Highlights from Collect Art Fair 2026.

Collect - the leading art fair for contemporary craft and design - recently returned to Somerset House for its 22nd edition.

Spanning ceramics, glass, lacquer, furniture, jewellery, metalwork, wood, textiles and paper - the fair continues to push the boundaries of traditional craft techniques as we know them. It also paints a picture of the evolving material landscape, presenting alternative craft materials such as denim, moss and shopping bags, as well as spotlighting those embracing digital technology in their practice. It's a hive of creativity, showcasing emerging names alongside master craftspeople.

Fair Director, TF Chan, in reference to his first year at Collect's helm, commented, “Collect has always been the place to encounter ambitious contemporary craft, and to see how galleries champion artists who bring together exceptional skill and imagination. While we deepen this commitment, we are enhancing the fair’s role as a platform for collectible design, where unique and limited-edition furniture is presented with the same care as museum-quality craft. Our 2026 exhibitors reveal how seamlessly these worlds come together, and how craft and design are integral to wider conversations about material culture and contemporary life.”

Here, we reflect on some of our craft highlights from Collect 2026...

Elliott Denny

'Ceramics Side Table' by Elliott Denny is a modular system designed during his time at the Royal College of Art. Elliott’s self-crafted system uses a set of extruded elements that can be assembled and reconfigured in numerous ways, allowing for different variations and complete experimentation in form.

'Stoneware Coffee Table' is a ceramic and glass coffee table made from a brick system developed by Elliott. From bench and table bases, to room dividers - this piece can be used to create a variety of furniture configurations.

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Heather Gibson

Heather Gibson’s ceramic practice is shaped by her daily encounters with the River Thames. Throughout the making process, she considers the layered histories entrenched in its banks. The works on display at Collect such as ‘Sediment Trap’ and ‘Fluxing Shore’ were developed during a year-long residency at County Hall, crafted with the river’s tidal rhythms in mind. The action of constantly revealing and concealing became a method for thinking about time, visibility, and material memory.

Inspired by the fragments found along the shore, particularly pottery shards, the works are made using a range of clay bodies inspired by her finds from the river bed. From iron-rich stoneware that bleed, to glaze to translucent porcelain that glows from within. Each material contributes its own voice, influencing form, surface, and outcome. Some forms are hand-built using slab construction, and others slip cast with embedded inclusions. balancing functional familiarity with abstraction. Poured slips and layered glazes flow across surfaces, recording gesture, gravity, and movement.

Sitting between past and present, function and fiction, Heather’s work offers a materially charged and painterly interpretation of the River Thames' geological history.

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Jihyun Kim

Jihyun Kim - a ceramic designer from South Korea - melds tradition with enchantment in her craft. Her work is now internationally recognised for her signature ‘gloop glaze’ technique, showcased at design events like Milan Design Week and the British Ceramic Biennale.

Currently creating from her studio in South East London, Jihyun explores organic forms and mythical narratives – crafting both sculptural and functional elements from her imagination.

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Irina Razumovskaya

Responding to sociopolitical shifts, Irina Razumovskaya's work featuring bulging vessels embodies the visceral weight of transition.

Throughout her craft practice, Irina uses a variety of materials to bring her pieces to life including both stoneware and porcelain clay, glazes, recycled raw minerals and glass. The sculptures - 'Tar' and 'Ichor' explore the loss of "home" through material metaphors of grief, capturing a moment where structural certainty breaks to reveal a resilient, transformative, and deeply introspective core.

'Venom', inspired by the folklore of the looking glass, reimagines the mirror as a site of absorption rather than reflection. This work challenges internalised voices of comparison, inviting a communal space where identity is no longer measured by competition, but by a shared, restorative meeting of selves.

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Edmund Davies & OTZI Studio

An architect, turned potter Edmund Davies fully took to ceramics after completing a BA in Architecture. A love for making and crafting utilitarian structures calls to the similarities between the two practices.

Collaborating with OTZI studio - also based in Norwich like Edmund - their tables crafted together are a study in elemental harmony. A frame of local native hardwood provides a structural skeleton, paired with a tactile, leather-wrapped base. The ceramic top, decorated using a wax resist glaze and fired to stoneware, offers a tactile and earthly depth and texture.

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John Creed

Working with both precious and non precious metals, John Creed finds the process of hot forging metals completely "magic". The physicality of the process is important to him, drawing in three dimensions.

John Creed creates large scale and small, intricate works for both domestic and public settings. Whatever the scale, he is conscious of how the work will inhabit its immediate and wider surroundings, and the interaction it will have with the viewer. Balancing function and expression, he is particularly intrigued by the configuration of junctions - especially when bringing together dissimilar materials.

At Collect 2026, John displayed new works - elegant sculptural shapes that are imbued with insect and arachnid references, bringing movement to the metal in new ways.

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Gizella K Warburton

The works of Gizella K Warburton take on a raw and simple materiality. However, beneath the surface are layers of detail revealed as light and shadow cross through the fragile forms.

Gizella's abstract compositions evolve through the tactile and contemplative process of drawing with paper, cloth and thread. Mark making is an intrinsic part of her practice: ‘shadowed, scratched, stained, scarred, pierced and stitched’. To make, she engages in a web of ritualistic processes: wrapping, weaving, binding, knotting, suturing and burning - moving from one to the other.

"My work explores an intuitive response to linear, textural and light detail within landscape and surface. The materiality of cloth, paper, thread, wood and paint connects me to an innate human urge to make marks. To decipher the meaning of our physical and emotional landscapes, and the transient nature of the warp and weft of our lives. The slow tactile intimacy of stitching is a mantra."

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