It feels fitting to discover that sculptor and lighting designer Alex Randall works from a cosy wooden summerhouse, supplanted in the corner of a vast utilitarian studio in a railway arch near Wandsworth, when a mixture of country-club tradition and functional modernity is at the heart of her work.

Growing up in Devon, this corner of pastoral calm Alex has created in this urban setting makes sense, as she admits, ‘when I design I have to be on my own, which is easier in the country’. But, she says, re-locating for her original studio in a barn in Devon to this London space ‘hasn’t really affected me too much because I wouldn’t really call myself a city person anyway – I always stay out on the edge’.   

These days, mounted moose-heads are as common in trendy hangouts as they are in a hunting lodge, and as such, Alex’s initial acquaintance with stuffed animal was far from rural. ‘It was through Ted Baker that I started doing taxidermy’ she tells us, clutching a cup of coffee in her Wendy house in a workshop, complete with iMacs, a morbid menagerie of taxidermy birds, and a ten foot Freddie Mercury statue made entirely out of rawhide (more on him later). ‘I’ve done the lighting for most of their stores – Kuwait, Paris, two in Dubai, London, Liverpool, Turkey, Bristol, and we’re working on one in Panama at the moment’, she says. Avian decoration is at the height of fashion, literally, so Alex’s lights, which have featured everything from pigeons to doves, plus some land-borne animals too, are perfect for the likes of Ted. 

‘Taxidermy is probably what I’ve become known for because it’s really popular’, Alex notes, its increased appeal something she considers to be ‘a re-buff against minimalist living. Everyone’s just bored of it’. She continues, ‘I mean something like Ikea’s great and I have it in my own home, but people need some more character back in their homes, and taxidermy’s certainly got character!’. The popularity of taxidermy has worked out well for Alex, who says that ‘I approach making chandeliers like I would any sculpture, in that I like to use found objects’. She notes that ‘there’s all these animals being culled and just wasted, and I only use animals that have been culled’. Rather than seek out ’20 flamingos or something', Alex sources ‘stuff that’s already in freezers or going to be thrown away’. This of course means that there’s a distinctly British feel to the wildlife in her work – squirrels, and even rats have featured – although ‘I was trying to get my hands on the paraquets that they’ve been culling in Richmond park’, she says. ‘It seems such a waste to kill them and just throw them in the bin, so we’re working on that’.  

Alex’s love for animals extends outside of her work too. ‘When I was a kid I was fascinated by them’, she remembers. ‘We used to have this conservatory on the back of our house that the birds would fly into and die, so I’d have this little animal graveyard’. She laughs, ‘it sounds really gory, but death and dead animals have just never freaked me out. In fact, if I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be a vet’. She is keen to note too, that while she is not a vegetarian, ‘I’m very careful and picky about where my meat comes from. We’ve just got to be responsible about that sort of thing’. 

As well as some other notable pieces, including the stuffed squirrel lamps in London’s Riding House Café and a remarkable commission for Jemima Khan, involving thirty-six white doves holding a cage containing three crows and a hummingbird aloft, Alex’s portfolio contains plenty of non-taxidermy items. Most closely linked is a larger than life illuminated statue of Queen singer, Freddie Mercury, fashioned entirely from rawhide. ‘I was making all these rawhide shapes and I wanted to sculpt something big’, she explains. ‘I contacted the mayor’s office to see if we could use a statue in London, and they were like, no way, but my friend’s father, who is the manager of Queen had this statue of Freddie in Geneva, so we went and used that’. Creating the statue involved making a sort of leather paper maché. ‘You wet the rawhide and it goes stretchy like chicken skin, then you wrap it around the statue and let it dry naturally’, she explains. ‘There were about 40 different pieces coming back in the car – a boot, a hand. I was like, how do we explain this to customs if we get stopped!’. 

Of Alex’s work where no animals were killed prior to the making, there are the spectacular trombone light fittings at Camden’s Blues Kitchen, and she’s currently working on grammar phone Chandeliers for their new Hoxton branch, due to open soon. Plus, when the Panama branch of Ted Baker opens, Alex’s contributions won’t feature any wildlife. ‘There are a lot of problems with importing taxidermy’, she says. ‘We’ve had a lot of stuff stopped before’. 

Having studied sculpture at university, Alex is passionate about art and is adamant that there is a real place for ‘art just to be for the sake of art’. So why work on something as functional as lighting rather than straight forward sculpture? ‘For me it’s the crossover between usefulness and art, because not everyone’s got space for art alone – I like the playful nature between the two things’. Rather aptly, she says, ‘it’s like killing two birds with one stone’.