
Womanifesto!
Honored by Maison&Objet as the 2025 Designer of the Year, Faye Toogood (amazingly, it is her given name) is an adventurous artist who dips her appendages in many waters, including drawing, sculpture, fashion, and design.

The pastiche collage above was part of Toogood’s “Drawing Room” exhibit at M&O, displaying not only her fascination with landscape, but also her penchant for the surreal. Note that the assemblage contains a re-imagining of one of her most popular pieces, the Roly-Poly chair, with its scoop seat and elephant legs. Here it is back in the land of the actual.

In this particular collage, the art form has re-contextualized the furnishing, but for Toogood, drawing is most frequently an antecedent: “It’s often a means to an end… in the Toogood studio, it’s about speed and communication more than a finished work of art. The pulse of a scribble.” Below is the “Material” room of Womanifesto. The squiggly shapes and ineffable textures not only suggest the purity of the line, but also evoke the dissipation of form, hallmark of Surrealist art.

The aesthetic here is definitely dreamlike, an expressive gesture much in the mode of Toogood’s characterization of Womanifesto: “A self portrait of the brain as an artist. Squishy. Surreal. Sensual. Sexual. Spontaneous. Turning the studio of my subconcious inside out.”

Above, the subconscious on display includes an oversized landscape mural fronted by Tim Burton-esque cardboard sunflowers and an assemblage of Toogood’s most popular pieces, including the Palette coffee table and Gummy chair. Here they are against a blank white canvas.

By dividing the exposition into four categories (“Landscape” and “Sculpture,” in addition to Material and Drawing), Toogood displays her eclectic sensibility, emphasizing that—though the marketplace may have it otherwise—these categories are always blurred within her mind’s eye. The different disciplines are inextricably intertwined, she seems to be saying. Hence, she mixes them in overt ways, as exemplified in the Sculpture Room scene below: “The monochromatic room showcases innovations in shape… the dramatic installation features iconic designs from my archive remade in all-black materials.”

The Rolling Stones’ iconic “Paint It Black” comes to mind, as this is the very opposite of the white-palette-as-background most typically used to showcase design. Here, instead, everything blends into one gesture—the familiar shapes barely discernible, the individual elements only subtly coalescing into the fore, as if finding it difficult to extricate themselves from the morass of the subconscious.
Below is a similar gesture that’s a more overt play on landscape: an impressionistic desert scene establishes the ambiance, which in turn seems to have transmogrified the furniture, now camouflaged for survival—as well as aesthetic coherence.

Studio Toogood works in interior architecture, design, art, and fashion. Faye Toogood has collaborated with CC-Tapis, Calico Wallpaper, Tacchini, Poltrona Frau, and Maison Matisse, among other brands. You may also see some of her self-titled collections, which she calls “the purest form of my artistic expression” at Friedman Benda in New York.

See Studio Toogood for more.
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