In West London’s Ladbroke Hall, the spring light arrives slowly, filtering through tall windows and settling across marble floors and plaster walls.
It feels like the perfect setting for reflection; for design that asks us to pause. This season, Carpenters Workshop Gallery opens its spring–summer programme with three exhibitions (Komorebi, Caos Calmo and Persistence of Form) that explore how art can propagate ambience, as opposed to simply occupy a space.
The most meditative of the three shows may well be Komorebi, a new body of lighting by Paris-based studio Aki+Arnaud Cooren. The exhibition’s title refers to the Japanese word describing sunlight filtering through leaves. It is an image that neatly captures the duo’s longstanding fascination with light as a poetic, almost sentient presence.
At its centre is a new series of lamps from the designers’ ongoing Ishigaki collection, inspired by memories of freediving around Japan’s Ishigaki Island. Crafted from bamboo, metal and linen, the sculptural floor lamps draw upon natural materials to create immersive, mesmeric environments that replicate the sensation of being underwater. Seven new pieces appear in a pigment inspired by coral formations encountered around the island. In keeping with the Coorens’ restrained sensibility, the works favour a kind of sensory kindling over spectacle. Nature’s subtle luminosity diffuses through linen and glides across gently curved forms, casting shadows that float rather than fall.
Caos Calmo marks an expansive presentation by Sardinian designer Antonio Marras. Though widely known for his work in fashion, Marras has long pursued a parallel artistic practice encompassing painting, collage, ceramics and sculptural assembly. Marras invokes a layered intensity that does well to counter the Coorens’ softer approach. His compositions draw together ceramics, mirrors, textiles and found objects that carry traces of their previous lives. In these assemblages, a shard of ceramic or a fragment of cloth takes on the weight of a relic or heirloom.
Invoking the power of memory in an artwork is no easy feat. Marras taps into something universal here, absorbing the viewer into something familiar and soothing; calm amongst the chaos.
Completing the programme is Persistence of Form, a group exhibition exploring the dialogue between jewellery and collectible design. Spanning seven decades, the show brings together leading female figures including Ute Decker, Gabriella Crespi, Charlotte Perriand and Ingrid Donat. Their ostensibly disparate practices are tied together by a focus on scale. The exhibition proposes that a cuff bracelet, a cabinet or a wall sculpture may originate from the same creative impulse. The works range from jewellery with the mechanics of miniature architecture to furniture bedecked in ornamental splendour, pretty enough to wear. Ane Christensen’s Ghost Bowl sees the framework burst away from an otherwise ordinary bowl. Biblioteque is a striking, open-ended bookcase comprised of concentric ripple embossed and painted black. It is an ensemble cast of works that highlight how sculptural language moves between scale and medium, from interiors to the body.
Together, the three exhibitions form a persuasive argument for the continued evolution of collectible design. Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s programme reflects a world in which artists move freely between craft, sculpture, fashion and architecture. It finds a fitting stage in Ladbroke Hall itself, the gallery’s expansive London home. The building, once a community hall, now reimagined as a multidisciplinary arts destination, mirrors the gallery’s founding vision: to push beyond conventional gallery boundaries and create environments where objects are experienced rather than simply displayed.
In this sense, the season feels like a constellation of environments as opposed to a stringent set of exhibitions. Visitors are invited to journey through the oceanic calm of the Coorens’ lamps to Marras’s emotional assemblages and land in a play pit of ever-shifting scale and perspective.
The exhibitions run from 12 March to 2 May 2026 at the gallery’s London space in Notting Hill.
