LOUCIA MANOPOULOU

MA Postgraduates from UCA School of Craft and Design showcase interpretive practice, pushing the boundaries between glass, metal, textile, wood and ceramics.
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MA Ceramics • MA Glass • MA Jewellery •MA Metalwork •

MA Product Design • MA Textiles • MRes Crafts

 

Showcasing exciting interpretive practices, eleven delivers highlights from this year’s postgraduate show: skilfully crafted objects and multi-sensory experiences that push the boundaries between mediums.

eleven – spot emerging creative talent of the future

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MA CERAMICS
Alice McIlroy [Transition, ceramic raku] creates ceramic bird forms that reflect aspects of human life and social interaction. Life is a series of transitions, and the phoenix is the ultimate symbol of transition. Its rare appearance is considered auspicious, and one that other birds gravitate towards.

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MA GLASS
Mike Barrett [Long Shadows, glass blocks, video projection with sound] is an artist and data scientist, exploring the devotional relationship we have to the digital world. Long Shadows is a diorama of an assembly in thrall to the marvellous and immortal world on the other side of the glass screen.

Claire Crawford [Sylvia I and Sylvia II, glass, bronze, leather] is a kiln cast glass and mixed media artist who creates sculptures of scale for large interior spaces inspired by abstractions from natural texture, form and colour. Her Sylvia series exhibition pieces reflect this through a representation of fallen snow covered tree roots in an undisturbed forest position.

Hannah Gibson [Whispering Sweet Nothings, glass] has been working with glass for almost two decades. Capturing the nostalgic imagery of childhood, connecting people, and exposing hidden narratives through cast sculptural glass stands at the core of her work. With a background in geology, her work is created using recycled glass from other artists, television glass, glass from mobile phones, and other ‘found’ objects.

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MA JEWELLERY
Candy Matterson [Touch and Response, silver, acrylic and other metals] crosses the boundaries of jewellery and technology processes. She combines new and traditional materials to create engineered jewellery and sculptural objects – an interaction between the wearer and the viewer.

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MA METALWORK
Cara Wassenberg [A Thousand Degrees, glass, metal] makes large-scale work creating site-specific sculpture for buildings and exterior areas. By using glass, copper and steel in combination with blacksmithing and glass-casting skills she explores these materials’ potential for organic interaction.

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MA PRODUCT DESIGN
Stephen Sheffield [Curatorial, oak, glass] has been working with furniture for many years and has been designing and making for 21 years. His new MA work is designed to reflect an appreciation of furniture craft and how we curate our personal lives. His latest work looks at sustainability and logistics and attempts to re-evaluate our current manufacturer-orientated approach to consumption in favour of a customer-based approach.

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MA TEXTILES
Alison Baxter [Fragments and Whispers, textiles, metal] creates delicate and elegant small-scale three-dimensional objects integrating thread with metal. Fragments and Whispers, is a body of work made in response to archival research of the life of a woman, a close friend of King Edward VII, and her forgotten bedroom designed in the 1890s.

Mona Craven [In-Between, textiles, installation] has explored heritage cloth to connect
to cultural heritage found in the fragmented spaces between cultures. Her practice crosses media, integrating digital processes with hand-stitching to emphasise elusive traces, memory and the fragility found at the points of contact in the fragmented space
between cultures.

Janet Twinn [Lost in Landscape, patchwork wall hanging and textile rolls] makes patchwork wallhangings constructed from her dyed and printed cloth. Patchwork is a process of layers. There are hidden seams, raw edges and tangles of loose threads. Lost in Landscape is an abstraction, grounded in the observed. Colour is evocative rather than literal.

Kas Williams [Off The Wall, textiles, mixed media] is a textile artist whose creative practice occupies the space between fine art and craft. Her work reflects a curiosity about form and structure combined with a playful use of colour, pattern and texture to create sophisticated pieces in a diverse mix of materials.

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MRes CRAFTS
Loucia Manopoulou, curator | researcher, has extensive experience in curating exhibitions, both in Greece and the UK. Currently she is exploring the history of crafts, with a focus on modern and contemporary British crafts, curatorship and the relationship between crafts and music.