Some studios build one thing well. Isabel + Helen — the decade-old creative partnership of Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner — have spent ten years building almost anything, as long as it moves. Large-scale kinetic sculpture, wearable mechanical invention, set design, product design: the throughline isn’t a material or a medium, it’s a fascination with mechanics itself. Their new retrospective, Motion Sickness, opens at The Conran Shop for the 2026 London Design Festival (September 12-20).
A studio built around movement
The range of what Isabel + Helen have made over the past decade is unusually wide even by design-studio standards. Large-scale kinetic sculpture work includes an installation at Coachella 2025. On the wearable side, their Power Suits — mechanical garments engineered around motion rather than just silhouette — were shown at the V&A. Fashion collaborations have included a raft built with Moncler and a maypole woven by 16 dancers for Burberry. Smaller, quieter pieces exist too: a spinning egg holder is part of the portfolio alongside the room-scale installations, and much of the studio’s immersive work leans on deliberately low-fi, hands-on craft rather than digital effects — the mechanics are the spectacle, not a screen layered on top of them.
What’s actually on view
Motion Sickness is described as the first time the studio has shown its own process publicly — models, maquettes, and motion tests pulled from a decade of archive material, rather than only finished, client-ready pieces. For a studio whose public-facing work is almost always large, expensive, and site-specific, a show built around the working models and failed tests behind that work is a different kind of access to how they actually think.
Getting there
The exhibition opens at The Conran Shop as part of London Design Festival, which runs September 12 through 20, 2026 across venues throughout London. As of this writing the show hadn’t yet opened — it’s a genuinely upcoming event, not yet something visitable, worth checking back on once the festival is underway.