Yinka Ilori Finds a Deeper Meaning of Joy Through Design and Loss
Goldlaner.com – For more than a decade, Yinka Ilori has brought exuberance to contemporary design through vivid colors, playful geometry and objects that invite people to feel something. His chairs, installations and collaborations reject the neutral restraint often associated with modern interiors, replacing it with a visual language rooted in memory, community and celebration.
Now, the British Nigerian designer is examining what happens to that language when joy is interrupted by personal grief. His mother died in 2024, a loss that forced Ilori to confront sadness in a way he had not previously experienced in public or in his work.
“For the first time I had to process loss and sadness, when all I’d been preaching for 15 years was joy,” he said.
Ilori is preparing to release Chairman, a book that gathers 10 years of chair designs and reflects on the stories embedded within them. While the subject may sound narrow, the chair has become a remarkably expansive form in his practice: a place for family history, migration, identity and emotional connection.
Furniture as a carrier of memory
Among the works included in the book is “Ni Akoko Fe,” a bold, angular chair that honors his parents’ move from Nigeria to the United Kingdom. Another is “Two Become One,” his earliest chair design, made while studying at London Metropolitan University. Its flowing, seatless shape signaled an early interest in challenging how furniture is expected to function and look.
“Iya Ni Wura,” a rocking chair whose Yoruba title translates as “mother is gold,” carries an especially personal significance. Created for a charity auction, the piece reflected the importance of his mother within both her family and her wider community.
“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.
His mother’s presence also helped shape the way he thinks about domestic objects. She loved collecting things for the home, and Ilori came to understand that everyday possessions can outlast their original purpose while continuing to carry stories. A chair, in that sense, is never only a chair. It can become evidence of a family gathering, an inheritance, a departure, a celebration or a person no longer present.
A midpoint rather than a farewell
Chairman functions in part as an early survey of Ilori’s career, but he does not view it as a conventional retrospective. At 39, he sees the project as a chance to take stock while his creative practice is still evolving.
“I don’t really believe in having a retrospective when your career is nearly over. Why wait until I’m 80 or 90?” he said.
For Ilori, looking back is not about closing a chapter. It is a way to speak openly about the ideas that have already guided his work and to consider where they may lead next. His output has moved easily across furniture, tableware, fashion, automobiles, watches, public environments, stages and trophies. That flexibility is central to his approach rather than a departure from it.
London has supplied much of the energy behind that broad creative vocabulary. He has described growing up in the city amid architecture, music, fashion, textiles, sound and animation, all of which shaped the way he understands visual culture. At the same time, his Nigerian heritage, family life and faith have remained equally important foundations.
“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.”
When optimism meets bereavement
Ilori’s work became particularly resonant during the pandemic, when colorful public projects and optimistic forms offered a sense of warmth at a difficult moment. But his recent experience has complicated, rather than erased, his commitment to joy. After his mother’s death, he said he initially felt uncomfortable being so closely identified with happiness.
“It felt weird, like I was a fraud,” he said.
Over time, however, he came to see that grief does not simply cancel joy. Memories of a loved one can hold sorrow and gratitude at once, and the two emotions can exist alongside each other without contradiction.
“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 his work a more layered emotional register. Joy, in Ilori’s hands, is not limited to bright surfaces or cheerful colors. It can be found in remembrance, in the rituals families preserve and in the resilience that communities draw upon during difficult periods.
Passing joy between generations
Ilori has begun framing this inheritance through the idea of “transgenerational joy.” The phrase asks audiences to consider not only the harm that can travel between generations, but also the positive practices, gestures and forms of care that are passed forward.
“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?”
The theme shaped his TED Talk in August and runs through his first solo gallery exhibition, Joy Through Resistance, at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London. Ilori has said that his mother gave him many of those enduring “seeds of joy,” which now continue through the people who encounter his work.
His commercial activity remains extensive. This year, his projects have included collaborations with Rapha, Veuve Clicquot, Bloomingdales, Dunelm, Absolut Vodka, Starbucks and the Portland Art Museum. Rather than treating brand work as separate from his artistic identity, he approaches it as another opportunity to bring unfamiliar ideas to wider audiences.
Across those projects, whether a chair, an exhibition or a public installation, Ilori’s work returns to the same underlying question: how can design make people feel seen? His answer is increasingly shaped by the knowledge that happiness is not the absence of pain. It is something that can persist through memory, change and loss.
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