Brand founder, make-up artist and creative director Isamaya Ffrench is known for her artistry. She’s painted the faces of everyone from Rihanna to Miley Cyrus, and her line of stainless steel tools and products (including lip balms and pigment palettes) are artefacts as well as implements – they deliver on function and form. Ffrench’s collaborations with the likes of YSL Beaute and Nike are as much futuristic works of art as brand collateral. So it’s no surprise that Studio Iron, the Chelsea College of Arts grad’s latest project, focuses on curating art and objects.
Ffrench launched Studio Iron with a pop-up exhibition at Saatchi Yates gallery in Mayfair last week. It’s a preview of a more permanent project: an exhibition space in Soho.
“I’m building a design gallery and concept store that focuses on artisans working in the space between art and design, which questions the hierarchies that tend to separate the two,” she tells Broadsheet. “So when [Saatchi Yates founders Phoebe Saatchi Yates and Arthur Yates] invited me to do the show, it felt like an opportunity to extend that into a wider context, bringing in artworks that reflect my personal perspective.”
Ffrench has curated a group exhibition that spans design, installation, sculpture and painting, with pieces straddling the post-industrial and pop. Steel and iron are dominant materials, with works including a chair covered in bumper stickers by visual artist Jordan Wolfson; two benches with a football jersey perched on each by German artist Anne Imhof; and influential US artist Paul McCarthy’s large-scale inflatable butt plug in reflective fabric.
Wolfson and McCarthy were early influences on Ffrench's understanding of art. “There’s a rawness and psychological intensity in their work that stayed with me. It shaped how I think about material, the body and the idea that work can be confrontational without needing to explain itself.”
Ffrench says this project felt like a logical next step in her career. “In beauty, you’re constructing something through editing and placement – here it’s just applied to objects and space instead of the body.
“The plan is to move into a space within the Painting Rooms in Soho, where Studio Iron can run more continuously as both an exhibition space and a place for ongoing projects with My Beautiful City, the global event production agency,” Ffrench says.
The capital feels like a natural home for the project. “London is quite open in terms of how people work. There’s less pressure to define yourself too narrowly, which makes it easier to move between disciplines. That mix tends to produce more interesting outcomes and you can feel this in the show.”
And it’s no surprise given Ffrench’s form for creating covetable tools that she plans to launch products as part of the project. “We’re already developing them as a representation of an ever-growing group of strong designers, and will eventually be operating a creative agency alongside the gallery.”
Studio Iron is at Saatchi Yates until June 7.
