction. Working across painting, creative coding, 3D imaging, speculative design and installation, she develops participatory experiences that explore how technological systems shape perception, behaviour and environmental relationships.

Vittor is a multidisciplinary artist, gardener and educator based in London. Rooted in their Peruvian heritage, Camila’s practice channels the color-saturated landscapes of Latin America alongside the resilience and grace of wildlife. Working across drawing, sculpture, sound, and textiles, they create landscapes that explore intimacy between people, nature, and the city, asking what it means to belong in times of uncertainty. Their work invite us to slow down and notice the delicate connections that shape everyday life.

Becca is an artist and gardener with a background in biological sciences. In 2021, alongside her day job in environmental policy, she began to study documentary photography, which inspired her to connect with London, its wildlife and cultures in a more creative way. Working with a range of media, she explores relationships with movement and space, and how sensory approaches can open up alternative ways of appreciating and connecting with the natural world.

Arran is a British Sri-Lankan sculptor and artist based in London. His practice seeks to perceive the self through nature, rather than nature through the self. Through his series 'Earth Body', living land art interventions made from unfired clay and gathered materials, he invites the environment as collaborator.

Delve deeper into design – join a specialist course, workshop or talk and learn more about design from leading experts in the industry.