Makers Moment

All about letterpress printing with artist Daria Hirny of Homework Letterpress. Daria went to art school and trained as a printmaker - after she graduated, she changed her practice into a visual art business. She found that 2000 pound Heidelbelrg letterpress designed for commercial printing and started printing decidedly non-commercial, artful things of her own design.

This episode is with designer Geof Lilge (pronounced Lil-gee), who has made a lifelong career out of furniture design, and all of it based out of Edmonton. From starting HotHouse co-op right out of university with some fellow grads to then breaking off into internationally successful company Pure Design, through then going back and getting a master’s degree in Industrial Design and turning his thesis project into OnOurTable and now being elbows deep with his restaurant seating project Division 12, Geof Lilge has reinvented his work half a dozen times. He’s a designer that understands where entrepreneurship fits into the industrial design equation, but leaves all the room for experimentation and pivoting of ideas that makes something truly great.

This episode is all about the art world of smells. Yup, perfume. Josh Smith of Libertine Fragrance has been making scents for five years, since he made a perfume for a design school project. He tells us about the weird world of perfumes, the existence of scent reviewers (with YouTube channels! What!) and about his first career in forestry - it’s rad to hear designers and makers come from all sorts of places. We’ll hear about how perfume school is a thing, about making scents in Edmonton, the inspiration behind Josh’s perfumes (and a little history lesson on 19th century France), and making friends through smells. Josh tells us how perfume is a really good way to look at issues around sustainability and climate change, why we might all smell differently in the future, and where the idea of perfuming came from.

OG Edmonton concrete design superstars Matt and Shauna Heide from Concrete Cat are designer/maker/manufacturer hybrids, who went from construction company to concrete design house, making super bright, colourful modernist objects out of one of the supposedly dullest, coldest materials around: concrete. They’ve been at this for ten years and it’s so great to hear from those who have been in the game for a while about where they came from. Of course, they ignored some sage advice and followed sheer curiosity to make something truly new. That eventually led to work for the Whitney Museum, Sephora, and the Dior fashion house as well as a slew of other brands (Maker goals, amirite?). Matt and Shauna tell us how a lucky break helped them get into the USA and global markets and they also talk about working together as a couple, tell us what their take on being a maker is, how concrete is a polarizing material and how being based in Edmonton has affected them over the years.

ndustrial designer and ceramicist Molly McMahon of Stranger Design tells us about why Edmonton is a great place to make things, why her restaurant job helps with making ceramics, and takes us through all the different mediums she tried out before she hit the ceramics train. We also talk about “glazing ordeals”, helps us try to define what a maker is, what it takes to actually run the business side of making, Molly’s cat Cosmo makes a cameo - ceramics peeps, this one’s for you.