Akiko Hirai
Akiko Hirai is a Japanese ceramicist living and working in the UK. Born in Shizuoka, Japan, Hirai came to London to study at Central St Martins in the 2000s. Hirai’s ceramic forms are often derived from traditional Japanese and Korean vessels such as moon jars and tea wares. She embeds her body clay with unexpected materials to encourage the texturally rich surfaces typical of her practice. She is intrigued by the interaction of materials and the transformative power of the kiln; this metamorphosis allows the work’s surface to evolve, a process she compares to the ageing and changing of all life forms over time. For Hirai, her works reflect the ritual process of making and a bodily connection with her material. She does not seek perfection but rather beauty in imperfection, attracted to the unrefined quality of objects. Her work is held in public collections worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK and The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Her work was recognized by the influential Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2019.
Rosa Nguyen
London-based artist-maker Rosa Nguyen works with ceramic and glass to create objects, vessels and installations in the form of poetic compositional tableaux. Taking inspiration from the natural world and our holistic relationship with it, her work is characterized by organic and abstracted vessel forms and the incorporation of living and dried botanical materials. These are assembled and manipulated through casting and preserving in both fired and clay gesso. She dips plant matter in liquid porcelain and processes them in sacrificial kiln firings, which fuse and transform the combusted vegetal materials into strange, otherworldly forms in rich glassy colored glazes. With a long-standing interest in animist and oriental philosophies, Nguyen’s work evokes a contemplative aesthetic and a deep-rooted spiritual connection with nature. Her work often alludes to the transience between life and death, celebrating the interconnectivity between all life forms. Exhibiting widely in the UK and overseas, her work is represented in public collections in Europe, China and Japan, including The Garden Museum collection in London, UK, the Crafts Council Collection in London, UK and The Shigaraki Museum, Japan.
Richard McVetis
Richard McVetis’ practice is deeply rooted in the repetitive nature of making and process, and intrinsic to this is hand embroidery. Often monochromatic and labor intensive, his meticulously crafted installations and embroideries span across the congruity of macro and micro. His exploration of time, memory and cosmology, capture the rhythms and patterns of existence and explore the subtle differences that emerge through ritualistic and habitual making. These inscribed patterns mark the hand’s rhythms, recording human presence, time and decay, each stitch or line acting as a marker for lived time, an embodiment of thought and patience. Through stitch, McVetis weaves together his own enquiry into the way this dimension is felt, experienced and constructed. He has been shortlisted for several distinguished prizes, including the Jerwood Drawing Prize, UK, 2011 and 2017, and the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, 2018. His work ‘Happening’ was awarded Bronze at the Cheongju Craft Biennale, South Korea, 2025. Exhibitions include, ‘RENEW’ (2019), Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK; ‘Threads: Breathing stories into materials’ (2023), Arnolfini, Bristol, UK.
Jonty Sale
For Wiltshire-based photographer Jonty Sale, the photographic experience is not necessarily instant, final or definitive. Rather, he sees it as a corollary of his experience of the landscape: ever-happening and in a state of constant change. Eschewing the pastoral tradition, the photographs are not meant to reassure, but rather to agitate and stimulate. The images lack the specifics of location and as non-recognizable places they are free to exist in the imagination. His time-based work exhibits annual seasonal cycles of interest and ideas arrived at, tried out, adopted and discarded; indeed, these developments are coterminous with the duration of time spent in his locale, suggesting that it is he who changes, as much as the landscape does. His interest and excitement lie foremost in the apparent perplexity of growth and form, in the haphazardness of thickets and hedgerows, of hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble and briar. Jonty has exhibited regularly in the UK and North America, where his works are also held in private collections.
