James Shaw

James Shaw is a designer and a maker exploring the material landscape in a hands-on way. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Art's Design Products programme and now runs a studio in London working on projects that interrogate the material, systemic and formal approaches to the creation of objects. Frequently his work considers the resources around us by challenging the notion of waste to create new beautiful materials. Waste plastic has been a key theme of his work both through his ongoing Plastic Baroque project and notably in the exhibition Plastic Scene he cocurated with Laura Houseley in 2018, which was named ‘one of the standout shows of LDF’ by the New York Times. 

Shaw has exhibited internationally including at The Design Museum, The V&A, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum and MOMA. Past awards include being nominated for the Design Museum Designs of the Year Award and winning the Arc Chair Design Award. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Montreal Museum of Art, The Museum of London and the Vitra Design Museum among others.

At Future Heritage

For Future Heritage 2018, Shaw produced a collection of objects from his Plastic Baroque series, including a console table, a collection of six stools, vases and the highlight - a freestanding fountain. The fountain came out of close discussions with Corinne Julius, curator of Future Heritage, and although it gave them much excitement with various spillages and splashing during set up, it proved to be a real crowd drawer. 

Current work

This year Shaw has had acquisitions of work by the Museum of London and the Denver Art Museum. Sadly, he experienced cancellations of various scheduled shows this year due to the pandemic. Nonetheless Shaw was delighted to have been included in the Kleureyck show at the Design Museum Gent, which opened just before the Covid-19 lockdown began, as well as other venues such as Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset and Soft Opening gallery in London. He has received various interesting commissions recently such as producing an enormous four-metre-long worktable entirely from waste plastic and, although currently on hold due to Covid, Shaw has been designing an interior for a well-known Spanish shoe brand for their Paris store.