The Design-Nation team is excited to be welcoming our biggest intake of new members since 2022. Over thirty impressive designers and makers have recently joined us, or have upgraded their membership, some as the result of very well deserved awards. Read on and follow the highlighted links to find out more about these talents, who between them represent many craft and design disciplines, and some intriguingly complex practices that explore diverse materials.
Award Winners
Caroline Wheeler and Rosie Lee Hood were selected for Green Grads, our favourite sustainable design awards, where they received our Graduate Innovator awards for 2023. Trading as CLAW (her initials), Caroline is an interdisciplinary artist and jeweller responding to matters of social and environmental concern through object, installation, and time-based art. Rosie Lee Hood is a lighting and textile designer whose love of traditional craft underpins her passion for British wool, a passion that stems from her Yorkshire upbringing. Rosie’s designs are charmingly named for breeds of British sheep.
Last month Design-Nation Graduate member Natalie McCormack won the 2024 Collect Open with Harmony, her biggest yet textile art project, also inspired by Yorkshire’s landscapes. Natalie designs and makes her work in her Wakefield studio using only organic materials; these she dyes using locally foraged plants, then uses weave and stitch to create subtly hued pieces. Natalie trades as Botanica Textiles, and in recognition of her achievement will become a Professional member of Design-Nation. Massive congratulations to Natalie!
Wood
We have two new Associates creating in wood: Alex Botes makes charming boxes in a contemporary take on the traditional skill of marquetry, while Philip Gay of Timber Robot Studio skilfully creates playful furniture informed by his years as a propmaker in the film industry.
Textiles
Alice Joan Woven is the label of Alice Noble who weaves attractive and functional fashion accessories in complex designs inspired by her love of space exploration. Carola Van Dyke‘s exquisite pieces are new takes on the decorative arts: she uses minute machine stitches and sophisticated colour blends to recreate nature. Alice and Carola have joined as Professionals.
Becky Brentnall is a new Graduate, completing her degree in surface design from Staffordshire University last year. Her nature-inspired work combines abstract mark making, hand painting and screen printing, and was shown at Green Grads 2023.
Our new textile Associates are Samantha Boot who hand stitches vintage household fabrics and linens to create subtle pieces imbued with narrative, and Sharon Kearley, a former Graduate member, whose weaving investigates the potential of emotional, physical and hidden lines within landscapes.
Stone Carving
Stonework is a rigorous and beautiful discipline with a long history that we don’t see enough of, so we are excited to have no less than three makers join us now. After a degree in painting, sculptor Zoë Wilson trained in historical stone and letter carving, and is now known for her precise geometric compositions. Zoë joins as a Professional.
Ambrose + Goulding is a brand new venture from artists Moss Ambrose & Philip Goulding O’Brien whose join as an Associate member. Moss and Philip work primarily in reclaimed limestone, sandstone or slate, relishing the unpredictable natural inclusions and flaws. They also incorporate traditional glass working, in pieces suitable for the outdoors.
Lighting
New Associate Chris Parker Day makes statement lighting using blacksmithing, engineering and jewellery techniques. He draws on over three decades of metal working, creating functional pieces with an industrial feel.
Jewellery & Metalsmithing
We welcome three new Professionals working with precious metals. Jade Mellor makes wearable sculptures with ethically sourced and recycled gold, silver and gemstones, celebrating the raw, imperfect beauty of natural history, geology and archaeology. Katie Watson is a silversmith making beautiful tableware and brooches inspired by the natural splendours of Northumbrian woodlands and Scottish coastlines; she translates her fine drawings through skilled techniques such as chasing and repoussé. Studio Katherine James is moving up from Graduate to Professional with a concept-driven collection of wearable and sculptural metal pieces, re-imagining chain-mail armour to explore issues around gender and mental health.
Graduate jewellers Lindsay McDonagh and Sugandh Makwana have studied at the Jewellers Academy and Central St Martins respectively. Lindsay has a background in architecture, film and photography, and makes mainly solid silver pieces that play with contrasts between delicate and chunky, with moveable and reversible elements. Sugandh’s underlying intention is to modernise Indian jewellery through innovation in form. Her recent collection ‘Euphonious Seasonality’ explores her key cultural experiences of food and dance, through the warmth of remembered Kathak hand gestures she learnt as a child.
Glass
Hassina Khan graduated with a masters from the University of Sunderland in 2022: her kiln-formed pieces are composed of transliterated texts between Urdu and English that consider her English-Pakistani background. Hassina’s award winnng practice includes the Glass Society Prize Residency at the National Glass Centre in 2023 where she made new work exploring loss.
Sally Scott is curently studying Design Crafts at De Montfort University and loves the boundless interrelationships that glass enables, between opacity, colour and light. Sally joins as an Associate.
Ceramics
Ceramics always plays a strong part in the Design-Nation portfolio and we are now joined by nine new makers exploring this elemental material.
Two new Professional potters join us. Alison Waters Art is based in Stockport and her sculptural vessels convey a strong sense of place, and the layered histories of the industrial north. Beverley Sommerville has a split practice, with one body of work ‘matter’ exploring nomadism and travel, while the the other ‘no matter’ references the Cheshire landscapes surounding her studio in pieces that play with form, detail and domestic ware.
Gemma Smale‘s material based practice is exploratory. Her current experiments include waste materials such as wood ash, iron scraps from local blacksmiths and local clays that would otherwise end up in landfill. Gemma has a 1st class honours degree from Central St Martins, graduating in 2023.
There are six ceramicists joining as Associates. Elaine King‘s handbuilt stoneware features hand-painted accents and images developed through her observations of typically English habitats. David Stark‘s sculptural forms draw on the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, as he makes objects that show deliberate accidents and intentional damage.
Glenice Hoffman and Hannah Heys both hand build in stoneware, creating very different work. Glenice is fascinated by the journey to abstraction, particularly Kandinsky’s in his use of sharp shapes and clear linear qualities. Hannah uses natural, black and white stoneware, making vessels that incorporate intricate sgraffito designs in bold and bright colours. She also works in textiles.
Llinos Gale‘s handbuilt ceramics draw from her walks along Devonshire beaches, frequently depicting shells, coral, pebbles and driftwood in delicate colours. Stephanie Dickinson has a diverse creative background in graphic design, television and fashion. Taking up ceramics has allowed her to reconnect with tactile making. Her love of mid-century modern ceramics is expressed in her brand Stadeware.
Multi-Disciplinary/New Materials
Two new Graduate members are working across disciplines. Following post-graduate study at the RCA where she became president of their SustainLab Society, Line Le Fevre has an intriguing practice around biocomposites and textiles, which she describes as “foraging for clues in the world of alchemy, natural materials, storytelling, and art-making as an expression of those investigations”. Valerie Bernardini was a professional photographer for over two decades and now brings togther ceramics, flame-worked glass and neon lighting in intricate sculptures and installations that invite her viewers to engage with the organic fluidity of light, texture, and form.
Ann Marie Hamilton brings twenty-five years of jewellery making to a new practice, creating ceramic slipcast porcelain forms which she stitches with delicate gold and silk threads. Ann Marie has joined as an Associate.
