This first-time collaboration between artist Christopher Kelly and designer and craftsperson Daniel Hayden is born out of Kelly’s ongoing work exploring visual representations of the neurodivergent experience. Meeting as co-exhibitors at the Future Icons Selects show during London Craft Week 2024, Kelly and Hayden quickly forged a creative partnership through a shared ‘perfect imbalance’ aesthetic, in which carefully considered tension and disproportionality are as important as balance and harmony. A shared love of nature and raw, minimally-processed materials led to exploration of what Kelly calls ‘minimal excess’ – the way in which nature can find a happy equilibrium in a state that appears to us to be out of proportion, such as a very overgrown garden.

Interrupting the functional aspects of Hayden’s furniture, Kelly challenges the assumptions we have about the furniture that is so integral to all our lives. Enveloping and overwhelming pieces with crochet forms, they remain accessible but force the user to question assumptions about their usability. As a furniture maker, Hayden is generally concerned with creating objects that successfully balance beauty and utility, and that interact harmoniously with other pieces. This collaboration allows Hayden the freedom to create functionless, furniture-like objects to explore imbalance and tension and argument, both within the woodwork itself and in its relationship to Kelly’s work.