From joy to grief and back: Yinka Ilori's new reckoning

Modern design often veers into the sort of minimalism that comes across as tasteful and sophisticated, but bland. Yinka Ilori has made an entire career doing the opposite.

From landmark public installations to furniture, his dopamine-inducing, color-soaked designs are instantly recognizable and have resonated both culturally, and globally.

But the British Nigerian designer has recently reckoned with grief, devastated by his mother's passing in 2024.

"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 speaking from London, ahead of the release of "Chairman," a book tracing a decade of chairs, specifically. In his hands, chairs have become vessels for family memories, migration and storytelling, and charged with unusually emotional responsibilities.

There's the bold, geometric "Ni Akoko Fe," for example, that celebrates his parents' migration from Nigeria to the UK. Also featured is Ilori's first chair, "Two Become One," a fluid "seatless" form created during his time at London Metropolitan University.

The rocking chair titled "Iya Ni Wura" ("mother is gold" in Yoruba) was commissioned for a charity auction and symbolized "how much she was loved; how she was gold to the community and gold to us as her kids."

If the monograph sounds like an early retrospective, that's because it is. "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. "I feel like I'm at a midpoint in my career, and I want to look back at what I've done and talk about it now…I don't want to shy away from the idea of being 39 and doing it. Why not?"

An archive of feeling

Ilori's practice has always been sprawling in the best sense: a design language that moves from chairs to tableware, fashion, cars, watches, public installations, stages and trophies. The range, he says, begins with London's sensory layers.

"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."

But Ilori's first love, he said, has always been community. That includes his parents, faith and family members who have had to "really dig deep to find resilience even in their darkest times to still find joy…it's inspiring."

Perhaps it was that sense of almost impossible positivity that made Ilori's design so welcomed when he was creating pieces during the pandemic. But beyond the visual uplift and optimistic palette is also an interest in how objects can retain the emotions of people or communities, and how public spaces can invite happiness.

Grief, joy and what remains

The harder question is what happens when the person most publicly associated with joy encounters grief.

"It felt weird, like I was a fraud," he said, of what he felt following his mother's death. "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."

A year testing how joy survives a private rupture has given Ilori's work a more complex, durable point of view: that joy is not synonymous with brightness, nor just the inverse of sadness. It can coexist with grief, memory and absence.

His mother was obsessed with "collecting objects at home;" watching her taught him how possessions hold memories and stories long after their original use has passed.

"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 idea was the focus of his TED Talk this August and echoed in the emotional undercurrent of his recent first solo gallery exhibition, "Joy Through Resistance," at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London. His mother, for example, gave "me so many transgenerational seeds of joy that people are now reaping the rewards of."

Range and reasoning

There is an unusual elasticity in Ilori's prolific practice. He moves with enviable freedom between furniture, object and architecture, art and commerce. This year alone, projects have included collaborations with Rapha, Veuve Clicquot, Bloomingdales, Dunelm, Absolut Vodka, Starbucks and the Portland Art Museum. But Ilori approaches such work with neither the purism nor the coyness that plagues many of his design contemporaries.

"I love working with brands that are open to new ideas and new ways of thinking, and where the work is accessible."

He is forthright about the economics of collaboration. "Yes," he added, "the money is a factor" — it makes personal projects possible, provided a collaboration permits genuine exchange rather than a cut and paste application of his visual codes. Personal legacy work can then be funded and developed more independently. For example, the launch of the Yinka Ilori Foundation in 2025 (spurred on by his mother's passing) aims to put this into practice in underserved communities around the world.

The not-for-profit foundation will co-design accessible play spaces with underserved communities starting with Kenya, Nigeria and London. Its first project is in Lamu, Kenya. The foundation's model is collaborative: the spaces will not be the result of photogenic solutions delivered from afar, but rather they'll be shaped by the people who will use them.

He points to research on how play impacts children's mental and physical wellbeing, and recalls reading that it can even affect children's hair growth.

"There are kids in the world right now who are not playing at all. All they're experiencing is war, trauma, neglect. A big chunk of play is missing from their childhood."

The ability to experiment without immediate consequence; to make a world, dismantle it, and begin again is conspicuously rare for those in violence or displacement, he added.

Perhaps the work of joy is actually not such light work, after all. This is especially true for grown ups, Ilori added. "Sometimes people feel like they need permission to access joy, to play, or to dream."

"There's this kind of block — adults are not good at it at all."

Despite all this, Ilori is still trying to get people to "find beauty in the chaos and the lows." It can all be an argument for taking imagination more seriously.

Does "Chairman" also make that argument in miniature? A monograph about chairs might sound like a dry act of professional consolidation, but Ilori treats it as an opening: to look at the objects, communities and inherited rituals, and carry them into new spaces. The chairman of dopamine design is still assembling the room, seeing more seeds of joy to plant.