Craft in colour: Forbo’s Furniture Linoleum in Soft Lilac frames HOW&WOW at Dutch Design Week 2025.
Image credit: Fan Liao
At this year's Dutch Design Week, Crafts Council Nederland presented HOW&WOW - a vibrant showcase of contemporary craft.
Disciplines ranged from bronze casting and glassblowing, to knitting and woodturning - the HOW&WOW showcase spotlighting makers who have spent near their lifetime refining their skills to a level of quiet mastery.
Set against sculptural reels of Forbo Flooring Systems’ Furniture Linoleum in Soft Lilac 4010 FL, part of Forbo’s recently refreshed palette, a road of lilac took us on a meandering journey through all the exhibited pieces. A both serene and striking backdrop, the tone amplified the textures, colours, and material nuances of each piece. The linoleum itself, a natural material rooted in sustainability, echoes the values shared by the featured makers, including a respect for process, material integrity, and enduring beauty.
Though each maker’s practice may appear a deeply personal pursuit, HOW&WOW highlights craft as a collective endeavour. Techniques and materials are exchanged, reinterpreted, and passed between generations - creating a living lineage of knowledge that bridges past and future. Within this dialogue, materials are not passive; they are active collaborators. Makers explore their possibilities, challenge their limits, and ask how locally sourced materials and time-honoured skills can shape a more sustainable world.
Read on to discover our material highlights from the makers at HOW&WOW...
Agne Kucerenkaite
Agne works with natural stone waste, specifically dark granite fragments. Utilising these byproduct materials, she crafts surface patterns for ceramics. These pieces feature floral-like crystalline designs that form during high temperature firing. The iron in the granite reacts with the glaze, producing colour, without the addition of conventional pigments.
Ignorance Is Bliss - another of Agne's projects - can be viewed in all three of our Studio locations within the Future Materials Library™.
Elena Genesio
Elena Genesio excavates her own wild clay from the Maas and Rijnuiterwaarden. After processing the material by hand, she slip casts it into stackable ceramic pieces. Her both functional and sculptural pieces are inspired by the geometry of retaining sea walls, and pay homage to the continuous interplay of land and water that defines the Dutch landscape.
Image credit: Fan Liao
Image credit: Fan Liao
Image credit: Fan Liao
Hannah Rose Whittle
Hannah Rose Whittle develops ceramic glazes from industrial byproducts and secondary raw materials, such as ash from power plants and pizza ovens, recycled glass, industrial porcelain waste, calcium from water purification and Dutch clay from the brick industry.
Isaac Monté & Staramaki
'Straw Return' explores how wheat stem residues can be transformed into new, high-performance materials. Isaac Monté & Staramaki transform rejected stalks of wheat into acoustic panels using a bio-based glue. The biomaterial's design takes cue from fields of grain.
The project diverts agricultural residues from waste streams, creating scalable, and sustainable materials from a typically overlooked byproduct.
JAS&CAL
Repurposing waste material and deadstock fabric, JAS&CAL create new patterns by pulling the threads of striped and checkered textiles. By making slow and careful alterations to existing surface patterns, they produce colourful wall-hangings originated from waste.
Kesem Yahav
Kesem crafts ceramic brushes using plants for the brush heads. These objects are intended to be used as tools but are also a metaphor for creativity, growth and the connection between nature and craft.
Primo Arets. Image credit: Fan Liao
Rinke Joosten. Image credit: Fan Liao
Image credit: Fan Liao
Primo Arets
Primo shapes recycled birch plywood with a grinding machine, continuously sanding to reveal the layers in the wood. The Layered Stool is an example of this, revealing 3D patterns in the beech ply that vary in between each stool.
Rinke Joosten
Balancing precision with unpredictability, Rinke uses industrial slip casting processes and external vibration frequencies to create unique ceramics. By applying different vibrations to cast pieces made from the same plaster mold, Rinke produces new shapes, structures, and patterns each time, without the need to create new molds.
Image credit: Fan Liao
Image credit: Fan Liao
You can find out more about the makers exhibited at HOW&WOW here. And for more info on Forbo's collections, including Linoleum, click here, and head to Material Source Studio London, Manchester & Glasgow, where it is a Partner.
Exhibition design by Studio Jeroen van Veluw
Photography by Fan Liao
