Helen Chesner is days away from maternity leave, but there’s still a couple of things to do before she steps away – this interview, a photoshoot and then, finally, a pause. She and Isabel Gibson have been working together for over a decade as Isabel + Helen, for their London-based 3D design studio specialising in installation, spatial and set design. In that time they’ve navigated changing studios, taken on larger projects, and now, the balance of motherhood and their creative practice. “We’ve timed it pretty well,” Gibson says, laughing. After having twins last year, she recently returned to the studio, just as Chesner prepares to step back. But thankfully, their working dynamic is seamless, one picking up where the other has left off – which is a dynamic that has come to define their partnership, and their work itself.
Tucked behind Dalston’s leafy Curve Garden, their studio is located in one of the gentler East London enclaves. “It’s a little hidden gem, especially in the summer – you can go and have lunch in the garden,” says Chesner. They recently moved from Forest Hill, where they spent three years working out of a freezing space with concrete floors and big windows. The new location, though still industrial, has the benefit of heating. “A bit of a luxury,” Gibson admits. This transition reflects how their practice is always undergoing a constant process of adapting, shifting and refining.
Gibson and Chesner’s journey began at Chelsea College of Arts, where both enrolled in the BA Graphic Design Communication course. The programme's broad curriculum allowed them to explore various facets of design, but it was their mutual affinity for tangible, hands-on projects that truly connected them. "We have always been interested in the real and the physical,” Gibson recalls. “We both have a shared love of analogue." Post-graduation, Gibson honed her graphic design skills at Hotel Creative, a brand agency focusing on retail spaces and window displays for clients like Nike, while Chesner worked in set design at Storey Studio, crafting environments for photoshoots and engaging extensively in building and making.
In 2015, the duo received their first independent commission, which was an installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum. Setting the foundation for their signature aesthetic, the installation featured a geometric landscape of cubes and cylinders, rendered in primary colours reminiscent of the Soviet avant-garde. The structures were engineered to pivot, slide and rotate, allowing visitors to manipulate them and change the composition. Chesner explains, "We brought the shapes of the Constructivist movement into a 3D playground that people could play or interact with; they brought these shapes to life and made them move in different ways."
Today, Gibson and Chesner are known for their brand collaborations with clients such as Hermés, Dior and Burberry. For the latter’s Found Objects campaign in 2023, they designed a paddling swan, built from discarded materials like gloves and tubes. Brought to life with the help of James Dougan and Rich Luxton, the quacking swan was filmed gliding across a pond, powered by motion-driven propellers. A fleeting, digital spectacle, the piece was released on TikTok and engineered to draw attention in a fast-moving social media landscape. A year later, the pair created Rapha in Motion, an installation unveiled at London Design Festival as part of Past Forward: The Exhibition, celebrating Rapha’s 20th anniversary. Reminiscent of spinning bike wheels, the dizzying sculpture was inspired by the brand’s first merino-blend jersey and the energy of cycling. “We respond well to briefs and thrive on commercial work,” says Gibson. “We enjoy problem solving and mixing our aesthetic with the brands’.”
Beyond these commissions, the duo dedicate themselves to personal projects, exploring the limits of movement and materiality through installations exhibited at institutions such as Tate Modern and Vitra Design Museum. In 2021, they held their debut solo show at London’s Saatchi Gallery, In Orbit, showcasing hypnotic paintings generated by hand-assembled industrial contraptions. Unlike their commercial pieces, which are often dictated by brand identity and the need for immediate visual impact, these installations unfold at a slower pace, allowing viewers to spend time with the works and inviting a more meditative, immersive experience.
Yet whether for a brand or gallery, a fascination with movement lies at the core of their work – how it transforms objects, dictates mood and invites interaction. “We take functional objects or mechanisms and reconfigure them in a different way to tell a story,” Gibson explains. Chesner adds, “Because of our graphic design background, we’re drawn to bold, simple graphics that marry well with this functional, industrial aesthetic.”
Complimenting this ethos is a process that’s rooted in intuition and resourcefulness. They usually begin with sketches before translating ideas into maquettes, using materials such as wood or metal to explore different structural possibilities in 3D. If motion is involved, which is more often than not, they build prototypes and conduct tests to ensure that the mechanics are communicated effectively. Because of this, their studio functions as a workshop where ideas are tested, refined and sometimes completely reimagined.
“We have the space to be able to push the movement in a different direction and to keep testing, tweaking and changing. We use a lot of rough materials, which gives our work a handmade feel – and keeps it feeling playful rather than robotic,” Gibson says. They also keep a storage unit filled with materials from past projects, which they can dip into at any point and repurpose in new ways. “It’s always about using what we have around us, playing with it, reappropriating it, and creating something unexpected that changes its function,” Gibson notes.
In the early years, it was just the two of them and they would be involved in every project from start to finish. But as their scale expanded, they grew to a team of four and began collaborating with architects, 3D visualisers and fabricators to bring their concepts to life. “We would build everything, including simple mechanics. It was exhausting but a good learning curve, because it just made us more practically minded and helped us to understand how things work, what's possible and realistic,” Chesner says. “It takes a lot of testing and a lot of tweaking,” adds Gibson. “It's a very slow and probably not very efficient way of working, to be honest.”
But this openness to discovery allows their ideas to progress fluidly. “We don't always know the end result, so we just start making prototypes and develop from that,” Gibson continues. “It might take a new direction, depending on what’s working – experimentation informs the outcome.” They also document each phase meticulously, filming prototypes and movement studies before analysing them to determine what works best. Chesner sums up their philosophy simply: “It’s designing through making. That’s how we work.”
For Gibson and Chesner, movement is a language, and their practice is a constant study of how objects behave, how they can be altered and, ultimately, how they make people feel. “You can create all these different moods just by changing the speed or the type of movement,” Gibson notes. Their 2019 collaboration with Craig Green for Moncler Genius exemplified this approach. It took the form of eight jackets, treated as kinetic sculptures, manoeuvring as if they were alien creatures attached to puppet strings, suggesting the kind of protective wear appropriate for some apocalyptic emergency. Gibson and Chesner created two contrasting settings in which to present them. One was a dark industrial space with fast-moving figures, suggesting the relentless churn of a printing press. The other was a light, ethereal room filled with dancing inflatables. “The dark room was quite unnerving and a bit terrifying,” Gibson recalls. “Then you’d enter the bright, light room, and it was uplifting.”
Gibson and Chesner grew increasingly interested in harnessing natural forces – like wind and human movement – to create self-sufficient energy. A key example is their Power Suits project for the London Design Festival at the V&A in 2023. The project featured mechanical-looking flowers embedded in turbines worn as backpacks, with components that activated in response to the wearer’s movements – spinning, folding or generating small bursts of kinetic energy. “Instead of relying on external forces like wind, we were interested in how movement could be self-sustaining,” Chesner adds.
Among their many projects, there are two that stand out for them: their Folding Machines for fashion designer Craig Green and their upcoming large-scale installation for Coachella. Folding Machines saw the duo and their team physically operate mechanical sculptures to fold garments in synchronised motion, turning process into performance. “It’s nice to be part of the process and sculpture itself,” Gibson says. And while Folding Machines depicted the beauty of human interaction on a small scale, the Coachella Festival installation for April 2025 is their most ambitious yet – a towering 15-metre-tall kinetic sculpture inspired by 19th-century flying machines. “It’s going to be quite epic, because we've never done anything like it,” Chesner says. The sculpture will feature rotating propellers and people-powered bicycles. “It will feel like it’s about to take off and fly,” says Chesner. “The bikes have become part of the sculpture.”
Whether working at the scale of wearable sculptures or monumental installations, Gibson and Chesner’s process remains rooted in tactility and the joy of the unexpected. “We like to remind people that there is still magic in the real world,” says Gibson. “There's something about the human input that makes everything more relatable, more real,” adds Chesner. “You get these happy accidents that you could never plan or recreate in CGI.” Gibson agrees: “I think that's what people relate to. It feels more experimental.”
But for all the emphasis on the physical, their work is ultimately about connection – between materials, movement and most importantly, people. “It’s about being open to dialogue and accepting change,” Chesner says. Gibson echoes this, describing their working dynamic as a constant exchange of ideas rather than a battle for creative control. “We've never had arguments about who knows better, whose idea is best. It's always an ongoing collaboration.” That openness fuels everything they do, from kinetic sculptures to partnerships with designers, brands and fabricators – even a children’s book is on the horizon. “We're open to trying new things, and if they don't work out, we don't get too disheartened about it,” Chesner says. “We've had a lot of failures, but we get through it and get past them.”
This article is taken from Anima Issue 3, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here