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Charlotte Colbert’s playful and provocative meditations on female sexuality have become a signature of the London-based filmmaker and designer’s work. For this year’s London Craft Week, her life-sized tree with stainless steel bark, which explores themes of the body, dreams and the unconscious, takes root in one of the turbine halls in Battersea Power Station. It not only brings the annual event into innovative spaces, but intersects with other disciplines as it reflects the building’s fashion campaign.
It is a big, bold statement counterbalanced by teeny-tiny ones. For the first time, LCW will partner with the long-standing Kensington Dollshouse Festival that turns Kensington Town Hall into a world in miniature.
Featuring more than 400 exhibitions and 1,000 makers, LCW, now in its 11th year, offers a dazzling, if overwhelming, programme. The citywide showcase encompasses everything from shoemaking to silk weaving to suminagashi — the Japanese marbling technique being rethought in a new collaboration by artist Nat Maks and furniture maker Sebastian Cox.
The Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, lead sponsors, offers help in navigating the options; its Homo Faber Guide is searchable by area or craft. As well as highlighting many of the initiative’s artisans based in London — including glass sculptor Kira Phoenix K’Inan and guitar maker Daisy Tempest — Homo Faber is running two live demonstrations at the V&A on marionette-making and contemporary bookbinding, and a straw marquetry workshop at Newson’s Yard, a former timber yard in Pimlico Road dating back to the 1840s.
LCW founder Guy Salter’s top tip is the Secret Ceramics project, hosted this year at Christie’s. The exhibition will showcase some 100 for-sale works by both well-known and up-and-coming ceramicists — including Hitomi Hosono, Christabel MacGreevy and Claudia Rankin — but they will be presented anonymously. The artist’s identity will only be revealed after the piece is bought. The aim is to raise funds for ceramics workshops for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Last year the proceeds funded charity initiative FiredUp4’s studio in White City. “It’s life affirming how something so simple can make such a huge difference, giving purpose and igniting a creative spark,” Salter says.
There is plenty of international talent to discover too. Korean craftsmanship is once again in the spotlight via the Soluna Art Group at The Lavery (formerly Cromwell Place) in Kensington. Dahye Jeong, winner of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2022, will be weaving horsehair into mesmerisingly delicate 3D forms, inspired by techniques used in the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) to craft men’s headwear.
The arts hub is also hosting an exhibition about the traditional practices of the Bai people of Dali in the Yunnan province of China: embroidery, indigo textiles, ceramics, Dali dreamstones (marble slabs cut and polished to reveal extraordinary patterns) and silver explore the role of spirituality in nature.
No less bewitching, Wax Atelier will showcase lifelike and fragrant wax roses at its workshop in north London’s Abney Park, once home to more than 1,000 varieties. With workshops on wax flower-making, the show will reimagine the long-lost scents of an ancient rosarium.
London Craft Week, May 12-18
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