Returning next weekend for its 20th edition in London’s Somerset House, the contemporary craft and design fair Collect this year provides a platform for more than 400 artists and makers whose work spans sculpture, decorative art, furniture and jewellery.
Organised around showcases by organisations and galleries such as Craft Scotland and Maud and Mabel, the fair prioritises work made within the past five years and is international in scope. This, says director Isobel Dennis, “allows for contemporary works to be rooted in a diverse range of craft cultures”.
As well as big names including ceramicist Florian Gadsby, furniture designer Max Lamb and set designer Shona Heath, there are newer names to discover, revealing the breadth of craftsmanship today. Here are six makers to watch out for.
Renata Cassiano Alvarez
Mexican-Italian artist Renata Cassiano Alvarez, exhibiting with gallery Thrown, creates exuberantly colourful ceramic sculptures that blend architectural forms with playful expression. Born into a family of archaeologists, she is inspired by the kind of historic artefacts she was surrounded by as a child. “I’ve always been fascinated by them and the hidden meaning they hold,” she says.
The motif of the arch and vault, which her pieces often return to, reference both pre-Hispanic Mexican and ancient Roman architecture. As well as visiting archaeological museums and sites for ideas, Alvarez — who is based between Mexico and the US — harnesses archaeological restoration techniques to finish her works. She praises the “possibilities and space for play” that clay offers her. “It has an expansive memory — it keeps all the movements we make with it,” she says. “I love all the languages it speaks. Clay is a multilingual material.”
Jean-Servais Somian
Working with fallen trees, including coconut, idigbo and ebony, Ivory Coast-based artist and designer Jean-Servais Somian crafts totem-like furniture. The works take their forms from the unique tree trunks sourced — often leaning or twisting in dynamic ways — into which Somian carves shelf openings or inserts drawers and cabinets. Many of his creations draw aesthetic influence from 20th-century artistic movements concerned with geometry, including Cubism, Constructivism and Modernism. His tall “Les Demoiselles” pieces are named after Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, while the “Cases” series makes reference to designer Charlotte Perriand, with bold rectilinear shelves and drawers in primary colours.
Somian, who is exhibiting with 50 Golborne, particularly loves working with coconut tree wood: “I love to play with its natural curves that derive from the sun and the wind,” he says. “It’s a real challenge because it is so hard and fibrous, but it is now a major part of my vocabulary.”
Steven John Clark
Since establishing his design practice denHolm in 2020, Melbourne-based Scottish artist Steven John Clark has been celebrated for his striking sculptural furniture. Working primarily in South Australian limestone — a relatively soft stone, Clark explains — allows him to produce “intricate free-flowing forms”.
His two tables on show with Charles Burnand Gallery demonstrate the range of expression working in this material can achieve: one piece, “Sister Dead Mental”, appears all in raw white, resembling a precarious stack of rough rocks on which a smooth, monumental tabletop rests; the other, “St Stanley Bearskin Table”, is a colourful and irregular assemblage, with childlike crayon drawings and spray paint. Clark enjoys the creative “game” of pushing his own practice, he says, at the same time as responding to the specificities of the spaces that the furniture is designed for.
Qiushuang Sun
Beijing-based metalwork artist Qiushuang Sun takes inspiration from traditional Chinese craftsmanship for his surreal, surprising teapots and tableware. In his “Reproduction” series, exhibited with BR Gallery, what appears at first glance like swiftly crumpled tin, is in fact carefully forged, rippling silver, covered in a sea of delicate hammer marks that belie its hard texture. “I use the disorderly nature of forging to give direction to the forms, arranging tiny marks to lead the eye and tell the narrative of each piece,” he says. “Every hammer mark acts like a path for ideas, filling the work with a feeling of movement.”
Sun enjoys how forging achieves complex shapes, and “transforms the material throughout the process,” he says. “I believe the creation evolves as I work, which directly connects to my inspiration from Chinese drawing and calligraphy.”
Jennifer Hickey
Irish ceramic artist Jennifer Hickey creates sculptures made from thousands of tiny, wafer-thin porcelain pieces sewn on to tulle. The arresting intricacy makes for pieces that invite careful observation and appreciation of exquisite craft. “It can take months to complete a work,” says Hickey, “but this slowness, repetition and ritual of making are essential to the work.”
The County Mayo-based artist — who is exhibiting with Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) — seeks to explore the rhythms and movement of nature, including its “fragility, translucency and ephemerality”. Her piece “Sweet Violet” draws links between the human heart and a seed, while also reflecting on ideas of birth and nurturing. “Return of Spring” takes the form of a suspended veiled light, referencing Mayo’s bog cotton meadows in spring. “It’s a plant that is uniquely symbolic of the Irish landscape,” Hickey says. “For me, it is a symbol of hope and beauty.”
Lin Yanxiong
Artist and furniture designer Lin Yanxiong makes his European debut with Charles Burnand Gallery, presenting sculptural pieces from his “A Window to the Past” collection. A black cabinet and table — made using xuan (rice) paper, steel, wood and natural urushi lacquer — aim to become “poetic vehicles”, he says, that transport the viewer to other worlds, playing with notions of the real and imaginary.
Each of the works is designed over months of hand carving, as well as mortise and tenon joining. The London-based artist, whose work is in the permanent collection of Shaanxi Grand Opera House and Xi’an Concert Hall in China, is influenced by Cubism and Deconstructivism, as well as objects from his childhood memories growing up in China.
March 1-3; somersethouse.org.uk
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