Simone Brewster

With one question printed on each card and using only a pen to answer, here are her responses.

We’ve partnered with Winsor & Newton to bring you interviews with top designers from around the globe. Each designer was given a 0.8 WN Fineliner to sketch answers to a variety of questions.

In this addition of Design Dialogues, we spoke with @simonebrewster_london, a London-based artist and designer whose work merges craft with cultural storytelling. Drawing from her Caribbean heritage, she explores “intimate architectures”—the interplay of texture, shape, and memory—bridging Western and African visual languages. Using only a pen, here are her responses.

Simone Brewster is an artist, designer, educator, and cultural changemaker. Strongly grounded in craft, Simone uses her creative outputs as her voice, celebrating and sharing windows into diverse Black female narratives and histories. Born and based in London, UK, her work displays a balance of function and beauty, repurposing both the “ethnic” and the “Western” while continuously experimenting with scale, materiality, and architectural form. Brewster is the winning artist of the London Design Festival 2023 Festival Commission and the Now Gallery 2023 Design Commission.

Her pieces explore “intimate architectures,” a term she uses to describe the relationship between texture, shape, and volume, and their impact on memory and emotion. As part of the Caribbean diaspora, her work sits at the tension points between Western and African visual languages, bridging the gap between these two histories and the materials, shapes, and forms inherently imbued with culture and history.