In the January/February issue of Crafts magazine, we meet makers who are playing with the boundaries between beautiful and ugly, with seductive results.
Romanian artist Alexandra Muresan fuses recycled glass with other materials to create emotionally charged sculptures that have both brutality and grace, while emerging maker Emma Witter is showing her ethereal sculptures made from discarded bones, using beauty as a tool to make the grotesque palatable. Both will be showing their work at Collect art fair in February, alongside many other talents spotlighted in this issue. Meanwhile, furniture maker Gareth Neal is embracing beauty and perfection with his dramatic new 3D-printed vessels, challenging the very definition of craft.
A meeting of tradition and modernity also pervades our pages. American artist Christopher Myers reimagines historic Ghanaian Asafo flags to tell contemporary stories about identity and migration, while alumni from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust usher classic making techniques into the contemporary world. Delving behind the scenes of the car industry, we also discover how age-old craft skills like clay modelling are fuelling innovation.