Accumulate Artwork Honest 2025: our highlights from the twenty first version

‘I’m drawn to things that make you query what they’re comprised of – that incite your curiosity and defy expectations,’ says Accumulate artwork honest director, Isobel Dennis. There have been surprises in droves within the 2025 version at Somerset Home, from wall-based works comprised of moss and paper that seem like weavings to vessels original from denim that you can mistake for ceramics.

That was a part of the fun of a stroll by the honest, the place traditional supplies have been additionally pushed to extremes: steel crafted so finely it may have been spun yarn and wooden turned as skinny as paper. A journey by Somerset Home additionally transported you throughout continents and backwards and forwards in time, with makers telling tales about locations, folks and traditions in modern types.

We carry you the standout artworks and installations from Accumulate 2025.

Magic in moss

Preserved moss was the unlikely star of the Design & Craft Council Eire’s Weathering Revival presentation, which regarded like woven silk within the palms of self-taught artist Paola Di Legge. Evoking the undulating panorama close to her Dublin house, ‘Grounded Views’ was part of curator Maria McLintock’s mission to upend the hierarchies of luxurious objects and native supplies and vernaculars at Accumulate. Di Legge’s work and others in wooden, ceramics, textiles and steel embraced ‘the enduring, the delicate and the regenerative’, as McLintock places it.

Denim reimagined

Denim has a worldwide story, extra typically related to mass manufacture than one-off artworks. However its ubiquity is a part of the attraction for makers, together with Momoka Gomi (of NM Artwork and Design) and Minyeol Cho (Siat Gallery), who’ve reworked it into woven landscapes and vessels. Denim grew in prevalence throughout the Industrial Revolution, a time when weavers have been being changed by machines, however Gomi reclaims it for the loom in her sequence Recollections, depicting scenes harking back to her native Japan which are half dreamed, half actual. In the meantime, Minyeoul Cho collects scraps of denim from Seoul’s garment district, slicing and stacking them to kind his vessels, their bleached patterns recalling the journey of the fabric and the passing of time.

Dialogues between previous and current

The star of this 12 months’s Accumulate Open – a platform for experimental works by particular person artists – for Wallpaper* was undoubtedly Wanbing Huang, whose sculptures in ramie, Chinese language grass fabric and bamboo reference the parable of Hundun, a logo of the world’s creation. It was straightforward to get misplaced within the intricate depths and hypnotic geometry of her types, woven utilizing historical Chinese language craft methods.

Webbed wonders

Some of the intriguing gallery displays at Accumulate got here from Charles Burnand Gallery, which devoted its house to the gossamer installations and furnishings of Kyeok Kim. The Seoul-based artist crochets with copper wire, creating ethereal lattices that she handpaints in ottchil lacquer to provide them lustre. She conceived her mobile works to evoke the power and fragility of human pores and skin.

Bringing lightness to arduous supplies

Korean artist KO Hyejeong reworked chilly, arduous brass into delicate, feathery types. ‘My work goals to provide viewers a way of relaxation,’ she says of her pared-back natural items, made utilizing a micro-welding approach. They have been snapped up by each the V&A and Nationwide Museums NI at Accumulate.

Award-winning ceramic confections

You’d be forgiven for desirous to eat Ebony Russell’s towering sculptures, which gained her the 2025 Brookfield Properties Craft Prize. The Australian artist has developed an revolutionary strategy of piping porcelain like icing sugar to create each kind and ornament concurrently. Her mouth-watering works reimagine Wedgewood ceramics, whereas taking a swipe at gendered aesthetics and labour.

Narrative threads

Artists harnessed the story-telling energy of textiles all through the honest, however significantly at Candida Stevens Gallery. Amongst works by Alice Kettle and YiMiao Shih, Manya Goldman’s meticulously detailed works stood out regardless of their humble measurement. The artist got here to London along with her household within the Sixties to flee the Apartheid regime in South Africa and her haunting, hand-stitched photos evoke forgotten selves and locations.

Business meets the handmade

Lee So-ra introduced a modernist sensibility to textiles at Accumulate – her translucent works recalling stained glass and summary structure. She makes use of scraps of Osaka silk to reimagine ‘Jogakbo’, a kind of conventional Korean patchwork, dyeing them with homegrown botanicals to provide these materials a mushy, pure tone, earlier than assembling them utilizing her meticulous ‘saamssol’ stitching approach. In doing so, she transforms materials from the clothes trade into handmade artworks.

Visible trickery in paper and wooden

Suspended from the curved Nelson Stairwell at Somerset Home, Isobel Napier’s floating, diaphanous items regarded like extremely high-quality weavings. She makes her work by laser-cutting paper, nonetheless, fusing digital design with components of probability. The burning course of lends the items a smoky hue and a ghostly presence.

Totemic ceramics