Faye Toogood’s “Lucid Dreams” Signals a New Chapter in Her Artistic Evolution

Celebrated British designer and artist Faye Toogood has unveiled a striking new dual exhibition in New York City titled Lucid Dreams, signaling a deeply personal and imaginative turn in her creative practice. The exhibition, running concurrently at two galleries—The Future Perfect and TIWA Select—reveals a vivid evolution in Toogood’s work, blurring the lines between functional design, emotional storytelling, and fine art.

Coming off the heels of her award-winning presence at Milan Design Week, where she received the prestigious EDIDA Designer of the Year award, Toogood’s New York showcase marks both a professional milestone and a creative departure. Known for her architectural furniture forms and minimalist fashion collaborations, Toogood now delves into more intuitive, emotional territory. Rather than adhering to the aesthetic rigor that defined much of her early career, Lucid Dreams embraces messiness, spontaneity, and introspection.

At The Future Perfect, Toogood revives her early background in painting, using brushstrokes, color, and texture to animate sculptural furniture. These aren’t just functional objects—they are canvases for self-expression. Chairs and stools become abstract totems of feeling, daubed with expressive marks that reflect her internal landscape. There’s a loose, painterly quality to these pieces that stands in contrast to the clean precision often associated with modern design.

Across town at TIWA Select, the mood shifts. Here, Toogood presents a series of ethereal lighting sculptures made from delicate rice paper and ink. Inspired by a recent trip to Japan and rooted in techniques she learned from traditional paper artists, these softly glowing forms reflect a quieter, dreamlike aspect of her practice. Titled Rice Paper Dreams, the series channels subconscious imagery and meditative simplicity—each lamp resembling something ephemeral, like a memory captured in mid-fade.

Toogood describes the works as “an exploration of the space between waking and sleeping,” where clarity and abstraction coexist. The materials, both humble and poetic, emphasize texture over technology, echoing her larger design ethos: a resistance to the digital and mass-produced in favor of the handmade and emotionally resonant.

This artistic pivot has been shaped in part by the pandemic era, which forced a period of creative pause and reevaluation. Like many artists during lockdown, Toogood found herself retreating into domesticity and introspection. The result was a more intuitive approach to making—one less bound by commercial expectations and more in tune with her emotional rhythms.

She also credits her recent collaboration with her sister, fashion designer Erica Toogood, as a transformative influence. Their joint work, which centered on garments and objects inspired by memory and ritual, sparked a renewed interest in the personal and poetic dimensions of design.

Ultimately, Lucid Dreams presents a portrait of an artist in metamorphosis. It’s a study in contrasts: bold and soft, structured and loose, functional and fantastical. And it cements Toogood not only as a designer of objects, but as a storyteller of mood, material, and imagination.

The exhibition runs through June 21, 2025. For anyone interested in the intersection of design and emotion, Lucid Dreams is not to be missed.