Marc Fish

Marc Fish is a British designer and maker whose practice occupies the shifting territory between furniture, sculpture and collectible design. Based in Newhaven, East Sussex, he has spent more than twenty-five years developing an approach in which making, material research and technical invention are inseparable from design.

Fish did not follow a conventional route into the field. Largely self-taught at the outset, he developed practical skills through restoring and modifying classic cars, particularly early Volkswagens. The work required welding, metal fabrication, engineering and finishing, leading first to metal sculpture and then to furniture. One restoration, a 1951 Volkswagen camper, was subsequently acquired by Volkswagen for its museum in Wolfsburg. When the market for his early metal furniture contracted in the late 1990s, Fish turned to wood, completing City & Guilds training in furniture making and spending six months training with cabinetmaker John Lloyd in Ditchling.

Traditional cabinetmaking gave Fish a rigorous understanding of structure, joinery and the behaviour of wood, but conventional furniture did not provide the creative freedom he sought. Around 2009, he began working intensively with thin, knife-cut veneers, treating veneer not as a decorative surface but as a structural material. In the same year, he founded Robinson House Studio, conceived as both a working studio and a school in which contemporary design and high-level craftsmanship would be taught together.

The Nautilus table marked a decisive change in direction. Constructed from more than 4,000 individual pieces of walnut and sycamore veneer, the work translated the logarithmic spiral and chambered structure of the nautilus shell into a functional sculptural object. Its development established many of the lamination methods that would underpin subsequent bodies of work, enabling Fish to create complex curves without steam-bending or heating the timber.

Over the following decade, Fish pushed this language beyond the direct reference to natural forms found in works such as Nautilus. The One Piece works use continuous, fluid structures built through micro stack-lamination, while the Relics series explores the visual tension between polished, precious or reflective elements and rough, eroded organic surfaces. The Ethereal series introduced a further technical and conceptual shift: veneers are positioned vertically with resin poured into the spaces between them, producing translucent structures in which wood and resin operate visually as a newly integrated material.

More recent works extend this research through bronze, aluminium, lacquer, ancient bog oak and mokume-gane, while illumination has become an increasingly important means of shaping the atmosphere around an object.

Fish’s work has been exhibited internationally at TEFAF Maastricht, Design Miami, PAD London and FOG Design+Art. In 2024, it was included in Biophilia: Nature Reimagined at the Denver Art Museum. He has received multiple Bespoke Guild Marks from The Furniture Makers’ Company and twice received its Claxton Stevens Prize, in 2011 and 2019. Across these developments, his practice has moved progressively away from conventional furniture categories while retaining function, craftsmanship and direct engagement with the workshop as essential foundations.