Grymsdyke Farm is pleased to reveal the final results of the works created during Reading Design 2025, presented at LDF25.

This year’s edition brought together students with leading practitioners: Maurizio Altieri, Marco Campardo, FOS, Guan Lee, Luca Lo Pinto, Soft Baroque and Lorenzo Vitturi  for an intensive summer school exploring the theme “Falling”.

Each workshop responded in its own way, transforming the theme into new forms, processes and collaborations. The results are artistic works, each one unique and special, reflecting the approach of the thinker behind it.

Vn0_works – Maurizio Altieri and Luca Lo Pinto
Responding to the theme Falling, Luca Lo Pinto, Maurizio Altieri and the students treated it as both method and metaphor, embracing uncertainty, release, transformation and the continuous line. Using oak bark tanned leather, students experimented with moulding, carving and folding to create unstable, asymmetrical forms that meditated on life’s beginnings and ends. Digital scanning and reproduction extended the enquiry, not to replace craft but to open new directions.

Gravity – Marco Campardo and Lorenzo Vitturi
Lorenzo Vitturi guided students to shape clay forms through falling and impact, later cast in glass using raw Murano glass (Cotisso). Marco Campardo led aluminium sand-casting with soft foam, where the sand itself defined the final form. Their processes converged in a single sculpture where glass and aluminium supported one another, embodying tension, unpredictability and collaboration between materials.

Kink Society – FOS and Guan Lee
Working with found objects, FOS, Guan Lee and the student began by making chairs, discovering how discarded materials could be reanimated into new forms. These improvised pieces shaped not only use but also social interaction, culminating in a farm party choreographed through objects, spaces and gatherings. Kink Society celebrates the odd, the eccentric and the inventive possibilities of things brought together.

Pulp – Soft Baroque
Soft Baroque explored the theme Falling through the cultural and material resonances of pulp. Students made paper embedded with LEDs and electronics, where fibres settling in water became a metaphor for suspension and drift. This process extended into hanging and collapsing forms, objects caught between stability and disintegration. Pulp became both material and method, showing how making and collaboration can transform uncertainty into creative momentum.

A quote from Grymsdyke Farm’s Founding Director, Guan Lee, summarises this project perfectly:
“We established Reading Design as a unique time and space for designers and students who share our passion for making and materials, to live and work together. Everyone was committed to the idea of designing and making with no fixed outcomes in mind, which was liberating and led to an extraordinary body of new work.”

Acknowledgements

2025 Participants: Karolina Adamiec; Joseph Bonetti; Andia Chan; Shouhui Chen; Luna Copponex; Guandong Diao; Priyanshi Dhanrajbhai Jain; Emily Foster; Eliza Friend; Joe Horgan; Eddie Huddart; Zarin Islam; Richard Kirk; Murat Kurul; Mingxuan Ma; Curro Guillen Martinez; Seb Masters; Margaux Richler; Tianqin Yang.

Material Specialists: Martin Hanson; Jessie Lee; Nigel Tucker.
Pianist and Composer: Marina Chan.

For more information and to request a press kit, please contact: press@grymsdykefarm.com