10 highlights from Harewood Craft Biennial 2024
The Yorkshire stately home has once again filled its grand interiors with contemporary craft by a host of inventive makers shedding light on its history and collections
The Harewood Biennial strives to offer new perspectives on the interiors, collections, and landscapes of the grand country house near Leeds where it takes place – asking contemporary makers, artists and designers to unpick its history and its relationship with visitors.
For its third edition, curator Ligaya Salazar chose to explore the power of craft to bring people together, affect social change and facilitate community connections. Work by 16 practitioners and collectives are nestled among its opulent interiors and across the landscape. Some of these look inwards, at the colonial connections of the house, which was built using wealth from the slave trade, while others use the space as a stage to imagine different ways of interacting and connecting.
Work by major names such as Hew Locke, who is showing an embellished Parian bust of Princess Alexandra of Denmark – part of his Souvenir series that adorns and subverts representations of royal figures – sit alongside emerging makers such as Rosa Harradine, who has created a display of her handmade brushes, and the works of Common Threads, an embroidery collective spanning between the UK and Pakistan brought together by textile artist Alice Kettle.
Furniture designer Kusheda Mensah’s installation of seating is designed to allow people to sit, linger and read indoors, while Venezuelan artist Lucia Pizzani has erected fallen tree branches and ceramic sculptures in the garden, where they will slowly be embraced by live plants. Rebecca Chesney, has made an outdoor installation of windsocks out of abandoned tents salvaged from music festivals, while inside the building Temitayo Ogunbiyi has installed a climbing-frame-esque installation made of manila rope and steel whose sinuous form has multiple references, from flight routes to botanical forms.
Here are 10 artists whose work caught our eye:
This non-profit artists collective from Dhaka has recreated a Bangladesh street market out of ceramics, textiles and metal – a mindblowingly intricate work that is part of an ongoing project called Rasad, previously exhibited at the Documenta festival in Kassel in 2022. The material choices themselves carry meaning – such as the cartons made of razor blades. Meanwhile wry messages on the packaging, such as the milk jars emblazoned with the logo ‘E.coli’, comment on the global politics of food, trade, extraction and consumerism.
Read more about the connections between food and craft in our Tastemakers series
Wax-cast bronze pieces by Emefa Cole. Photo: Drew Forsyth
The jewellery maker and V&A curator has turned her hand to sculpture, creating wax-cast bronze pieces inspired by the baobab tree, which is found across the African continent and seen as a symbol of survival in hostile environments. The Ghanaian-British artist, who is known for her ethical sourcing of metals and gemstones, created the works as a response the history of Harewood House, which was built by slave trader Henry Lascelles. Cole’s sculptures nod to the resilience of the people whose blood was spilt to create the building and grounds in which they sit today.
Listen to our conversation with Emefa Cole at Collect art fair
The Welsh artist is working to revive the heritage craft of brush and broom making, using natural, sustainable materials. Her playful installation, Fibre and Form, asks questions about the boundaries between functional and decorative objects – the brooms are displayed on the walls, as if ready to pluck off and use, but closer inspection reveals that some of them are too impractical to be effective.
The Beirut-based collective worked with designer Hamza Mekdad and a diverse group of other craftspeople to create a set of artworks in different materials that reference the importance of the Corinthian capital as a motif in everyday Lebanese everyday life – appearing in everything from kitchen vessels to design elements on coffee tables. Whether stitched, embroidered, hammered from metal or carved from wood, each object is unique and reflects the makers’ own interpretation of this ubiquitous architectural element.
For this London-based furniture maker, the unknown craftsperson was also a starting point. His installation – a commentary on the house’s complicated histories of wealth, trade and power – creates a dialogue between handcrafted wooden objects from Harewood’s collection (made by makers from Mali, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone), furniture originally made for Harewood’s by people at Thomas Chippendale’s London workshop, and Henzel’s own new works: a large-scale a mirror and console table made from British timber. Both pieces were produced using joinery techniques inspired by master artisans both in the UK and West Africa.
The Zimbabwean ceramic artist creates human-scale sculptures in bold colours and mesmerizing forms that comment on the colonial history of the country she was born in. Her new sculpture, Eye of the Beholder, reflects on Harewood’s collection of French Sèvres porcelain, which were established as markers of good ‘European’ taste in the Global South. The work asks us to question our own assumptions and choices when it comes to aesthetics, value and taste.
Layered Legacies, a hand block printed wallpaper, adorns the walls of one room at Harewood House, with motifs inspired by its own design. A Newcastle-based artist, Kambo was fascinated by the human touches she discovered around the building, including in the decorative loops on Robert Adam's plaster ceilings. Her work honours the anonymous makers whose skilled work unpins the decorative arts we take for granted in these settings.
The Kosovo-born artist has created an immersive environment of paintings, as well as carpets and embroideries created in collaboration with craftswomen in Albania, Kosovo, Burkina Faso and Suriname. They are adorned with his illustrative, cartoonish imagery that straddles folk art and the graphics of computer games.
A collective based in Antigua and Barbuda, Botanique Studios specialises in the traditional art of seed work – using tamarind seeds to create earrings, belts, table mats and other objects. Deeply rooted in the African history of the islands, it is a practice that the studio says was sustained by only a handful of people before it started its efforts at revival through workshops and exhibitions, striving to generate conversations about cultural heritage and resilience.
The design studio Arabeschi di Latte worked with ceramic artist Jo Woffinden to create Social Kitchen, a series of five ceramic dishes out of stoneware clay with a blue slip finish. The objects aim to highlight histories of communal dining and sharing – a chafing dish (which is designed to keep food hot at the table during feasts) is accompanied by four mugs that take inspiration from vessels designed for traditional British drinking games.
