Mercedes Plazola

Designer, artist and maker.

Mercedes Elena is a London-based critical and contemporary designer with a background in furniture design. Her practice moves fluidly between the roles of designer and maker, using fabrication as a method of inquiry. She is drawn to overlooked materials, waste streams, inherited techniques, and everyday objects that often pass unnoticed. Through these, she investigates questions of value, production, and authorship. She approaches materials as carriers of meaning, embedded with labour, politics, geography, and desire, positioning design as both a functional discipline and a critical lens.

Her practice has developed through close engagement with material-driven studios internationally, including working in Mexico City alongside Fernando Laposse. Immersed in processes that bridge craft, agriculture, and design. She further refined her understanding of making as a situated and responsive act that acknowledges environmental, social, and economic contexts.

By foregrounding process and storytelling, she seeks to narrow the distance between production and perception, encouraging audiences to engage more consciously with the objects that shape their environments.

FEATURES

People and Places Exhibition, London (2024)

Sin Tematica Exhibition, London
(2024)

Young Furniture Makers Exhibition, London (2024)

Young Furniture Makers Interview, London (2024), Read Here