5th May - 15th July 2023
Botanical
Taking nature as their inspiration, this collection of makers come together to celebrate the wonders of the natural world around them; from using imagery of flowers and plants within their work to using natural materials themselves like flowers and wood, this show will highlight the marvels of life on earth and celebrate nature in all its glory. Featuring jewellery, ceramics, metal, wire, paper, mixed media, textiles and wood by the very best of contemporary craftspeople from the UK, the gallery continues to grow after its recent 40th anniversary.
Image: Ali Tregaskes
Jewellery...
Holly Suzanna Clifford
Holly considers her work to be wearable art. Each new piece is utterly different from the last. Vivid paintings are built up inside layers of eco-resin; creating awesome depth and life within the pieces. These elements are combined with hand-worked silver, resulting in extraordinary creations for people with an eye for uncommon treasures. Holly has shown her work at a wide range of contemporary craft fairs. Her jewellery & silverware is inspired by botanic gardens; the beauty of the plant life & the otherworldly, ethereal quality of glasshouses. Her ideas come from outside the realm of jewellery; illustration, great painters such as Monet and Klimt and old dioramic books.
Val Muddyman
Living by the sea provides Val with endless inspiration for her work - it comes from the landscape, and from the effects of the sea air and the tides. She is working towards being sustainable in her practice and has opted for cleaner and greener methods. To address the carbon footprint that results from the casting process, Val has recently begun to support and collaborate with community interest group Pollenize. Val’s collection relies heavily on collecting washed up seaweed from the high tide line on her local beaches which she then sculpts and has casts. Val has collected sea glass for many years and instead of adding precious gems she reworks the glass to make more ethical gems of her own. Val was presented with the Victoria Sewart Showcase Award. Val is also an Associate Member of MAKE Southwest and recently became a member of the Green Maker Initiative.
Antonella Giomarelli
Antonella’s work draws on her passion for gathering and collecting items and fragments from the natural world. The transience of delicate wild grasses is captured and given permanence in precious metals, highlighting their subtle texture, retaining their fragility. In this thoughtful presentation these humble finds can become objects of intrigue where jewellery becomes a lens into the natural world, drawing attention to a beauty that may easily be overlooked. Through this romantic narrative Antonella hopes to offer the wearer a greater connection to their natural environment. Antonella has been making jewellery for over 14 years, selling and exhibiting her work internationally.
Emma Leonard
Emma makes jewellery inspired by mid-century fabric prints and patterns and the shapes you find in cityscape architecture. “I like to imagine my work as tiny sculptures, adding pops of colour with hand-painted lacquers. I love seeing the angles where a stack of bangles cross and layer, or the contrast between polished silver and a flash of colour. Mainly I like making jewellery that makes people happy when they wear it.” Emma also enjoys teaching silversmith classes from her studio.
Ali Tregaskes
Ali is based along the banks of the River Wye, and specialises in nature inspired etched silver. Her work is rich in texture and detail, and is based on plant life, architecture and everything related to the sea. Ali long ago realised that being near to a body of water had become essential to her and her work. She specialises in creating etched silver jewellery, using her photographs to create the etchings. These are usually based on plant life, architecture and the coast. Ali particularly loves to oxidise her work, which highlights the definition in the etching. Ali’s collections are constantly evolving, and each piece is entirely unique due to the nature of etching.
Diana Greenwood
Diana is a jewellery maker endlessly inspired by the world around her. During a university design course, Diana accidentally fell in love with metal. With a Danish mother and a line of engineers on her father’s side, it seemed the perfect material to marry clean, Scandinavian design with technical possibility. Diana went on to study Silversmithing at the Royal College of Art and eventually found her way into making small pieces of jewellery. Diana’s garden and collection of vintage botanical prints are an endless source of inspiration as well as hours spent by the ice-rink in pursuit of her daughter’s passion for figure-skating. Her work is simple, contemporary and personal with the greatest emphasis on craftsmanship. Most of all, Diana loves to see jewellery gifted and worn by the person it was thoughtfully intended for. Diana is a Senior Fellow at Bishopsland Educational Trust and a member of The Sussex Guild.
Lindsey Mann
Working from her studio in the wilds of Wiltshire, Lindsey constructs jewellery using hand-printed anodised aluminium, precious and non-precious metals and a host of semi-precious stones and plastics. Since 2002 Lindsey's jewellery has been to places all around the globe and special pieces have been bought for both public and private collections. A number of her pieces feature in books and journals and Lindsey's own book ‘Coloured Aluminium Jewellery: design & make’, was published by A&C Black in 2010. Lindsey’s work is inspired by a combination of 50's style tin toys, games and interior decoration, with bold colour and surface pattern playing a key role. There is a toy-like quality to the jewellery which is enhanced by the addition of kinetic components such as tiny spinning propellers, swinging pendulums, or fragments of colourful plastic that wiggle when set in motion. The wearer can play and interact with the jewellery.
Catherine Woodall
“When you have a technical AND creative brain what do you do? Design and make jewellery, of course!” Initially Catherine studied engineering, followed later by art. For Catherine, making jewellery has been the happy combination of these two disciplines. Her jewellery is handmade in her workshop atop the Pennines. Surrounded as she is by Emily Bronte’s ‘high waving heather’ and the green wooded valleys, it is little wonder that Catherine’s work is inspired by nature. The veins of a leaf and the rain or dewdrop glistening on it are some of the details she has drawn down. Every piece is impressed with the texture of a real skeleton leaf and therefore every piece is unique. Catherine works with silver and semi precious stones and her work is inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement in both Britain and Vienna at the turn of the last century. “I love creating these wearable little bits of nature and I hope you’ll love them too.”
Papermetal (Julie Bailey)
Julie lived in Singapore as a child. Exposed to the richness of far eastern cultures, Julie began to make, construct, cut and arrange. Combining this early perspective with the later added skills of jewellery craftsmanship, fine art printmaking and working in gardens and with flowers, the editing and re-editing of surfaces, colours, textures and forms start to make sense. The interweaving of metal to paper and paper to metal evolving as a signature style around imprinting. “A realm of infinite possibilities is created by combinations and layers of a range of metals and surfaces, using hand-cut paper to emboss metals, patinas to delineate, edges to create dimensionality, wire and tube to navigate.” Julie’s style comes from; a Japanese minimalism, the refinement of France, the quintessence of Englishness or just the romantic wildish nature of a tinker? Either way, the work is individualistic and eclectic and once discovered hopefully is at once engaging. Now based in North Yorkshire, Julie has designed a collection for National Trust as their Artisan/Maker 2019, and is a Crafts Council Selected Directory Maker.
Naomi James
Naomi has been making jewellery since she was 14, and studied jewellery at Middlesex Polytechnic from where she gained work experience with Sarah Jordan at the Royal College of Art. After college she spent 18 months travelling, gathering stones and inspiration for starting her own business. Since then Naomi has enjoyed working in several shared workshops and has been at Rose Hill in Brighton for the last 19 years. Naomi has been a regular exhibitor at Dazzle exhibitions since graduating and enjoyed her time managing the London exhibition when it was at the Royal National Theatre in London. Many of Naomi’s designs use real leaves, plant structures and feathers to create natural textures on silver, giving her work a 'found' quality- almost as if the pieces were produced by a natural process. Naomi contrasts different textures of different plants and makes unique hand pierced colourful semi- precious stone rings.
Please note the images below may not necessarily be of work we're expecting for the show. Once the show starts we'll be adding photographs of what arrived and creating a Virtual Gallery Tour for you to enjoy too. Watch this space!
Ceramics and other media...
Claire Brewster
For this exhibition, Claire is launching her newer work consisting of unframed acid etched brass wall pieces based on the botanical. Traditionally, Claire uses old maps and atlases to create intricate and delicate cut-out sculptures and collages. She takes her ideas from nature, creating entomological pieces of flora and fauna, with the hummingbird being her main object of inspiration. Claire’s signature delicate paper cut work has been widely exhibited around the world from London to Sydney, and can be found in many public and private collections. With a career reaching over a decade she has noticeably mastered her craft. Nature is the main theme in her work: the birds, insects and flowers transcend borders and pass freely between countries with little regard for rules of immigration or the effects of biodiversity. The shadows created by her work create a dynamic three-dimensional quality, generating a feeling of movement.
Hannah Nunn
Hannah Nunn specialises in making lamps and tiny treasures laser cut from card. “I'm very excited to say that all these years later these lamps are creating cosy corners in homes all over the world and that they have been the making of my career as an artist.” This was the start of her adventures. The lamps led her to open a shop, write a book, exhibit all over and be part of a community of artists and makers navigating the boom of the growing internet. Hannah’s art allows her love of nature and making things to be at the heart of everything she does. It allows getting out in the woods with her camera or marvelling at a wild flower to become part of her every day. Hannah’s range of creations also include wallpapers, window films, books, laser cut 'treasures' and meadow bouquets. It's all inspired by the beautiful, tiny and fascinating details found in nature.
Leigh Shepherd
Leigh has been working as an artist and jewellery maker since 2007, since then her pieces have been exhibited at art fairs and in shops and galleries throughout the UK. Leigh works from her home studio in Haworth, West Yorkshire, creating a range of mixed media pieces, art cards and jewellery. A passion for upcycling and a desire to make affordable, quirky pieces has been her inspiration. Leigh loves visiting vintage fairs and antique shops, her home is full of vintage finds. She also loves to incorporate these treasures into her work. Leigh’s larger pieces are made from sections of typecase / printer's trays. Smaller pieces are made from vintage trinket pots, wooden boxes, tins, weaving shuttles, all sorts of things. Leigh has a huge fascination for bees and ferns, both feature in her mixed media pieces.
Jacqui Atkin
Jacqui Atkin has been potting for twenty years, and during that time the main focuses of her work have encompassed lowfiring techniques and especially resist Raku. However, in an attempt to move away from this extreme firing process, recent work has been exploring new themes to create subtle surface treatments where either texture is used to create movement in a background for botanical imagery or surfaces are refined to create an eggshell-like finish not unlike burnished surfaces of old. Jacqui has endeavoured to find a way of reproducing the very black surfaces created in Raku firing using engobes for dramatic colour variations. “I am essentially interested in clay as an art form rather than for its functional properties so my work is mainly decorative – something beautiful to look at rather than use. Increasingly the work becomes more sculptural and abstract because form and surface design developments are what interest me most. Each piece is unique.” Inspiration for form and pattern is drawn from many sources but the view from Jacqui’s studio window which looks out over her garden and the woodland beyond in rural Shropshire has the most enduring influence on her work, ever changing with the seasons, a rich palette of colour and shape.
Sue Dunne
Sue creates ceramic objects which are both beautiful and useful, each piece reflecting the natural environment "My work directly reflects my year-round fascination with natural history, particularly plant-life when it's wild. Over the months, seasons and years I have been building up a library of records in the form of moulds of pressed flowers, twigs, seeds, leaves, berries and feathers. I feel privileged that something as beautiful, but so flimsy and transient, as a flower can be given more permanence by my ceramic work. As well as through the colouration, the methods I use ensure that each piece is a separate and individual work of art rather than using 'mass-produced' identical moulds. Everything is twice- fired, the colour being applied before the second (glaze) firing at just under 1100 degrees C."
Leafsong (Sue Walsh)
Sue lives and works in North Yorkshire, using local plants to make unique ecoprinted designs, direct from nature. Through the slow art of botanical mark making on papers and textiles, an enhanced encounter with plants and their properties unfolds. “In my workshops, participants are invited to experiment with a wide range of plants and to discover the unique signatures that they offer. In the process of foraging, identifying and printing we discover the joy of a deeper connection to the natural world.” EcoPrinted textiles are made using leaves and flowers to create a contact print on beautiful natural fabrics. There is a huge variety of pigments and tannins present in foliage/flowers, which can be coaxed from them during the process. There are no paints or digital prints used in Sue’s process. She uses a wide variety of locally sourced plants here in North Yorkshire, both from my garden and the surrounding countryside. "Ecoprint is for me a dialogue with nature and my surroundings. One of my recurring themes is a sense of place and belonging which I record on cloth and paper. It can draw together sensory memory, that of a particular walk, or time of year in my garden or surrounding countryside.”
Wild Grey Art (Sarah McKenzie, Helen Knaggs)
Sarah McKenzie and Helen Knaggs developed their own little business, Wild Grey Art. Sarah trained as a jeweller and gained a degree in 3D design specialising in jewellery and silversmithing. Helen led a paper making workshop for many years at an arts and crafts centre for adults with different support needs. A move to the seaside six years ago inspired the pair to create freestanding mini sculptures and wall art from wire and driftwood. Their love of beach combing, flora, fauna and nature in general, inspires their creativity which is reflected in their work. Every piece of our wire work is original, every item is hand formed and manipulated. Their frames are all handmade too, just adding to the uniqueness of every piece.
Alison West
Alison specialises in hand thrown and slab-built porcelain tableware and vessels. The ancient process of Saggar Firing is used to create natural surface patterns with local organic material such as ferns, seaweed, leaves, grasses and naturally occurring minerals. Saggar fired ceramics are the result of mixing the elements to create unique, unrepeatable transference of colour, pattern and texture without glaze. Alison’s curiosity in ceramics was aroused whilst living in a traditional pottery area in Japan and encouraged her to explore the medium at greater depth. Alison trained with Bruce Chivers on her return to the UK. She is drawn towards the challenges of the wheel, the physicality of throwing and the capricious qualities of porcelain, a material she finds demanding and engrossing. Alison’s pots reflect the experience of living in Japan - she does not consciously aim to create Japanese style pots, but there is an influence of traditional form. She is inspired by work decorated by flame and fire that reflects the process of making and firing. Alison fires in a sagger (a container) packed with organic combustible material in which pots are buried. The sagger is sealed and placed in a gas kiln and fired slowly. The natural materials collected from Dartmoor and the Devon coast turn from solid to gas and transfer colour, pattern and texture to the pot. The combination of the elements permeate the clay and create unique, unrepeatable surfaces.
Laura Bird
Drawing influences from the ceramics of ancient civilisation, and adding a touch of her own humour, Laura’s beautiful objects, curiosities and ornaments are clever and easy on the eye. With a background in illustration, Laura creates one of a kind clay pieces with lots of patterns, character and a beautiful, narrative style. “I love that a pot can tell a story, in both the decoration and the form as well as being something useful, becoming part of our daily lives. I am greatly inspired by ancient art, particularly Greek, Roman, Mayan and Celtic and also African sculpture. I use a variety of clays, mainly stoneware, and handbuild all of my pieces.”
Mike Bentley
Mike Bentley has been turning wood for over 40 years, and concentrates on turning one-off pieces, working with more difficult or unusual pieces of locally grown timber – making use of the natural shape of the tree by exposing the grain or ‘defects’ within it in an interesting and/or sympathetic way. Mike particularly enjoys working with burned or damaged material, revealing the beauty within the wood and letting its shape and form suggest the design of the finished piece. All the timber he uses is either reclaimed or sourced locally in Yorkshire. Each unique piece is individually hand turned and then finished using natural waxes or oils. Occasionally, Mike will make something for you from your own tree.
Vallari Harshwal
Vallari makes small batch objects, tableware and lights in her home studio; “Clay is my forever muse and medium.” Vallari is drawn towards the unexplored aspect of a material and its processes and leans towards being non-conformist in her visual aesthetics. Handcrafting timeless, simple objects which stand the test of time brings her joy. Her work is an essence of her Indian heritage juxtaposed with her life in England. Conceptually, at one end she enjoys the visual aspect of illustrating moments of her life. This line of work is usually translated on homeware and tableware. All of her tableware is either wheel thrown or slab rolled by hand and crafted to compliment the illustrations she draws. At the other end is the need to mull, think, absorb to push the so-called limitations of clay as a material to make objects and sculptural lights.
Katie Almond
Each piece of Katie’s work is a canvas for decoration and collage as she combines drawings with found, vintage ephemera. Katie is inspired by nostalgia, paper ephemera, vintage textiles and a love of drawing. She has always been fascinated by objects that have a history. Nostalgic themes that Katie constantly revisits in her work are afternoon tea, the seaside, gardening, and my love of traditional blue and white pottery. The porcelain pieces she creates are unique, one-offs produced using a variety of slip casting and hand-building techniques. All incorporate Katie’s own drawings with found nostalgic imagery by using both hand painting and transfers, and many have the added opulence of gold lustre.
Sue Kirk
Sue and her husband Kirk have been working with willow since 1998, originally inspired by the sustainability of the craft and the benefits which willow brings to the environment. Kirk grows several varieties of basket willows on two plots located in King’s Cliffe. He and Sue both weave just a mile away from the willow beds at their workshop, The Old Brewery Studios. Here the home grown willows are woven into bespoke traditional and contemporary baskets for homes and gardens. Sue also teaches basketry from the workshop.
Please note the images below may not necessarily be of work we're expecting for the show. Once the show starts we'll be adding photographs of what arrived and creating a Virtual Gallery Tour for you to enjoy too. Watch this space!
Check out our Virtual Gallery tour and pictures of the exhibition below!
