The ‘collect’ fair, organised by the Crafts Council at Somerset House, ran 27th Feb – 1st March. There were plenty of interesting pieces at the interface of art and design, often using materials innovatively. Here’s a sample:
Kobina Adusah: Kylix, 2025, at Gallery FUMI
A weightlifter as well as a ceramicist, Ghanaian Kobina Adusah says that every time he picks up a dumbbell in the gym, it reminds him of the weight the earth has. He sees his vessels as carriers of inherited knowledge, here of his mother’s work as a seamstress, hence the woven style of carving: pottery, unusually, meets textile, the kylix being an ancient Greek cup with a shallow bowl and a tall stem.
Nessie Stonebridge: Prey Pray, 2025, at Caroline Fisher Projects
On the back of her established painting practice, Nessie Stonebridge has developed a glazed stoneware language with echoes of Lucio Fontana’s early work, but exploring the relationship between predator and prey from her rural farm home in Norfolk. She uses a night camera to catch the action – and here too, although it’s light, it takes a while to discern the hunter above and planned victim below.
Olly Fathers with work from A Drop in Time, 2025
Olly Fathers, who has also come from a background in painting, now specialises in wood veneer, which he cuts and combines elaborately to subtle effect in his own spin on marquetry. In the ‘Collect Open’ section, he presented elemental forms made from bog oak carbon-dated to around 2600 BC, a rare material shaped over millennia as fallen oak lies preserved in peat-rich ground, slowly darkening and hardening.
Ebony Russell: Rococo Delight Flatware Vase, 2025 at Cynthia Corbett Gallery
Australian ceramicist Ebony Russell turns decoration into structure through a laborious process of piping stained porcelain as if she were dealing with a cake – it takes weeks due to the need for each ascending layer to dry in turn. The striking results, says her gallery, ‘amplify the politics of ‘too much’ and reclaim aesthetics long coded as feminine, frivolous, or excessive’.
Robyn Nield: Dibber, Small Spade, Shears, Fork, Blackberry Spindle andBrush with navelwort, 2025, at jaggedart
Kent-based Robyn Neild’s found gardening tools, embellished with delicately cast bronze botanicals, were a sell-out. I put that down to the wit with which what the tools are designed to control and encourage colonises them to the point of dysfunctionality – making for a neat twist on the assisted readymade.
Ewan Henderson: Megalith, early 1990’s, at Oxford Ceramics
Almost everything in collect is contemporary, but one exception was this example of the influential ceramic artist Ewan Henderson (1934-2000), incorporating volcanic glazes on his characteristic patchwork of mixed clays to yield a sort of painterly geology of forms. By the 80’s, he had moved on from building vessels to make free sculptural use of ‘fluxed earth’ – as he termed it, here inspired by ancient standing stones.
Minhee Kim: Seabream from Jeju, 2025, and other fish at Siat Gallery
Minhee Kim works with monofilament to reflect on Korean family rituals around food and shared meals – such as removing fish bones for loved ones – evidencing inherited gestures of care. She is showing several fish, which struck me as having another environmental aspect, given that they might well get caught in monofilament nets.
Daisy Collingridge: Unbridled, 2025, at House of Bandits
Internal and external come together originally in Daisy Collingridge’s sewn sculptures. Inspired by anatomical drawings, she has concentrated on the human form in a manner she calls ‘the squashy organic sanitised by soft fabrics and wadding’, but crosses most of the way into the animal world here while retaining the colouration she uses for people, as well as the cosiness with a disquieting edge.
Deborah Timperley: Waterfall in crisp noon light and Larch forest at golden hour, 2025, at Design Nation
Deborah Timperley illuminates cast glass to convey landscapes in specific atmospheres and lights, with blocks of colour echoing the hues of land, water and sky. She showed rocky sculptures based on photographs taken in the Slovenian Alps: here, a sparkling mountain waterfall tumbling into a pool, surrounded by pink and green wild heathers; and a late autumnal afternoon on a forested mountain.
HIROKI with Eden, 2023, at HIROKI / White Conduit Projects
Kyoto-based artist and restorer HOROKI joined with White Conduit Projects to show both his own work and his transformative repairs to work by Daphne Wright, Jane Bustin, and Rosa Nguyen. His wall sculpture has a reversible surface crafted from lacquer and platinum on wood and can be repositioned and reassembled in various ways, ‘echoing the changing dynamics of human relationships’. He collaborated with Wright to repair two broken butterfly sculptures in sympathy with her preferences, but still employing the kintsugi principle of highlighting damage to celebrate, rather than disguise, the object’s history and imperfections. Those are now paper antennae, by the way…
