I attended a film premiere about the work and life of artist William Turnbull by his son Alex Turnbull and it was a fantastic documentary exploring a number of questions.

During the interviews with numerous established artists (Anthony Gormley, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton), it became clear that he was, and still is, a very important and influential figure in the art world - on a par with Henry Moore. So why was he massively overlooked?

One of the possible answers is that he is one of the few abstract sculptors in UK. Even though we had over a century of modern art, some of it abstract, it seems that people find it difficult to relate to abstract forms. To understand and relate to abstract shapes one must have a capacity for abstract thinking and that is something that we will probably not see en mass in the near future. Most people like to look at things they can relate to; flowers, landscapes, human bodies, butterflies, skulls and even a shark in formaldehyde are easier to understand than, let's say, a square on a white background.

As bags become simpler and simpler, it seems that the canvas for expressing our personality has now become a humble piece of fabric called a scarf. It's versatility - not just as a piece that keeps our necks warm but also as a blanket, sarong and a gift - and it's accessibility from a price point of view, is making our leopard-print scarf a star seller on department store floors.

Often when asked which part of my design is influenced my the fact I'm Slovenian-born, I usually can't think of anything to say. Until recently, when I came across a book of photographs by Jan Kempenaers featuring "Spomeniks". Spomenik in Slovenian, Serbian and Croatian language this means the same thing: it is a word for a monument. In former Yugoslavia, "spomeniks" were raised to commemorate fallen partisans, prisoners of concentration camps, victims of the oppressor and to celebrate the heros of the revolution. They all came from the same era of Tito's socialist bloom; between the early Fifties and late Seventies. For the chosen sculptor to build those monuments it was a rare opportunity to express their vision of the brave new world in massively large scale, with no expenses spared. Mainly built from (so appropriate) concrete in futuristic shapes, inspired by constructivism, soc-realism and space age, I now realise that those sculptures have influenced my work immensely, perhaps far more than anything else I have ever seen.

The book Spomenik by Jan Kempenaers is available now.