One of the exhibitions we’re most looking forward to visiting this season is Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends at Young V&A. Coinciding with the studio’s 50th anniversary year, the show promises to get under the skin of one of the UK’s most creative companies, exploring the storytelling and craft that bring their familiar and fantastical worlds from the sketchbook to the screen.
Visitors can create their own stop-motion animations, light a set, and even film live-action reference footage — the kind used by animators to plan a scene. In other words, it’s a rare chance to understand just how much material intelligence, skill and craft sits behind characters we think we know so well.
It also feels like the perfect moment to revisit our Material Matters podcast with Peter Lord, who co-founded Aardman Animations with David Sproxton in 1972. In the episode, Peter reflects on the early experiments in Plasticine that led to Morph, the breakthrough of Creature Comforts, and the development of a distinctly British stop-motion language that would later give the world Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run.
We talk about collaboration, metamorphosis as a storytelling device, the tension between craft and scale, and why Aardman has always been wary of chasing whatever looks most ‘Hollywood’. It’s a generous, thoughtful conversation about material, making, and building a creative culture that lasts.
Alongside the episode, we’ve now published an edited transcript of the full conversation on the episode page, making it easier to revisit key moments, explore Peter’s reflections in detail, and dive deeper into Aardman’s relationship with material and technology.
If you’re heading to Young V&A, or simply curious about how a lump of clay became a global creative language, this is a good place to start.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript here.
Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends is on at Young V&A until 15 November 2026.