An exhibition exploring how makers are recycling and repurposing materials has opened at Make, a gallery dedicated to craft run by Hauser & Wirth in the Somerset town of Bruton.

The show, called Re-Use, Re-Think, Re-Imagine, features 54 pieces across disciplines from glass and ceramics to furniture, in order to showcase a wide range of possible approaches to the topic.

Jacqueline Moore, curator and director of Make gallery, told Dezeen that artisans have been exploring sustainability and new materials long before the recent trend. She chose projects that reflect this for the show.

"Sustainability, environmental considerations and the exploration of new materials are themes which many makers have long been engaged with," Moore said. "Even before the more recent, topical concerns."

"The exhibition seeks to continue and broaden the dialogue and to reveal new possibilities for materials, methods and techniques," she explained.

Opened last year, Make is the latest venue owned by international gallery Hauser & Wirth. It is located in a Georgian townhouse in the town of Bruton in Somerset, England.

Re-Use, Re-Think, Re-Imagine features work by designer Gavin Keightley, who seeks to replace not just the plastic in our products themselves but also in their production processes.

In order to avoid using the synthetic moulds that are industry standard, he instead casts a series of textured stools and cabinets in hardened food such as couscous and mashed potato.

A number of other contributions, meanwhile, focus on taking plastic waste that has already been created and repurposing it in new and productive ways.

For one of the stand-out contributions, Charlotte Kidger takes industrial offcuts in the form of polyurethane foam dust, combining them with resin to give them a second life as a series of tables.

James Shaw on the other hand takes recycled high-density polyethylene or HDPE – an opaque plastic used to make products including milk bottles and carrier bags – and hand-extrudes it into corrugated tubular shapes, draped over each other to create a six-pronged light.

He also looked beyond plastic, however, creating the aptly titled Old Man of The Sea (and the Land) Lamp especially for this exhibition from a mixture of seaweed, sawdust and tree resin.

Other designers, such as Costa Rica-born Juli Bolaños-Durman, hope to make us reconsider our throwaway culture more generally.

"She creates unique sculptures from found or discarded glass, conscious of the waste we create as consumers," said Moore. "These are then combined with hand blown glass which she engraves."

Similarly, ceramicist Aimee Bollu creates assemblages of found objects and her own, hand-thrown forms, made from porcelain, terracotta and stoneware.

"Bollu sources materials that were thrown away such as a make-up sponges, elastoplast or a hotel bell ring," said Moore.

"It's the ordinary, every day and overlooked in which she sees a particular beauty and she hopes to makes us look again at materials and their inherent purpose or appeal."

The exhibition also features patchwork textiles made from pineapple cloth by RCA-graduate Lola Lely alongside a series of colourful clay objects by Alice Walton.

Re-Use, Re-Think, Re-Imagine is on display at Make, a craft-focused outpost of Hauser & Wirth's main Somerset gallery until 1 January 2020.

Make opened a year ago in a Georgian townhouse in Bruton that previously served as offices for the art dealer and commercial gallery.

Meanwhile, biofabrication designer Natsai Audrey Chieza argued in a panel discussion at Dezeen Day that the future of design will be all about materials and processes rather than about creating iconic products.

Other recent projects that follow this mantra include a collection of lamps made from post-industrial beer and coffee waste – whose proceeds will go to addiction prevention – and a compostable, algae- and plant-based T-shirt.