The day after the opening of Studio Iron, Isamaya Ffrench’s new exhibition at Saatchi Yates, Instagram is filled with images of the eclectic works occupying the space: a latex dress hanging above a plate of cracked eggs – replaced periodically by the gallery team – a feminine cyborg-like figure sprawled across the floor, and a large, inviting glossy-panelled bed.

The night before, the London gallery was packed for the opening of Ffrench’s first move into art curation. Known for a throughline of creative direction across beauty and fashion, the shift feels like a natural one. As she explains, “creative direction is already about constructing worlds, sequencing ideas, and shaping how something is experienced. Curating applies that thinking spatially and materially – working with objects and people rather than images alone. It allows for a slower, more dimensional form of storytelling.”

Named Studio Iron after Isamaya – which means “Iron Strength” in medieval Germanic – the exhibition also introduces her forthcoming Studio Iron Gallery. “It made sense to carry a sense of who I am at my core, plus my love for raw materials, particularly metal... and the music genre of course,” she explains. The design gallery and concept store is set to launch later this month, with a focus on artists working in the “liminal space of art and design.”

Ffrench’s work has long leaned into industrial and dystopian aesthetics, and that sensibility carries through here. She expands on this relationship to material, telling us: “[the materials] tend to strip things back to structure and function. There’s an honesty in materials that have been pushed or stressed.....metal, latex, treated surfaces - that reveals process rather than concealing it.”

Many of the works in the space feel textured and cold, from Anne Imhof’s bronze bench to a strap-leather wall embossed with “XANAX”. “Those aesthetics also sit slightly outside comfort, which can make people look more closely,” she adds. “It’s less about dystopia as a theme and more about the clarity that comes from reduction and tension.”

While online coverage offers a glimpse of the works on display, many of the exhibition’s subtleties are best experienced in person – like the pairing of older works with more contemporary pieces, placed in deliberate sightlines with one another. It’s a considered approach, one that reflects Ffrench’s freedom of thought. “I don’t have any formal training in anything – just a longstanding experience across different creative industries and practices so the show highlights placing works in proximity that wouldn’t usually be seen together.”

One notable example is an impish statue of a Pinocchio-like boy by artists 4_F_S_B and Tom Schneider, which stands proudly in front of a 17th-century oil painting. Ffrench goes on to explain, “It’s not to provoke for its own sake, but to create a dialogue where meaning emerges through contrast. The idea was to build an environment rather than a display: something that asks the viewer to reconsider value, authorship, and use.”

Throughout the exhibition, that approach is pushed further: five leather stools, soil, and “the artist’s hair” are grouped in a circle, while a furry, growling wolf at the entrance appears almost inviting to touch. “Some pieces are displayed almost as if they could be activated.... sat on, worn, handled- while others are deliberately withheld. That ambiguity is intentional. It reflects the idea that function completes the work, but you have to build a relationship with it first.”

Beyond the exhibition itself, Studio Iron Gallery is conceived as part of a wider way of working — one that extends beyond the typical gallery format. Ffrench points to independent studios, small-scale exhibitions and cross-disciplinary collaborations as the spaces where the most interesting experimentation is happening. It’s in those spaces that work can remain open longer, producing more unexpected results.

It’s with that in mind that she hopes Studio Iron Gallery becomes a space that supports emerging voices and helps shape cultural positioning. “The intention is to build an ecosystem where curation, design, and creative direction feed into one another and where ideas move from concept to object to context.” Essentially, she says, it will be “a platform that produces as much as it presents.”

Studio Iron runs at Saatchi Yates 30 April – 7 June.