Global gathering: 9 makers at Collect inspired by their local environments

From the Berlin Wall to rural Australia, makers from around the world are creating works inspired by their local environments for this year's Collect art fair in London, which runs from 25 to 27 February. We take a whistle-stop tour.

Souraya Haddad Credoz, Pik’d

For ceramicist Souraya Haddad Credoz, making has been a way to reflect on events in her native Lebanon. ‘After the explosion on 4 August 2020 [in the Port of Beirut], I made spherical forms on the wheel and took each in my arms and hugged them. Those spheres were embraced and deformed by uncontrolled love.’ The half-crushed sculptures were then glazed in a variety of colours, ranging from serene celadon blues to virulent, dripping yellows.

One such piece will go on show at Collect with Beirut-based gallery Pik’d. To create a handbuilt work, Credoz ‘used layers of clay strips, gathered and altered – like all the people who amassed on the streets to show their solidarity after the blast had blown up everything.’ Despite the upheavals afflicting her country, the ceramicist has nevertheless found a ready audience at home. ‘People are very receptive – they understand that we can fight using beauty in the chaos. With art, we have hope.’ She adds: ‘Art is the best response to violence.’

Cho Sungho, Lloyd Choi Gallery

After finishing a metalwork course in Seoul, followed by jewellery studies in Germany and Italy, silversmith Cho Sungho returned home to South Korea, where he encountered a fragment of the Berlin Wall installed in a local park. He attached a thin sheet of wax to the fragment, then rubbed it to imprint the texture, before using the lost-wax technique to cast it into sterling silver.

He hammered and soldered the resulting silver sheets together to create various iterations of vessels. ‘As a Korean living in the world’s only remaining divided country, I produced the work using the motif of the Berlin Wall with the desire for the unification of the Korean Peninsula.’ Lloyd Choi Gallery will show these alongside other pieces focused on texture. The artist adds: ‘I want people to participate by touching my vessels with their hands as well as looking with their eyes.’

Yusuke Yamamoto, Ruthin Craft Centre

‘My work is a manifestation of my everyday observations,’ says silversmith Yusuke Yamamoto. ‘Everything that I experience in life has the potential to be translated into my practice.’ To create his hammer-raised and chased silver pieces, the Japanese artist draws extensively on scenes of nature in the rural hamlet where he lives, on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. Ruthin Craft Centre will display around 10 pieces inspired by forms and textures noticed in his environs. These include a centrepiece titled Dappled Garden, and Llwybr Defaid (Sheep Track), a small but intricately chased and engraved silver beaker, featuring 24-carat gold nunome inlay.

‘I came across markings in the ground near my house, which had been made by sheep. I found a beautifully irregular yet repetitive patterning that led to this beaker,’ explains Yamamoto. Likewise, Dappled Garden is a swirling evocation of natural patterning. In this case, memories of freshly fallen autumn leaves in the garden of his first home in North Wales – a cottage on an old estate surrounded by forest – inspired its mesmerising composition.

Annette Marie Townsend, Ruup & Form

Annette Marie Townsend Ruup & Form Cardiff-based wax artist Annette Marie Townsend looked close to home when making plans for Ruup & Form’s Collect presentation. Working in collaboration with the National Museum Cardiff during lockdown, she used beeswax collected from hives on the roof of the museum to create Alien, a series based on the pressed plant collections housed below in the Welsh National Herbarium.

Each delicate wax sculpture is rendered with the painstaking realism of a scientific illustration – no surprise, given that Townsend spent many years working in museums, preserving, documenting and storing scientific specimens herself. ruupandform.com

Pippin Drysdale, Joanna Bird

‘It is the feelings and moods of a place that spur my creativity,’ says ceramic artist Pippin Drysdale, who has long mined the landscapes of her native Australia for inspiration. ‘I’ve travelled extensively throughout central deserts and northern areas of Western Australia – the Kimberley and Pilbara have particularly inspired me.’ Rare Earth Marbles, on show with Joanna Bird, draws on a striking geological spectacle: Karlu Karlu/Devils Marbles, enormous granite boulders that are sacred to the local Warumungu people. ‘The rocks have a brooding and awe-inspiring presence. This series was the first time I have tried to convey a granite landscape – to do this effectively, I felt impelled to use closed forms, applying lustres to better depict the character of the granite.’

The result are mesmerisingly smooth porcelain sculptures with gold and platinum lustres. ‘Travel in recent years has been constrained, so my inspiration largely comes from memories. I’m still on a mission to perfect the art of sharing my feelings about the beauty and the importance of these places.’

Duke Christie, Craft Scotland

‘The natural environment surrounding my home and studio in Moray is a constant source of ideas,’ says furniture maker and sculptor Duke Christie. ‘There’s the Cairngorm mountains to the south, the Moray Firth to the North, and the rivers Spey and Findhorn meandering through the rolling hills.’ For Craft Scotland’s display, Christie is preparing wall panels, vessels and furniture inspired by the forms and textures of this local landscape.

Each is created using timber sourced responsibly nearby, which he shapes and carves using both hand and power tools, enhancing surfaces by torching, scrubbing or pigmenting, to tactile effect. ‘I take my lead from the grain to make objects that celebrate wood,’ he says. These objects range from Christie’s shell-like Limpet sculptures, each carved in wood from a single wind-felled ash tree, and Coriolus, a sculptural wall panel inspired by the turkey tail bracket fungus, through to a cabinet with sinuous lines recalling the serpentine course of the Spey.

Alan Meredith, Design & Crafts Council Ireland

Oak means more to Alan Meredith than most. The Irish maker, whose practice spans wooden sculpture, furniture and public space design, uses oak sourced near his studio in County Laois, located in an area called, appropriately enough, The Oak. Here he works from a stone outbuilding on the family farm. ‘This is where I grew up, with natural materials all around,’ he says. ‘It gave me an appreciation for labour and honest physical work – and the sense of achievement they can bring.’

For his Burl Dearcán vessels on show with the Design & Crafts Council Ireland, Meredith drew on the oak tree’s symbolic power. ‘Dearcán is the Irish word for acorn, which for me is the epitome of potential. It is the potential of oak as a material – its structure and its texture – that I hope to explore in these works.’ Each vessel is made by lathe-turning solid oak to a very fine thickness, then steaming it to render the wood more malleable. This process allows the wood to be bent into elegant folds, while the use of burl oak means that the outcome, while polished, is still full of textured knots and character.

Alice Kettle, Candida Stevens

For Collect, gallerist Candida Stevens challenged her artists to create works that react to the fair’s setting in the historic Somerset House. Textile artist Alice Kettle’s response was Flower Queen, a stitched portrait of Anne of Denmark (1574-1619), James I’s Danish wife, who made Somerset House her home. The royal is depicted in joyous hues, alongside bright blooms that connect to another recent inspiration for the artist: the garden. After she moved to the Somerset countryside on the day of the first lockdown, Kettle felt her world shrink. Like many others lucky to have outdoor space, she turned to gardening, finding that ‘watching seeds grow was like watching hope’.

In works such as Flower Dress – another stitched panel on display – people and plants coexist, reflecting on the idea of a shared world. Flower Dress is a portrait of Anne Macbeth, a pioneering embroiderer at Glasgow School of Art and early 20th-century suffragist, to whom Kettle is related. ‘Anne represents women empowered by embroidery,’ she says. ‘We engage with the world through thread, we find our voice, we transform the world.’

Te Rongo Kirkwood, North Lands Creative

Glass is not a medium we tend to associate with clothing, but for Te Rongo Kirkwood, combining textiles and glass makes sense. The New Zealand-based artist drew on influences spanning her Māori, Scottish and English descent to create her Ka Awatea series of wearable artworks, which will go on show with North Lands Creative. Each piece is made from plant fibres and processes used by Māori weavers, and adorned heavily with small panels of kilnformed, cold-worked glass replete with symbols and patterns.

Ka Awatea is based on the warrior’s cloak, which is called a kahu toi. ‘I love its protective nature,’ says Kirkwood. ‘But I’m coming to it from an applied arts perspective, so I see the beauty and magnificence of the form, and I see how I can add layers of story using another material – glass – which is so elemental, being made from sand.’ Their densely layered panels represent ancestral lineage and interconnectedness – ‘strings of memories and consciousness, passed down through bloodlines and DNA’