28 July 2026
Artist Highlight - Josh Ling
Interview and Review
Josh Ling is an emerging designer and maker based in East London. Having originally studied Aerospace Engineering, he developed his skill as a maker training at the Sylva Wood School and working for several high-end furniture makers.
He focuses predominantly on the use of British timbers in furniture making and has recently undertaken a residency at Somerset House. At the end of the residency he unveiled his newest collection, Increase The Noise, developed out of industry research into the use of British hardwood Glulam beams within construction.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. Increase The Noise comes out of research into British grown mixed species Glulam beams. What was it about that research that felt urgent enough to become a furniture piece?
The environmental crisis is one of the biggest problems we have to tackle today, and also one of the most impending. Part of the solution is finding ways to facilitate the growth of forests locally and globally, aswell as bringing existing forests into management. It is therefore necessary to explore new technologies and methods of creation that can coexist with these expanding ecosystems, especially in industries such as construction that are extremely carbon intensive. We really need to bring this knowledge and awareness into more accessible domains. Furniture can achieve this.
2. The chair brings Ash, Elm, Oak and London Plane into one laminated structure. Do you see the different timbers as separate voices, or as one combined material body?
Each species definitely has an inherent personality. The aim of the piece was to present these both through their distinct colour variations and through their internal grain structures presented in the splitting of the sides. However, the aim was also to recognise the multispecies interdependence of a healthy ecosystem. The lamination acts to stabilise any differences in reaction to the environment and allows us to embrace their differences.
3. There is something almost geological in the split surfaces, as if the chair has been cut open. Was that sense of revealing the inside of the material important to you?
It was important to me to present the wood as more than merely a material. We have become used to experiencing wood in its final state, but it has a significant history. The geological nature of the split surfaces emphasises this with the different woods acting as striations. It creates a sense of permanence that contrasts mass manufactured products that reveal air when they are split open. This history is made explicit in the high polish of the other faces.
4. A chair is usually expected to reassure the body, but this one introduces a certain unease. What kind of discomfort did you want to create, and why?
I wanted to limit the space available to the user. Providing just enough surface area for it to be functional but to act as a tool for the user to question the normality of everyday objects they interact with. Why is the seat like this? How does it differ from what I am used to? The user then understands what it means to use their everyday items and that won’t just accept manufactured products as they are. We should be conscious of what it is made from, where it has come from and who made it.
5. Your work questions the normalisation of non local, carbon intensive production. How do you avoid making the piece feel didactic, while still keeping that criticism present?
I think one of the benefits of being a furniture maker is that we are all familiar with furniture, we all use it. Where this piece aims to make a point, it does so through the audiences understanding. I am not so much telling them what to think as asking them to relate to the piece and understand why it is different to what they are used to.
6. Increase The Noise is beautiful, but it also asks a difficult question about comfort and responsibility. Do you think beauty can make people stay with an uncomfortable idea for longer?
I think beauty is a blessing and a curse. When something is too beautiful the point can be lost in the conversation, taken over solely by aesthetic and then doomed to disappear with time and trends. Sometimes it requires a singular detail to punch through and shift the conversation, people are drawn in immediately by the beauty but the thing that keeps them there is the slight unease from that unexpected detail.
7. The exhibition looks at the strangeness of the everyday. In your case, the chair becomes a way to think about forests, construction and consumption. What would you like viewers to notice the next time they sit on an ordinary piece of furniture?
I would love viewers to look for a sign of the hand in pieces of furniture they use. Though this may be unlikely in the new pieces typically bought from large manufacturers, they could seek it in their impact on the pieces they use daily. It could be a worn chair arm often turned to as a comforter or a wine stain from an evening enjoyed with friends. To acknowledge the furniture’s importance in their lives, not to see these things as flaws in need of replacing but as a new kind of history, their history.
BEFORE WOOD BECOMES FURNITURE
Review by Sara Chyan, Curator
Josh Ling’s Increase The Noise does not immediately look like a chair. From some angles, it resembles a material sample or part of a larger structure. Two upright sections of timber are connected by a small seat and exposed supports. The place for the body is there, but it does not dominate the object.
Josh developed the work through research into British grown mixed species Glulam. Ash, elm, oak and London plane are laminated into one structure, while their differences remain visible. The colours shift across the surface, grain runs in opposing directions and knots interrupt the straighter lines. Details that might usually be treated as inconsistencies have been brought forward.
The split faces are the strongest part of the chair. Fibres pull away from one another and the layers refuse a perfectly clean edge. These surfaces do not feel like decoration added after construction. They reveal what happens when the timber is opened rather than planed into a smooth and anonymous finish.
This creates a strange relationship between control and resistance. Josh’s background in aerospace engineering can be felt in the precise construction, but the chair becomes more interesting where that precision begins to break down. The different species have been bonded to stabilise them, yet their individual structures continue to interrupt the surface.
The seat offers just enough room to function. It does not encourage the body to settle without thought, and the tall rear section does not behave like a familiar backrest. Sitting becomes a deliberate action. The discomfort is slight, but enough to make the user consider why the chair has been made in this way and what they normally expect furniture to provide.
Josh relates the mixed timbers to the interdependence found within a healthy forest. I think the work is stronger when this is treated as a starting point rather than a complete ecological model. Trees do not support one another in the same way as timber bonded under industrial pressure. What the chair does show convincingly is that design does not always need uniform material in order to achieve stability.
The woodland photographs return the object to a setting associated with its source, but I find the studio views more revealing. Against a plain background, the chair cannot disappear into a familiar image of nature. The joins, torn fibres and compressed layers become easier to read, and the work feels less like a symbol of the forest than a record of what happens once the forest enters production.
Increase The Noise asks us to notice the stage that usually disappears between tree and furniture. Its strength lies in making that transformation difficult to overlook.