Annual Showcase 2022
29th June 2022 - 1st July 2022
Our first-ever showcase was a great opportunity for each Maker to explore abstract concepts and test different techniques that may have been unfamiliar to them.
The exhibition also demonstrated a wide variety of products and services that are displayed across each of the Makers’ independent businesses.
Hilda’s Lounge, crafted by Lesley Bushell, is a design-led upholstery business that refurbishes and creates stunning, reinvented furniture. She is particularly intrigued by bold, contemporary and useful furnishings that are built to last. Being drawn to the older mid-century fabrics, these beautiful remnant stools were inspired by the flower motif pattern from the 1970’s Craft Books and brought Lesley's lifelong fascination with patchwork to life. Each hexagonal patch has been hand stitched onto second-hand foam bases which can take up to several months to complete, in company with her other commitments.
Iain Myers, a bricklayer by trade, has always enjoyed being hands on and has incorporated this skill into his interests of woodwork. Iain appreciates the challenges associated with repurposing; often integrating this know-how into his projects by practicing and creating with found materials and objects. He purchased the glass sometime ago purely because he loved the colors and used it in his intuitive design of the Flaming Crown. This project gave him the opportunity to build a 3D structure using a Tiffany style foiling technique, commonly used in lamp making. He later repurposed a table base which he used as the base of his sculpture, found at a local car boot sale. As well as using a supporting plinth found from old kitchen remnants. Iain then thought it would be interesting to layer ply together and have a play with the twisted-wood technique to create the supporting structures of both his pieces.
Elisa Mott, maker of Shake Your Glass, first fell in love with glass back in 2010 when she observed a man making glass beads on an open flamed torch, however only found it as a hobby at first as she never dreamed it would become her day to day business, which it has been for many years now. Elisa’s work is often inspired by her travels and this elegant piece is no different. While backpacking in Chile, Elisa was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the river of ice that later influenced her glass art painting, Glacier. First, she started by taking a section of her sketchbook and recreating the line work onto a clear piece of glass using glass enamel. At the same time as this, Elisa had been creating glass puddles using offcuts from her original sketch, inspiriting her so-called “waste” glass. The final composition was formed of the clear base, made up of the glass puddles, along with crushed and melted strings combined together to create a thick slab.
Hamza El Fasiki, the creator of the multidisciplinary educational studio Craft Draft, offers both online and in-person traditional Moroccan arts workshops, lectures and courses. Hamza has Craft Draft studios in both Fes, Morocco and Portsmouth, offering classes related to Moroccan geometry, brass engraving and bookbinding. This Annual Showcase, Hamza demonstrated the process of paper making, brass plate engraving, leather embossing and also displayed both his finished and beautifully executed hand-bound notebooks.
Michael Birchmore, the creator behind these abstract, unique paintings. Michael states that although he has always been involved in one creative artform or another, it has taken him the best part of 60 years to find his true vocation in life. Michael enjoys creating items that can generally be used in the home, by recycling and reusing discarded objects and reinventing them into something with purpose. This Showcase gave Michael the freedom to exhibit what up until now, he never had a means to display. He created them using a mix of digital elements, drawing and then used acrylic paint to create the final pieces.
Ben Calvert-Lee, the name behind Master Crafted, expressed that it was his grandparents' love of making, from baking, sewing and woodwork, that instilled in him a fascination with exploring and creating. From these interests came that of map projections, particularly peaking after watching an episode of the West Wing, wherein characters discussed the choices we make when drawing the world. The most familiar and commonly-used Mercator projection hugely distorts land masses as the distance between the longitudinal lines is increasingly stretched as the projection moves away from the equator, at the expense of producing a perfect rectangle. The Dymaxion, or Fuller, the projection was first designed by Buckminster Fuller in 1943. By representing the Earth as an icosahedron, a polyhedron with twenty faces, he was able to unfold that shape in a way which minimized the distortion of both the shape and the relative size of any given area. Ben found inspiration in this concept and decided to include this into his version of the map, by reproducing an approach published in 1954, that splits two of the faces to allow the landmasses of our planet to be shown as one large contiguous form. Ben then simplified these landmasses to account for the abilities of his equipment. The map is laser-cut from maple and cherry veneered MDF and mounted on a 3D printed frame.
Gavin Meikle, having spent a fulfilling career in Sales and Marketing, he decided to change direction and found a new love for making and repairing using reclaimed materials. During this process, Gavin discovered his interest in clocks and woodwork, leading him to design and create his pieces displayed at the Showcase. The mechanical clock was a restoration project of a traditional 1950’s timepiece, it was stripped down, cleaned and reassembled. While completing this, Gavin decided that the innate beauty of the intricate brass mechanisms deserved to be seen rather than hidden away and later built the stand it sits on from an offcut of Sapele. The quartz clock was inspired by a picture Gavin found online while researching modern marquetry designs. The wooden carcass was cut from an old piece of scaffolding board and the face was created using a selection of veneer scraps remaining from previous projects.