The Handmade's Table: London Design Festival 2021

Press Release- 17th September 21

Ruup & Form presents The Handmade’s Table at London Design Festival, Design Club

Along with eight leading designers, Ruup & Form shares the historic design focused space at 14 Cavendish.

We present the exhibition titled The Handmade’s Table- a collection of contemporary design, craft and art focussed tableware that tells a story around the art of dining. Artists and designers examine the world around us through the lens of their discipline, and that includes the concepts around dining. Ruup & Form is pleased to bring together a diverse group of makers and designers exploring the interconnectedness of art, material, and the dining experience, elevating the mundane to the extraordinary. The exhibition will showcase handcrafted works of art that enhances the experience of dining, while others question sustainability and materiality, and some make statements on the politics of food. In this exhibition, you can view aesthetically delectable pieces and conceptual work.

The exhibition has been closely curated with home and easily, the dining area as the focus. Participating makers/artists are Zoe Preece, Bridget Harvey, Cecilia Levy, Rachael Colley, Sara Howard, Gail Altschuler, Sarah Shorthouse, Hannah Walters, Fleur Grenier , Brynony Applegate, Jessica Jue, Anne Butler, Anja Lubach, Spriha Chokhani and Popdots.

Ruup & Form

Ruup & Form is a curatorial led gallery that showcases a carefully curated collection of effortless aesthetics and unique contemporary crafted objects. Since its inception in 2019, we have worked with emerging, mid-career and established contemporary makers- nationally and internationally. Specialising in contemporary textile, ceramics, glass, wood, paper and interdisciplinary.

We believe craft and design in all its forms demonstrates creativity, ingenuity, and practical intelligence. It contributes to the economic and social wellbeing of communities, connects us to our cultural histories, and is integral to building a sustainable future. Our mission is to grow on this principle and do it with makers that we love.

Collect. Collaborate. Commission

More information

hello@ruupandform.com

About the artists

Anja Lubach

Anja Lubach grew up in Germany and graduated from the Royal college in 2000. She spent a month on Residency at the German manufacturer Rosenthal where she was free to explore porcelain as a creative medium. After receiving the Crafts Council Development Award, she set up a studio in South East London in 2001, where she still works today. Her work is exhibited and sold in Galleries in the UK and abroad. She has been commissioned by the Arts Council and has been involved in a number of creative fine art project collaborations. Anja is best known for her minimal wheel thrown porcelain vessels, whose surfaces and symmetry she enhances by imprinting translucent relief details. She creates small batches of elegant domestic vessels as well as one-off sculptural forms.

Anne Butler

Anne studied ceramics at the University of Wales and furthered her practice with a masters in ceramics from the University of Ulster. Anne’s creates striking sculptures in Parian porcelain, experimenting both with raw and fired state of the material, her extensive palette of techniquescasting, hand-building and printing, are continuously challenged and developed with multiple firings accentuates the porcelain’s satin, marble-like quality when solid and the delicacy and translucency when thin. Her sculptures are inspired by natural and manmade structures and are constructed - layered - deconstructed – collapsed and excavated to reveal associations between cultural and individual memory as well as contrasting qualities of strength and fallibility and material properties such as texture and density. She adds, “There is much reminiscent of archaeology, geology and architecture in my work which explores relationships between process, material and time.”

Bridget Harvey

Bridget Harvey is a maker who investigates process, occupying a fluid space between craft and design, making and remaking. She hand-works discarded objects into one-off or small-batch artefacts, drawing techniques from multiple disciplines such as textiles, print, and conservation methods, to create tactile and desirable objects. Her artefacts are hybrids of making, auto/biography and process, materialised to communicate discourses of repair-making, sustainability, and sharing. Bridget takes a broad and playful approach, considering exhibiting, curating, facilitating workshops, researching, residencies, writing, and giving talks as vital as making itself. By making and curating artefacts, Bridget re-stories the familiar and reconstructs the forgotten.

Bryony Applegate

Bryony is a recent graduate from Royal College of Art, focussing on various collections of tableware aimed at Michelin star restaurants. Her practice revolves around designing and making functional and sculptural ceramic objects.

Sarah Shorthouse

After a career in journalism at the BBC, Sarah trained in ceramics and until recently worked as studio assistant to Chris Keenan and Carina Ciscato. Her work is inspired by the natural geology found in the surrounding downland landscape and by the human form. For Sarah, who works predominantly in hello@ruupandform.com www.ruupandform.com porcelain with oxide additions, ceramics is an instinctual, intuitive process. She starts with an idea of form but lets the clay dictate the finished piece. All her work is wheel thrown, cut, altered and reassembled which helps create the fluid angles, shadows and subtle contours found in her unique work.

Cecilia Levy

Cecilia Levy is a Swedish paper artist. Formerly a graphic designer and book binder, she realised years ago that she was a maker at heart that needed to work with physical materials. Inspired by nature or common, everyday-objects found at home or in thrift shops, Cecilia creates sculptural objects in paper, using old books. Book pages are torn, cut or shredded and then merged back together again using moulds, wheat starch paste and papier maché technique. The book is recreated in a way, but takes on a new form, resulting in delicate, eggshell-thin, objects. The two-dimensional becomes three-dimensional. Work process is slow and meditative. Cecilia exhibits nationally and internationally, and works with public and private art commissions. Her work is included in permanent collections such as the Swedish National Museums’.

Fleur Grenier

Fleur is one of the few contemporary pewtersmiths working within the UK. Following her degree she went on to The Royal College of Art, London where she completed her M.A in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery. This passion has remained and when she completed her M.A, she set up a studio in London and in 2003 moved back to Sussex and established the studio where she works from today. Fleurs current series of work Home started in 2019, exploring the word ‘home’ and what it means, not only to us as humans but also the many insects, mammals, fish and other creatures with which we share our planet. It also gave her an opportunity to explore a new material, concrete. She experimented with the different techniques, but also found a crossover of skills such as mouldmaking, casting and polishing which gave a harmonious fusion of the two materials.

Gail Altschuler

Gail uses clay or porcelain as a canvas, telling personal stories from her sketchbooks transposed onto her porcelain people vessels and plates. Her new series of sculptural ceramics are slab-built porcelain vessels. They are illustrated with sketchbook observations of life around her. Themes include people at rest, musicians, buddha sculptures, plants, children at play and objects drawn while visiting museums. During lockdown Gail reflected on the content of her sketchbooks, each filled with drawings of friends and observations. She was inspired to create works in porcelain that were truly personal, showing a figure at rest or confined. We were all confined to the sofa during lockdown, to endure our isolation from others and the world outdoors. She is also presenting at Summer Exhibition 21 currently.

Hannah Walters

Hannah Walters is a ceramic artist based in Cardiff and is the 2019/20 recipient of the Fireworks Studios residency. Time spent working in her family’s antique centre has heavily inspired her work. It developed a real interest in objects and how they were made. She creates a mix of sculptural and functional items, often blurring the line between. Her work mostly comprises of an unusual mix of crank clay and porcelain. This begins the discussions of value and conflict in her work. She aims to make contemporary antiques, objects tied to both the hello@ruupandform.com www.ruupandform.com past and present. “Vase with Flowers” can be found in the Aberystwyth Ceramics Collection and Archive. Hannah studied ceramics in Coleg Sir Gâr in Carmarthen where a ceramics module, taught by ceramist Peter Bodenham, changed her path from a degree in Ancient History to one on Contemporary Crafts with Falmouth University. This led to her graduation from her Ceramics MA from Cardiff Met. University in 2019 with distinction.

Jessica Jue

Jessica is a London based silversmith and jeweller. She studied jewellery making from Hiko Mizuno College of Jewellery in Tokyo, 2015 and is currently pursuing her ‘2019 ‘Setting Out’ Business Incubation Programme at The Goldsmiths’ Centre. She was a resident at Bishopsland Educational Trust in 2017. She reinvents traditional techniques in silver to craft elegantly beautiful contemporary designs that have won her many accolades. Inspired by balance and harmony, Jessica draws and sculpts with dramatic use of fluid and organic playful curves and aims to create a sense of rhythmic movement within her collection. She skilfully manipulates her forms through the ancient art of hammering, while also introducing an abundance of rich surface textures, through the use of pattern and gold.

Popdots - Melissa Aldrete and Luis Cardenas

Melissa Aldrete and Luis Cárdenas founded Popdots in Mexico in 2012 with the sole purpose of expressing the memorability of traditional materials in a contemporary context, what the studio seeks is to strengthen the creative process and the concept, in order to provoke the development of unique and infinites series that will increase its mastery alongside with its practice, the understanding of the ceramic matter and the continuous search for a dialogue between the material, the being and its environment. 

Rachael Colley

Rachael Colley thinks through materials, producing cutlery, jewellery and sculpture which are explored in experimental dining events, exhibitions, installations and visual art projects. Based in Sheffield, the UK’s ‘Steel City’, she creates ambiguous eating implements that challenge our collective connections with food and communicate aspects of her lived experience as a sufferer of the autoimmune disease Systemic Sclerosis. Through the elevation of food waste as a luxury material, her jewellery questions traditional notions of preciousness and value, highlighting broad societal issues surrounding consumption and encouraging reflection on the waste we generate. 

Sara Howard

Sara Howard is an award-winning London based ceramic designer and materials researcher. Her practice is focused on reducing the environmental impacts of ceramic production. Sara has designed an industrial symbiosis around the ceramics industry. Within the symbiosis, waste by-products from external manufacturers replace the finite raw materials in ceramic production. Manufacturing in this circular method not only reduces industries’ consumption of finite raw materials, but also diverts waste away from landfill.

Spriha Chokhani

Spriha Chokhani is an explorer of Paper. She has been experimenting with paper waste since 2010. After graduating from Srishti institute of Art, design and technology, India in 2010, she further studied pottery. Her studio researches and experiments with local and sustainable practices to create product that engages with the idea of non-traceability. 

Zoe Preece

Zoe Preece’s current practise takes the domestic realm as the site of its enquiry. She makes intimate but nameless still lifes that speak of the ordinary and the human. Through focused attention on everyday domestic objects and ordinary scenes, her work endeavours to engage with the intangible, disquieting and emotive aspects of life through material processes and form. Ceramic forms are carved from plaster on the lathe or by hand, before being moulded and cast in a fine white porcelain; the heat of the kiln chamber is used to seek out moments of fluidity. Still Lifes On Longing, the stilled moment becomes an evocative space to capture ghosts of moments that go unnoticed within everyday domestic settings. Spoons contain a precise balance of porcelain and flux caught at a tipping point in the heat of the kiln chamber. The compositions are intended as metaphors; as recollections of intimate, unsettling or tender moments.