Jessie French on Materials, Waste and the Possibilities of Transformation

Armadillo's collaboration with Jessie French began with a palette. French is the founder of Other Matter, a research-led studio working at the intersection of art, design and science. To mark the launch of the Meridian Collection, she created Sill: a bespoke room divider made from an algae-based surface called MarbleWood, a material derived from mineral pigment and poured by hand in a way that can never be exactly repeated.

The piece came from a simple observation: that Armadillo and Other Matter, working in entirely different mediums, kept circling the same questions about how a surface records its own making, and how material carries the memory of geological time or the traces of a hand-led process. French responded with Sill, echoing the layered tonality and earthly rhythm running through Meridian. What resulted is a piece grounded in craftsmanship and environmental consciousness: two practices arriving at one belief, that objects built with permanence and integrity matter.

Below, French speaks to waste, the economics of closed-loop systems and what drew her to this project with Armadillo.

Photography and Video by Good Grief

Your work often begins with materials that have been discarded or overlooked. What draws you to them?

I think "discarded" is interesting but it's not quite where I start. My starting point is materials that are abundant and ancient: organisms that have shaped this planet for billions of years, but are largely invisible to us because of the transformations they have undergone over that time. Algae built the carbonate rock that became marble and contributed to the marine sediment that, over hundreds of millions of years of heat and pressure, became petroleum. Marble and petrochemical plastic, the two materials we extract and process at the most industrial scale, share a hidden biological ancestry.

We don't actually work with discarded materials, but when I was designing OM Signage Film, I wanted a completely closed loop, with nothing discarded at any stage. Every offcut from across the studio is now reprocessed into Other Matter Leather, with the addition of only charcoal. I wanted to design that [waste] out as the economic logic of the system, not append it as a gesture.


How has your understanding of sustainability evolved throughout your practice?

Sustainability is a tricky word because it lacks a universal definition. Referring to something as sustainable doesn't tell you what the material does, who made it, who was impacted in its lifecycle, what happens at the end of its life, or if it is reused at all.

What I've moved toward is thinking about systems and economics rather than materials in isolation. Most recycling doesn't fail on chemistry, it fails because the value of what comes out of the loop doesn't justify the cost of running it. Less than ten percent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled, and the reason is structural, not technical. With Other Matter Leather, we designed the end-of-life pathway in before we designed anything else. The premium quality of the upholstery output is what makes the collection cost viable. That's not a sustainability claim, it's an argument about how circular systems actually have to be structured to survive.

Your work sits between art, design and research. How do those disciplines intersect for you?

I don't experience them as sitting between disciplines so much as operating in different registers that inform each other. The research is what answers questions I have that make the other parts of the practice possible. The studio holds a granted Australian patent and works with CSIRO, the Cooper Hewitt and the Met's conservation scientists. That rigor isn't separate from the work; it's what allows the work to make the claims it makes.

But there are things the research register can't hold. The geological frame I work within, the idea that marble and plastic share a biological ancestry, that our extracted materials are, in deep origin, ancient marine life transformed by time and pressure - that's not a scientific claim, it's a conceptual one. It's the kind of frame that belongs to an artistic practice, where you can inhabit an idea and follow it through into form. The MarbleWood series is the object form of that thinking.


What role can material innovation play in addressing environmental challenges?

I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that all things are new and innovative. As an example, the reason we have ‘sustainability’ is purely because we have been operating in a way that is unsustainable for the last couple of hundred years, and the term was adopted in reflection of this, rather than as an innovation. I think the most honest position is to be precise about what a given material actually does rather than letting it carry the weight of a general environmental claim.

OM Signage Film is a non-petrochemical alternative to a category of flexible PVC signage that relies heavily on phthalate plasticizers - compounds the EU, WHO and US National Toxicology Program have all identified as endocrine-disrupting. That's a concrete displacement of a concrete harm. Other Matter Leather creates a high-value end-of-life pathway for a material that would otherwise be written off after a three-week campaign. CSIRO awarded that approach their prize for the Most Promising Advancement in Achieving the Ending Plastic Waste Mission in 2024. Those are specific claims about specific systems.

Redesigning the economic logic of the system the material sits inside [is] where design has something to contribute that pure materials science doesn't, because designers are working at the level of how things are commissioned, specified, used and disposed of, or reused.

Armadillo invited you to create a bespoke work inspired by the Meridian Collection. What aspects resonated most strongly, and how did you translate those ideas into the Sill room divider?

The starting point was really the palette. We honed in on the colors and the way they were held together across the collection. We used a range of mineral pigments [by a local pigment miller, Langridge Colors], including my absolute favorite - a red oxide milled to a point where it takes on a transparent, luminous quality - alongside a rich mars brown with real depth to it.

The works are all hand-poured, and the patterning is both unique to each panel and a record of its own making - frozen at the moment of creation. Each surface holds the choreography of the pour, the way pigments meet and separate in real time, and cannot be repeated. That quality of natural variation felt true to what draws me to the Meridian palette: it doesn't read as designed so much as arrived at.

What I learned about how the collection was designed deepened the resonance further. Meridian takes the coloring of natural materials as its reference and then stabilizes it - through dye processes that hold that quality even in direct sunlight, and structural references to traditional looms refined for contemporary performance. There's a logic to that approach I recognize in our own work: taking something rooted in a natural process and doing the work required to make it last.


While your practice and Armadillo's work operate in different disciplines, there is a shared interest in materials and their lifecycle. What common ground did you discover through this collaboration?

How Armadillo operates is genuinely rare. Their attention to materials and to the ethical conditions of everyone along their supply chains isn't a marketing position - it comes through in how they make decisions: what to produce, what to stop producing, when they've found a problem they feel responsible to respond to.

Armadillo works at production scale, which means the material decisions they make are multiplied across a lot of objects and a lot of interiors. The scrutiny that requires is different from a research studio context, but the underlying question is the same: what do you actually know about this material, and can you stand behind it?

What the making revealed specifically was how much we share an interest in longevity, in objects that are worth keeping. That's not purely an environmental position. Things made to last require a different quality of attention at every stage, from material selection to how a surface is finished. Finding that shared commitment made the brief feel genuinely generative rather than like a constraint.

Looking ahead, what conversations around sustainability do you think are most important right now?

Economics, honestly. The conversation has been dominated by materials science and consumer behavior long enough that we've somewhat missed the structural question: who pays for the loop to close? Collection, sorting, and reprocessing cost money. If the output from that process isn't worth enough to cover those costs, the loop opens. That's not a failure of will or awareness, it's a design problem, and it has a design solution at a systems level.

I think the regulatory horizon is undervalued in the design community. The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the UN Plastics Treaty and Australia's national plastic waste targets are creating real constraints on what can be specified and sold, within timescales that affect decisions being made right now.

Designers who understand that environment can argue for material choices on risk-management grounds rather than virtue grounds. That's a much more durable argument, and it opens doors that a sustainability label never did.