Georgia Merritt Returns to M Kardana with Five Sculptural Furniture Works

By Elena Vasquez

Designer Georgia Merritt has opened Refrain, her second solo exhibition, at antiques dealer M Kardana on Hackney Road in east London. The show runs from 9 to 31 October 2026. It presents five sculptural furniture pieces informed by 18th-century architectural mouldings and musical staves.

Merritt is a rising name on the London scene. She featured in Dezeen's London Design Festival Dispatch lineup of the city's emerging talents and showed with Max Radford Gallery at London's Collect fair in February.

The venue itself is part of the concept. M Kardana, a 20th-century antiques shop at 188A Hackney Road, was stripped back to form a gallery setting for the works.

"My pieces can be read as furniture, but equally as sculptures, or propositions for an interior," Merritt told Dezeen. "Showing them at M Kardana, within the context of an antiques dealer, plays on that ambiguity."

What is on display?

The five works draw on the precision of musical notation and architecture.

• A slim, wall-mounted mirror flanked by two black lacquered doors on full-length piano hinges. The birchwood doors read as solid stone through Merritt's hand-painted trompe l'œil faux marble.
• A delicate wire lamp, hand-formed and encased in an ellipsoid shade of silk organza overlaid with gazar, set on a stainless steel frame with a central rectilinear tray.
• Underscore, a sweeping bench carved from sapele wood, supported by a single leg at one end and resting against a wall at the other. A glass tablet sits atop the leg.
• A low-slung glass table topped with an elongated canopy of ivory silk, clamped to the upper panes with stainless-steel arms.
• A second full-length wall-mounted mirror with piano hinges, finished entirely in black lacquer.

Merritt designed the bench to visually interpret a glissando — the musical term for sliding from one note to the next. "The bench's profile recalls both Georgian architectural mouldings and the parallel lines of a musical stave," she said.

Of the black mirror, she said: "When closed, the mirror's doors form a monolithic, modernist silhouette."

How did the faux-marble technique develop?

Merritt developed her granular painting process during a gilding apprenticeship. She completed it in 2020, while struggling to find work as a fine art graduate. That apprenticeship-born technique now defines her practice of hand-painting timber to imitate stone.

A second chapter at M Kardana

Refrain follows Merritt's first solo show, Vague Precision, held at the same dealer in 2023. She defines her practice as art as much as design, and says the new exhibition marks progress in that trajectory.

"I think I'm continually working towards expressing something that I can sense quite clearly but can't necessarily define," she said. "With this exhibition, I feel a little closer to it."

Merritt wants her pieces to hold what she calls an "ability to move between different contexts, whether that's a gallery, a domestic interior, or somewhere else".

"I like the idea that their identity might shift slightly depending on where they're placed," she said.

The takeaway: a five-piece show in a stripped-back antiques shop extends Merritt's argument that furniture, sculpture and interiors are one continuous proposition.

Refrain is on display at M Kardana, 188A Hackney Road, London E2 7QL, from 9 to 31 October 2026. Photography is by Tazy Jessett Nash.