LONDON.- The Design Museum presents work by designer and artist Simone Brewster for its second iteration of PLATFORM, an annual free-to-visit display that makes contemporary design practice more accessible. Opening on 13 February 2026, this display marks the London-based designer’s first museum show, exhibiting objects spanning architecture, furniture, jewellery, collectible design and unveiling brand-new works.

Spanning four sections entitled Passages, Everyday Ornaments, Scales of Emotion and Body Narratives, this monographic display explores Brewster’s multidisciplinary practice, as well as the rich narratives and histories she imbues within her designs.

Working across a variety of scale and disciplines, Brewster’s practice challenges the conceptions of what is beautiful and valuable. Originally trained in architecture, Brewster’s career has evolved to include sculpture and later product design. As such, her forms often fuse architectural and sculptural language, layered with references from palaeolithic fertility deities to African diaspora traditions.

This display centres on the fluidity of Brewster’s practice: how past inspirations have informed her work and how her practice has evolved through experimentation.

The origins and perceived value of materials form an important aspect of Brewster’s work. She has experimented with materials including wood, hair, copper and cork, crafting luxury objects layered with meaning and cultural significance. Fascinated by the versatility of wood in particular, Brewster uses repurposed ebony, mango and tulipwood regularly in her craft, identifying wood as a precious material and elevating it to create luxurious objects.

The section Everyday Ornaments explores this interest in material histories and will present an array of creations including jewellery from her Ebony Revolution series, consisting of oversized rings, bracelets and statement necklaces defined by strong geometric lines, warm copper tones and dark ebony wood. Other highlights are three sculptural stepping stools crafted from ebonised tulipwood, designed to balance adornment and functionality.

Brewster’s reverence of Black and African diaspora tradition, craft, and identity - themes woven throughout her body of work - are particularly apparent with her Crown series of crafted wooden combs, also featuring in Everyday Ornaments. Throughout African culture, hair has often been a marker of status, community, and celebration. These combs are not just functional tools but sculptural tributes to this rich heritage.

As her design practice has developed, Simone Brewster has conceived the term ‘architecture of intimacies’, a practice defined by looking beyond the physical properties of materials, and translating their historical, geographic and emotive qualities into 3D sculptural forms and collectible objects. Scales of Emotion considers this idea of emotions giving architectural spaces meaning, and the objects Brewster designs as building blocks of an environment. A new vessel from her Tropical Noire collection, first shown as a series in her solo show ‘The Shape of Things’ at Now Gallery in 2023, is exhibited; sharing her creative process through sketches and prototypes culminating in the brand-new iteration made specially for this display at the Design Museum.

A vibrant 2.5m tall pillar that appeared in Brewster’s public installation commissioned for The Strand during the 2023 edition of the London Design Festival stands alongside three prototypes made during the installation’s development. Made from cork, the five totemic pillars were constructed to evoke a forest of cork oak trees in Portugal, highlighting the environmentally positive processes behind the material and inviting the essence of the forest to the bustling centre of metropolitan London. Scales of Emotion is also accompanied by a sound piece, reconstructing the moods of places Brewster references in her spatial work: the home, the forest, the temple, and the river.

Presented specially for the display, selected ornaments and benches from the ‘Temple of Relics’ summer pavilion commissioned by Brookfield Properties at Principal Place are reimagined as a public courtyard in the heart of the museum, where visitors can be immersed in Brewster’s spatial work. References for the temple’s ornamental vessels and hieroglyphics include the Venus of Willendorf and traditional Hausa mud architecture; earthy, organic materials left with their natural finish. The courtyard is emblematic of Brewster’s explorations into craft and imbuing objects with storytelling.

The final section, Body Narratives, depicts Brewster’s extensive studies into the female form and integrates these studies into surreal portraits of sculptural design, textiles and functional pieces, most prominently conveyed through her powerful works ‘Negress’ and ‘Mammy’. Images of both works feature in the show, with the original pieces currently residing in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC and the London Museum, respectively. For the Design Museum, Brewster has unveiled a brand-new sister to these works with ‘Negrita’, a bench crafted in ebonised tulipwood wood employing the same structural language as its chaise and side table counterparts. In Brewster’s provocative designs, the most commonly fetishised body parts – breasts, thighs – literally bear the weight of the structures. These bodies have been presented as furniture to be ‘used’ – and Brewster employs language with racist connotations to critique stereotypical perceptions. By reducing women to fragments, Brewster exposes how society has historically fetishised women, denying their wholeness, before reconstructing them in her designs.

A highlight of the display is Brewster’s striking painted explorations of the female form. The display concludes with a hands-on creative activity which invites visitors to follow Brewster’s visual language and use brushes to experiment and express intimate emotions through shapes and forms.

Simone Brewster says, “I’m honoured to be invited to share the deeper workings of my practice at the Design Museum for this year's PLATFORM. This is my first museum show, and it has afforded me the opportunity to share my individual approach to design and creativity as a whole. To me, design isn’t just about creating objects — it’s about giving voice to identity, heritage and memory. Through scale, material and form I aim to make visible what has often been invisible and to share narratives that connect us and ground us to objects and to each other.”