Clerkenwell Design Week 2014: curator Nick Wiltshire assembled a micro-exhibition highlighting the relevance of craft in contemporary design for the first edition of The Makings of Luxury (+ slideshow).
Wiltshire presented an edit of five UK makers, each demonstrating a contemporary interpretation of a traditional skill, at the Additions exhibition during Clerkenwell Design Week.
"The antithesis of mass production, the maker is both the architect and the artisan, producing limited quantities with a very pure expression of concept," said Wiltshire.
"For the collector, these makers offer original aesthetics and highly skilled execution, but also the opportunity to commission bespoke works and explore precious materials that you rarely see in large-scale manufacture."
Katharina Eisenkoeck's collection of portable concrete and leather lights combines the traditional use of leather as structural reinforcement with concrete and LED wireless power transfer technology.
Juliette Bigley's Conversational Vessels and Split Bowls are handmade in silver. "Objects, their characters and our interaction with them fascinate me," said Bigley. "Our lives are lived through, brightened and coloured by the objects with which we surround ourselves."
The polished brass vessels by Brooksbank & Collins were part of the MeFar Tria collection – three individual bowls, from open to closed and diminishing in size, can be nested together or used separately. "They can be playfully combined in a variety of different ways each of which creates different geometrical patterns and reflections," said the designers.
Nigel Matthews hand-throws his ceramics to order from his studio in Bakewell, Derbyshire. Matthew's mismatched aesthetic references the eighteenth-century tradition of repairing ceramics often using found handles and spouts.
The hand-woven textiles were by Dash & Miller: a weaving studio based in a Victorian schoolhouse in central Bristol, which collaborates with a UK womenswear mill to produce a seasonal collection of fabric available by the metre.
Each collection for The Makings of Luxury was accompanied by a film showing the design and making process.
