Hampstead Theatre’s Artistic Director Edward Hall and Festival Producer Issy van Randwyck have invited a wide variety of artists to share their stories and work processes in 2016. They include Sir David Hare, Sir Matthew Bourne, Howard Brenton, Darcey Bussell, Tim Pigott-Smith, Deborah Moggach, Meera Syal and Kate Mosse.
The first Hampstead Theatre Festival in March 2015 hosted over 30 events, where over 70 participants attracted an audience of 2,500 over the course of one weekend. For the hotly anticipated festival this year, Daniel Reynolds has designed Illuminated Books - bespoke ceramic table and floor lights in the form of stacked books, hand cast in bone china. They will add a decorative focus and glow on the table between interviewer and interviewee, and the surrounding area. “I’m very pleased with how the Illuminated Books have turned out, and delighted to be working with Hampstead Theatre,” said Reynolds.
The Illuminated Books will be placed in the downstairs area where guests will be ‘In Conversation’ with Darcey Bussell and others. In addition, Reynolds has created a series of six bespoke bone china pendant lights to hang above the tables in the bar area in the main foyer. The Refreshment Lights, hand cast in bone china, represent a Teasmade Kettle, a coffee grinder, a classic Italian coffee pot and two cocktail shakers.
Ceramic sculptures by Daniel Reynolds are currently on display in the USA. They are displayed in a dedicated cabinet within the New Territories exhibition currently touring nationally from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. His work is also in many private collections including the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection USA.
Reynolds’ mobiles and other work can be seen in Firmdale Hotels such as Dorset Square, Ham Yard Hotel, and Crosby Street Hotel in New York. His ‘Shall I Pour?’ installation was recently unveiled at chef Bruno Loubet’s second Grain Store restaurant and a series of his Organica pendant lights hang in Peckham’s fashionable Pedler restaurant.
Reynolds is an Englishman born to an American father and Venezuelan mother. He has lived most of his life in the UK, and draws great inspiration from the mid-century modernist aesthetic of and architecture of Caracas and Chicago.
“When I pick up a piece of clay, I feel a direct line into the ancient past; to very ancient pot-making. It connects me with what is primal and the important things that, in the noise of modern life, perhaps we overlook. I mean the fact that we are all human.”
