Venice Biennial Exhibition: Personal Structures
It began with an email. In November 2025 we received a direct invitation to submit a proposal to ‘Personal Structures’, an art biennial held alongside La Biennale Arte in Venice from May to November 2026. For the first time, the exhibition, organised by the European Cultural Centre and the non-profit Open Space Venice, would include a curated design section. We were thrilled! More than 200 international artists and institutions would show work across three venues on the Grand Canal. The theme was ‘Confluences’: how art and design meet, and how they engage with Venice itself.
Our answer was a free-standing wall of handmade tiles, 3.7m wide and 2.6m high. Venice was the starting point. It is a crowded city on open water, a jumble of colours, shapes and materials. On a single ceramic canvas we aimed to include themes of craft and mass production, history and tourism, the organic and the artificial. Speakers would play the sounds of the factory floor so that visitors could hear the process behind the result.
A wall of this size is no small undertaking. The installation called for around 500 tiles, involving 40 different kinds of tile and screen-printed in nine colours. This potential jumble had to form a single composition rather than a patchwork. We take the same approach with every custom tile installation, whether for a hotel or a private home. This is a list of all the tiles used in the installation.
The yellow squares on the design above mark where we planned to place our pocket tiles. These three-dimensional ceramic ‘pockets’ are tiles-but-not-tiles. They fit over wall light fittings that hold small screw-base LED bulbs.Like the rest of our range, pocket tiles are screen-printed by hand, so they belong to the installation rather than standing apart from it. By day the pockets blend into the surrounding tiles. At night they light up the wall. In Venice they would have echoed the light reflected off the city’s canals.
Look towards the top of the layout design and one shape stands out: a sharp white triangle among the organic forms. It represents the cruise ships that have recently towered over Venice’s palazzi, delivering crowds by the thousand to a fragile city. Italy barred the largest ships from the city centre in 2021, but the pressure of mass tourism has not gone away. Our triangle posed a question: should Venice drift, or change course? Perhaps it was not a question the organisers wished to hear. In the end, our proposal was rejected. 🙁
A question? A project? Advice?
