Thrills and Skills: Key Trends from Collect 2025

For five days at the end of February and into March, 40 galleries from across the world showed a thrilling selection of work at Collect in London. Now in its 21st year, the fair at Somerset House is a global gathering of the most relevant makers, curators and collectors in craft today. Showcasing avant-garde work across multiple disciplines, it is a barometer for the skills, techniques, materials and themes that are currently captivating collectors. Here are five key themes.

Neon
It’s not the usual colour palette associated with the handmade, but flashes of neon crept onto the podium at Collect. Tim Fluck’s porcelain tabletop compositions combine brutalist forms with Memphis-style pattern and neon inflections. Richard Perry adds fluorescence to sculpted pieces of Istrian marble, which he transforms with acrylic and lacquer, while Kim Yongjoo incorporates neon pink into wall pieces made of hook-and-loop fasteners on wood. Canadian textile artist Anastasia Tiller keeps things vibrant in her tufted scenes, while Sayuri Ikake’s heavily pigmented, textured ceramic sculptures pack a punch. 

Trail-blazing texture
One of the most arresting displays was the showcase of Wedgwood-style pieces by the Australian ceramicist Ebony Russell, who won the fair’s prestigious Brookfield Properties Craft Award. Her vessels are created in piped ceramic, which forms the structure as well as the decorative finish. Russell’s work set the tone for several innovative textural pieces emerging from pioneering processes, from the controlled distortions of Steven Edwards’s work to the 3D-modelled building blocks of Adi Avidani’s sculptures.

Stitched storytelling
Visual storytelling in yarn is growing in popularity. Deniz Kurdak uses free-motion embroidery to create works that explore the fracturing of memories and the shaping of identity. “Textile art adds another layer of texture and craftsmanship, reinforcing ideas of dedication and care in the act of reconstructing narratives,” she says. At Collect, her work could be seen alongside that of Alice Kettle, whose unique process turns stitches into large-scale figurative art pieces; Manya Goldman, whose atmospheric embroideries start with family photographs of life as a refugee of the apartheid regime; and Selby Hi, who mixes stitching techniques with ceramic elements to tell her stories.

Material trompe l’oeil
There is intrigue to be found in the work of artists using one medium to emulate another. Material trompe l’oeil was at play in London-based Isobel Napier’s remarkable washi paper “textiles”, produced with a mix of contemporary and traditional cutting techniques, while Alan Meredith manipulated wood to look like fine ceramic vessels. Korean gallery Siat (“seed”) used tiny building blocks to construct large-scale sculpture: morsels of scrap denim made into vessels (Minyeol Cho) and shredded leather built into vases (Junsu Kim). Helen Carnac’s glass and copper pieces masqueraded as crumpled waste paper, while Huimin Zhang’s outstanding brooches, made from gold filigree, were inspired by a friend’s breast cancer diagnosis.

Scaling up
Craft has no size limits, but as our love of the handmade grows, so does the space we give it. Woodcraft is one way to integrate pieces usefully and impactfully into our homes, but other mediums are increasingly scaling up to take on more significant roles in our interiors. Think ceramics such as the Hidden Life furniture collection by Agnès Debizet at Galerie Mélissa Paul, which includes sculptural chairs and tables, and the zoomorphic lighting pieces by Barcelona-based Sofia Karnukaeva at NM Art & Design. Architect Alison J Clark creates small-scale ceramic works that she painstakingly turns into bigger sculptures, while Robyn Neild’s intricate, botanical-inspired bronze art gains prominence when embedded into an antique bench. 

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