Collect 2020

Earlier this year Cavaliero Finn exhibited at Collect, the Crafts Council’s international art fair for modern craft and design, held at Somerset House, Collect’s new venue, showcasing the work of 11 of its artists in the West Wing of the building.

New to our stand this year was the work of Hannah Tounsend, Mimi Joung, Nicholas Lees and Leah Jensen, all of whom have never shown their work at Collect before.

Having won the ‘FRESH’ award in 2015, Hannah Tounsend was a finalist for AWARD 2019 at the British Ceramics Biennial, an award for excellence, innovation and creative ambition. Hannah presented an ambitious installation of large, painterly Statement Vessels for Collect.

Having delivered three of Nicholas Lees vessels to The Fitzwilliam Museum, following their purchase at our recent show, Alter at Fitzrovia Chapel, Cavaliero Finn presented a new series of Nicholas’ intensely hand-crafted porcelain vessels. The new work included a framed installation, ‘Littoral’ which refers directly to the liminal space of the shoreline. It explores relationships of positive and negative space and of variation in tone and materiality between the objects.

Following her exhibition at the Sfera Gallery in 2018 in Kyoto, Japan, Mimi Joung presented a new selection of works inspired by the book ‘In Watermelon Sugar’ by Richard Brautigan. Written in 1968 and set in the aftermath of a fallen civilisation, the book focuses on a commune in a utopian place iDEATH where every day has a different coloured sun and the people lead gentle lives in Watermelon Sugar. Mimi’s work explores language and every ceramic sculpture she produces encompasses the words from each chapter, starting and ending where each chapter starts and stops. Like poetry, each chapter carries its own uniqueness, made up of strange and dreamlike quotes which are incorporated into her pieces, sometimes recognisable, at other times more abstract in form.

Alongside his study of burnished and carved 19th-century Egyptian pottery for an exhibition at the V&A in 2020, Ashraf Hanna created a new body of finely sculpted undulating and cut and altered vessel forms for us for Collect.

Following closely after her Loewe Craft Prize Finalist Exhibition in Tokyo last year, Annie Turner made a new collection of work inspired by the River Deben in Suffolk.

We also exhibited a wonderful collection of new work by Matthew Chambers (featured above), Frances Priest (featured above), Ikuko Iwamoto (featured below) and Sun Kim.