The Bite Magazine - Spring 2019 - Issue 24

bite lifestyle The designer behind this namesake brand didn’t take the conventional route in becoming an indus- trial designer and is actually self-taught. He may recall his school years as a blur but the life-drawing classes (which were solely for sixth-formers) at school that he sneaked into became one of the foundations of his future profession. “There is nothing to beat this activity in teaching proportion and balance and I think it probably had a big impact and still informs my design work,” he revealed. A resilient person who ended up making his own path, Dixon tried art school after leaving school at 18 but gave up after six months. “If I had spent more time at art school, I would have been told to do this, or not to do that. There was great liberation in just being able to make differ- ent things using found objects, without having to justify myself.” Instead he spent a year as a painter in a cartoon film company, two years as a bass guitarist in a disco band and a further two years in the nightclub business. Using his brilliant mind and equally extensive talents, Dixon took one year to create his first 100 chairs in 1983. Having found a new passion for welding allowed him to teach himself to make tough metal structures, eventually turning into a craft for making furniture from found objects. Growing his clientele, he evolved seamlessly over the next few years from a welder to craftsman to designer. His studio became the playground for a whole host of young upstarts such as Thomas Heatherwick, Michael Young and Michael Anastassiades. “As an untrained, uncertified designer, my early obsessions stemmed mostly from the workshop methods I gleaned from friends, from whatever material I could obtain for free or from the primitive tools I bought,” he said, explaining his early day ethics. “My first lesson in oxy-acetylene welding came from a friend with a car-body repair shop in Clapham, south London. A whole new world opened up to me – this was a quick and effective way for me to make things… I probably made over 100 chairs in my first year just because I could.” It wasn’t long before his work became per- manent fixtures in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Design Museum and many more thanks to his designs, attend- ances at international exhibitions and the influence of forward-looking Italian luxury furniture manufacturers. One such piece was the S-Chair created in 1986, initially inspired by a doodle of a chicken that turned into an idea for a chair, an unu- sually sculptural seat that took Dixon from self-production into the Italian luxury goods industry. Interestedly, the designer cannot recall why he made the coiled springy lamp that he called ‘First Light’ in 1988, other than he got interested in making lights active rather than static. “It’s hard to pass this lamp without smacking it to make the pro- jected light dance on the ceiling. This was probably my first