LONDON CRAFT WEEK: ABSTRACT 9 - 15 MAY 2022

In the final London Craft Week post, we spotlight artisans' pushing the boundaries of traditional crafts to challenge perceived thinking and explore personal, community and global issues.

The Soft Collective: emotional issues
Soft Dialogue is an exhibition of ten emerging makers exploring emotion-led concepts through the traces and textures of each makers’ discipline: weaving, knitting printing, embroidering, tufting, and sculpting. Intended to challenge our expectations and understanding of textiles, the work demonstrate textiles’ versatility as a medium in modern craft through an exchange between people, space, and object.

Image: The Soft Collective, Soft Dialogue Exhibition, The Department Store, 248 Ferndale Road, SW9 8FR.

Conversations in Craft: Wooly Thinking
Freddie Robins uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition, as well as the cultural preconceptions surrounding knitting as craft. Themes explored in her work include how communities are working together to share and steward commonly owned assets and resources, and a post-Brexit re-imagining of future physical and cultural re-connections between the UK and the European mainland. Robins will be in conversation at Artefact to discuss her views on knitting as ‘a series of actions and processes through which identity and subjectivity can be formed and expressed’. Conservations in Craft, Wooly Thinking, will be held on Saturday 14 May at 11:00 BST. To book a ticket CLICK HERE.


Image: Wooly Thinking with Freddie Robbins, Saturday 14 May at 11:00 BST.

Conversations in Craft: Radical Craft
‘Ground’ is a recent work from the Thread Bearing Witness project by textile artist Alice Kettle who is seeking to connect concerned communities and individuals across the UK, inviting them to get stitching, showing solidarity and raising funds for displaced people around the world. Kettle is, simultaneously, working at a local level to connect personally with individual women and child refugees and asylum seekers, inviting them to work with her to contribute to, and inform, a new body of stitched works. These artworks are inspired by the strength, resilience, and hospitality of refugees and asylum seekers whom she and her family have worked with.

Textile Artist, Alice Kettle, will be in conversation with sculptural activist, Jay Mistry, to investigate ‘how the craft world is responding to some of the world’s most pressing issues: the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, globalisation, and climate change’. Conversations in Craft, Radical Craft will be held on Thursday 12 May at 11:00 BST. To book a ticket CLICK HERE.


Image: Thread Bearing Witness project by Alice Kettle.

Rarefied Landscape: Anna Gravelle at Contemporary Applied Arts (AA)
Anna Gravelle is a multi-media textile artist best known for reimagining the craft of tufting to add three-dimensional characters to textile artworks. Working the technique like delicate embroidery, Gravelle gives tufting craft an edge through her choice of materials of fine wool and silky threads. In response to the last two years, Gravelle has created new work that celebrates the changing of the seasons, welcoming the beginning of summer with bursts of painterly colour. The work is expressive, with abstract landscapes echoing natural forms. See Gravelle's work at the Contemporary Applied Arts (CAA) during London Craft Week. For more details CLICK HERE.

Image: Textile artworks by Anna Gravelle.

Thank you to Clare Lewis for editing this week's blog and talking us through the inspiring and creative crafts of this year's London Craft Week.