British Craft - The Miami Edit
Referring to both the tactile and emotional qualities that craft evokes, this body of work by a selection of British makers demands the engagement of head, heart and hand. The innate tactility and sensorial materiality of craft is distinct and unique, and this presentation invites you to journey through and discover the pioneering processes these makers have employed to conceive this exciting showcase.
\nCreative Director, The New Craftsmen
\nBritish Craft – The Miami Edit was a curated selection of works by craft makers and artists at the forefront of current practice in the UK.
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Broken, Cleft, Thrown and Planed, 2017 by Sebastian Cox and Sue Paraskeva. Photography: By the artist.
The Miami Edit is a long running partnership between The New Craftsmen, the Crafts Council, Craft Scotland and Ruthin Craft Centre. The 10 makers were selected by The New Craftsmen and the Crafts Council from hundreds of submissions, each was chosen for their distinctive artistic voice, exceptional skill, and innovative approach to practice. Late in 2017, British Craft – The Miami Edit was shown at the debut edition of applied arts and sculpture fair FORM Miami, a new sister fair to SOFA Chicago.
\nIn response to a resurgent international interest in craft and in particular ceramics, the exhibition placed a strong emphasis on the discipline, with seven of the 10 makers presenting ceramic or ceramic-based works that reflect the limit-pushing ideas and pioneering approaches driving the practice forward in the UK today. One of the exhibiting makers – the raw-clay sculptor Phoebe Cummings – was named winner of the £10,000 Woman’s Hour Craft Prize.
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Four Seasons from the Early Life of Zenobius by Leah Jensen.
Up-and-coming maker Leah Jensen developed a pattern-mapping technique that allows her to recreate Renaissance paintings on the surface of her clay. For the Miami Edit – her first show outside the UK – Jensen spent 133 hours creating The Tribute Money, a new vessel in black/brown clay bearing a pattern inspired by the eponymous fresco by Masaccio.
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Forde Abbey by Katie Spragg
Ceramic artist Katie Spragg presents a place-responsive set of three clay and stone pieces inspired by the brickwork and wild flora encountered on her residency at Forde Abbey in Somerset in May this year. Her work features the area’s distinctive golden Hamstone and wild plants, weeds and grass delicately depicted in porcelain. These pieces were commissioned by Flow Gallery, London.
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Broken, Cleft, Thrown and Planed, 2017 by Sebastian Cox and Sue Paraskeva. Photography: By the artist.
Isle of Wight-based ceramic storyteller Sue Paraskeva and London designer-maker Sebastian Cox collaborated on a contemporary and intricately hand-decorated dresser made using English elm and hand-cleft chestnut shakes, and featuring suspended vessels in finely thrown porcelain, incorporating precious metals.
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Antediluvian Swag by Phoebe Cummings (clay, wire, steel), New Art Centre, 2016 (left). Photography: Sylvain Deleu.
Winner of the inaugural Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, Phoebe Cummings works predominantly in unfired clay, creating ephemeral, exquisitely detailed site-specific pieces that are destroyed and reclaimed at the end of each exhibition. At the Miami Edit, she presents a symmetrical composition featuring a photograph of a completed work, Antediluvian Swag, juxtaposed with a fragmentary display of its clay components: flower heads, leaves and branches.
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My Big Fat Sofa by Charlotte Kingsnorth
The work of industrial artist and designer Charlotte Kingsnorth reinterprets traditional materials and techniques to create unexpected forms and effects. For this exhibition, Kingsnorth revisited upholstery methods to create My Big Fat Sofa, a biomorphic seat that is both beautiful and unsettling in its organic, fleshy form.
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Lines by Lauren Nauman.
Ceramic artist Lauren Nauman works with plaster moulds and casting slips to make experiment-driven porcelain pieces that depend on the warping of clay in the kiln for their final form. At The Miami Edit, she showcased a selection of her Lines series of sculptural vessels, formed from curving strands of porcelain
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Group of Vessels by Ashraf Hanna.
Based in Pembrokeshire, Ashraf Hanna is an Egyptian-born designer-maker who works in both ceramics and glass, creating quietly elegant experimental forms. Four large, hand-formed ceramic vessels from his recent collections will be on show, displayed alongside Lauren Nauman’s works
\n \nTextiles artist Anna Ray presents Bloom (Marguerite), a sculptural fabric work created in homage to Maureen Hodge’s 1976 tapestry Hill for my Friend. The first of a series of five works, it depicts the centre of a daisy in soft 3D textile forms.
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Moulded and handbuilt earthenware and imitation gold leaf. Photo: © Philip Sayer, Courtesy Marsden Woo Gallery
Born in New Zealand and based in Glasgow, James Rigler uses ceramics to introduce notes of ambiguity to familiar or everyday forms. In Miami, he presents a selection of his more recent, experimental and instinctive work: playful, cartoonish pieces that incorporate gold leaf to create wood-like surface finishes. The inclusion of James Rigler is supported by Creative Scotland. James is represented by Marsden Woo Gallery, London.
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