Tradition meets Technology at London Craft week 2023

London Craft week has steadily grown over recent years. It brings together over 700 established and emerging makers, designers, brands and galleries from around the world. Craft is increasingly been seen as a driver of luxury industry, most recently in so called ‘quiet luxury’. Craft week clearly demonstrated how the industry is moving along with the times.

Image: Internal Landscapes by Marianne Thoemer, Canopy Collections

Most interesting works during the London Craft week exhibited tradition and heritage combined with unusual material choices or new technology application.

Craft Art

What makes craft an art piece? Craft has evolved a long way from humble everyday use items to become objects of desire. When craft becomes art it is often about uniqueness of material choice guided by intuition of the making process to express individuality.

Reinventing Tradition

Korean craft and design foundation presented beautiful examples of traditional Moon Jar artistry that represents Confucian ideas of purity, simplicity and austerity.

Moon jars by Lee Gee-yo

Unique technique of slip casting by Yun Ju-cheol

Unglazed unique patching technique by Choi Bo-ram

Ceramic paintings by Park Sung-wook

Porcelain as nature’s canvas by Kwak Hye-young

Launch of the Red List of Endangered Crafts

During the Craft week the Red list of Endangered craft skills in UK was updated. Crafts classified as ‘extirpated’ or ‘locally extinct’ are those which are no longer practised in the UK. For the purposes of this research, this category only includes crafts which have become extinct in the past generation.

• Cricket ball making
• Gold beating
• Lacrosse stick making
• Mould and deckle making
• Mouth-blown sheet glass making

Craft skills have been gradually and steadily disappearing from generation to generation. However, during and even before the pandemic certain skills like knitting and sewing have grown in popularity. Needlepoint (below) and most recently tufting workshops are emerging hobbies.

Pushing Boundaries

Many works at the Craft week showed how boundaries are becoming more fluid between handmade and naturally formed. Power of nature is an inspiration that can also transcends ideological boundaries.

Japanese artist Gaku Nakane is inspired by textures of nature; observing with heightened perception the surfaces of trees, rocks and other materials has shaped his artistic identity.

Sense of fluidity is explored by Dan Rees in his new body of marbled linen works

William Cobbing pushes the traditional boundaries of clay, both in its raw and fired forms.

Waterfall painting by Hiroshi Senju

BIOMATERIALS

New biomaterials is one of the fastest growing areas in material innovation. During Craft week The Mills Fabrica which is a go-to solutions platform accelerating techstyle and agrifood tech innovations for sustainability and social impact presented some of the most innovative solutions.

Conventional leather recycling reProLeather by HKRITA

Deep cleaning of leather reProLeather by HKRITA

Separating poly from cotton Greenmachine by HKRITA

Regenerated cellulose fibre from Kombucha by HKRITA

Biological process to create dyes by Colorifix

Natural dyeing by soaking, Errance

Textile fibres out of potato harvest waste by Fibe

Replacing virgin plastic

Ocean Plastic by Parley

Textiles embedded with bioactive ingredients by Skin Series

Plant based fibre fill BioPuff by Saltyco

Plant based fur by BioFluff

Modern biocraft

Craft is a skill of making and doing (usually by hand), so how are biomaterials craft? In fabrication of biomaterials there is a process or intervention to create materials with biology. In the future we will see many more amazingly creative applications of how that can be achieved.