What happens when a designer known for joy encounters grief

Yinka Ilori’s New Book Finds Meaning in Chairs, Memory and Loss

Earthguardiansonline.com – For Yinka Ilori, a chair is never simply somewhere to sit. Across a decade of work, the British Nigerian designer has used furniture to explore family history, migration, belonging and the emotional lives that objects can carry. His new book, Chairman, gathers that body of work at a particularly personal moment: Ilori has been navigating the death of his mother in 2024.

Known for exuberant color, bold geometry and installations that bring energy to public spaces, Ilori has built a career around a visual language that rejects sterile minimalism. His work can feel playful and immediate, yet the ideas beneath it are often rooted in memory, community and the stories passed through generations.

“For the first time I had to process loss and sadness, when all I’d been preaching for 15 years was joy,” he said.

Speaking from London before the release of Chairman, Ilori described the publication as an opportunity to look carefully at the furniture that helped define his practice. The book focuses specifically on chairs, which have become expressive containers for his experiences and the experiences of those around him.

Furniture as personal history

Among the projects included is “Ni Akoko Fe,” a vivid geometric chair that honors his parents’ move from Nigeria to the United Kingdom. Another work, “Two Become One,” was Ilori’s first chair design, made while he was studying at London Metropolitan University. Its flowing, seatless shape already pointed toward the unconventional forms that would become central to his work.

One of the most intimate pieces is the rocking chair “Iya Ni Wura,” a Yoruba phrase meaning “mother is gold.” Created for a charity auction, the work became an expression of maternal love and communal care.

“How much she was loved; how she was gold to the community and gold to us as her kids,” Ilori said of the chair’s meaning.

The book may resemble a retrospective, but Ilori does not see it as a closing statement. At 39, he considers himself midway through a career that has already crossed numerous disciplines.

“I don’t really believe in having a retrospective when your career is nearly over. Why wait until I’m 80 or 90?” he asked.

For him, examining his own work now is a way to understand its direction rather than preserve it at a distance. His practice has expanded from seating and household objects into fashion, tableware, cars, watches, trophies, exhibition design, stages and large-scale public commissions. The breadth is not a departure from his earliest interests, but an extension of a worldview shaped by the density of London.

London, family and creative freedom

Ilori grew up surrounded by the overlapping visual and cultural languages of the city: buildings, music, clothing, textiles, sound and animation. Those influences helped form an approach that is deliberately open rather than confined to one design category.

“Growing up in London — I was surrounded by everything from architecture, music, fashion, textiles, sounds, animation. That really impacted how I see the world, and how I show up as an artist and designer — my roots have had the biggest impact in my career.”

At the center of that outlook is community. Ilori has repeatedly returned to the influence of his parents, his faith and the relatives whose resilience made a lasting impression on him. He has spoken of family members finding ways to hold on to joy through difficult circumstances, a quality he considers deeply motivating.

That belief helped make his work especially resonant during the pandemic, when public color and optimistic forms could offer a welcome visual lift. But Ilori’s interest has never been limited to cheerful palettes. He is equally interested in the way spaces shape feeling, and in how everyday possessions retain traces of the people who used, kept and valued them.

When joy meets bereavement

The loss of his mother forced Ilori to reconsider the public identity he had built around joy. In the period after her death, he questioned whether his signature optimism still made sense.

“It felt weird, like I was a fraud,” he said.

Over time, however, he came to see joy and grief as experiences that can occupy the same space. Bereavement did not erase the positive memories associated with his mother; instead, it made those memories more present.

“It sounds bizarre what I’m going to say, but there is still joy in loss and bereavement when you really look into it…in all the memories.”

That perspective gives recent work a different emotional register. Joy, in Ilori’s hands, is no longer merely brightness or the absence of sadness. It can include remembrance, longing, resilience and the recognition of someone who is no longer physically present.

His mother’s habit of collecting objects at home offered another important lesson. Watching her attach meaning to possessions showed him that objects can outlast their original function, continuing to hold stories and connections. This understanding is fundamental to the way he approaches furniture and domestic design.

Ilori has also developed the idea of “transgenerational joy”: the positive rituals, values and forms of care that families and communities inherit and pass onward. The concept formed the basis of his TED Talk in August and was also present in the emotional atmosphere of his first solo gallery exhibition, Joy Through Resistance, at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London.

“We spend a lot of time talking about transgenerational trauma, but what about transgenerational joy — those seeds of joy that were given to us and that we pass on as rituals to our loved ones and communities?”

Ilori sees his mother as a source of many such “seeds,” whose influence now reaches beyond his own family through his work. That personal inheritance helps explain why his designs can be simultaneously vivid and reflective: their color is not decoration alone, but a way of making room for shared experience.

A practice without fixed boundaries

Ilori’s projects continue to move freely between art, design and commercial collaboration. During this year, his work has included partnerships with Rapha, Veuve Clicquot, Bloomingdales, Dunelm, Absolut Vodka, Starbucks and the Portland Art Museum. Rather than treating brand work as separate from artistic practice, he embraces collaborations that give ideas a chance to enter wider public life.

The result is a practice with unusual elasticity. A chair can become a tribute to migration; a rocking chair can honor a mother; a gallery exhibition can examine resistance through joy; and a public installation can offer a moment of connection to people passing through a city.

Chairman captures that range while bringing the focus back to the object that began it. Through chairs, Ilori has created a language of color and shape that can hold both celebration and sorrow. His recent experience of grief has not displaced the joy in that language. It has made it fuller, more complicated and more enduring.