Collect Art Fair 2026

Collect, an international art fair presented by Crafts Council, was held at London's historic Somerset House from February 27th to March 1st, 2026. Contributor Fiona Coleman visited the 22nd edition of the fair featuring contemporary museum-quality craft and design and hand-picked her favorite exhibitors for THE KINDCRAFT.

“Our 2026 exhibitors reveal how seamlessly worlds come together, and how craft and design are integral to wider conversations about material culture and contemporary life.” -TF Chan, the new Fair Director of Collect

Gallery FUMI

Hailing from Kumasi, Ghana, Kobina Adusah is a ceramicist whose practice explores clay as a vessel for memory and story. His work is entirely hand-crafted, involving a rigorous process of sourcing, carving, and firing raw material into large-scale sculptural forms.

Adusah’s signature contemporary patterns often draw on personal heritage; the woven carvings in this series are a direct tribute to his mother’s career as a seamstress. A 2025 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize finalist, this presentation coincides with his solo exhibition, Inherited Beings, at Gallery FUMI, London.

Cavaliero Finn

Alongside Max Radford Gallery, Caveliero Finn was the winner of the Outstanding Display Award, who was praised for its cohesive spring-themed presentation, Verdant Pulse.

A key highlight was the work of artist and designer Dalia James, whose geometric textiles result from a meticulous yet instinctive process. Starting with watercolor studies to refine her palette, James hand-dyes her fiber warps and plans the color placement on the floor before finalizing the composition intuitively at the loom.

James likes to use biodegradable fibers including wool, silk and SeaCell – made from seaweed – and is interested in using pineapple leaf fibers. “It's great because the farmers get an extra crop from a part of the plant that would otherwise be wasted,” she said with sustainability in mind.

House of Bandits

House of Bandits by Sarabande features Darcey Fleming, winner of the 2026 Brookfield Properties Craft Award, who transforms discarded baling twine into tactile sculptures.

Also presented is Jingyi Li’s Obedient Objects - Chair, which interweaves handmade filet lace with a vintage chair. Through lace-making, Li transforms domestic objects into sculptures exploring feminist narratives, desire, and BDSM dynamics. Her auto-ethnographic practice investigates how materials record bodily knowledge, framing craft as a non-verbal form of writing.

Ben Austin Projects

Ben Austin Projects presented a solo exhibition by Portuguese artist Vanessa Barragão at Collect 2026. The artist displayed sculptural textiles rooted in ecology and sustainability. Nature and the sea are constant sources of inspiration for Barragão, who uses ancestral techniques and contemporary craft processes to make interwoven sculptural forms. Her artwork explores nature in all of its twists and turns and holds her concern about global warming and the natural world.

Contemporary Applied Arts

London's Contemporary Applied Arts (CAA) featured Gizella K Warburton's raw materiality of paper, cloth, and thread at Collect 2026. "My work explores an intuitive response to linear, textural and light detail within landscape and surface. My relationship with making is visceral... I 'feel' where the work emanates from, and is leading, as much as I 'see' it. The materiality of cloth, paper, thread, wood and paint connects me to an innate human urge to make marks."

TM Gallery

Carmen Mardonez’s Textildermy IV-VI (2023) reclaims hand embroidery as a contemporary medium for exploring identity and the body. The title—a blend of "textile" and "taxidermy"—posits fabric as a second skin that preserves memory and lived experience.

Stitched onto discarded bedsheets while living in Los Angeles, these works reflect the city’s vibrant atmosphere through saturated pinks and neon tones. Mardonez employs an intuitive, painterly approach, building texture through hundreds of freehand stitches that oscillate between abstraction and bodily presence. By repurposing domestic materials, she transforms a historically feminized craft into a site of autonomy and resistance—a creative refuge she describes as "home."

Jig Studio

London’s Jig Studio showcased works by Brazilian artist Alex Rocca, whose practice bridges handcrafted tradition with a contemporary sculpture practice. Rocca’s work is deeply informed by Afro-Brazilian ancestry, translating the symbols of African-origin cultures and religions into a sophisticated textile language.

Rocca’s process merges intuitive guidance with technical precision, elevating traditional weaving into a sculptural medium. He experiments by integrating diverse fibers—including cotton, silk, and ramie—with unconventional materials like glass, copper, wood, and brass. This multidisciplinary approach is shaped by his professional background in film art direction, scenography, and interior design, allowing him to weave poetic narratives that connect historical roots with modern aesthetics.

WAJOY

Founded in 2025, WAJOY is a Kanazawa-based platform rooted in a Meiji-period gold-leaf lineage. Making its international debut at Collect 2026, WAJOY showcased the work of Ken Noguchi, who binds cord with lacquer, strand by strand, allowing lines to evolve into structure. What begins as a supple material gradually hardens, accumulating through repetition until it assumes three-dimensional presence. In the act of binding, time and bodily gesture are layered into form. His practice rewards endurance over speed, cultivating a strength not through force, but through sustained return. Each repetition carries the trace of the one before it, constructing a quiet architecture of resilience.

Ruup + Form

Presented by Ruup + Form, London, Woo Jin Joo is a mixed-media artist whose practice spans textiles, sculpture, and installation. Drawing on folklore, shamanism, and ritual, she reconstructs traditional symbols into hybrid forms that explore transformation and the "in-between."

In her piece I Hear Things Existing With Me, (below, top left) Woo Jin draws on Korean domestic spiritual traditions to evoke "quiet guardianship" with subtle humor. Emerging from the wall as a playful hat holder, the sculpture inhabits the threshold between physical reality and the inner imagination, suggesting a mutual dependence between internal and external worlds.

Collect Open

In addition to the gallery presentations, Collect Open brought together the work of 11 artists selected for the annual showcase of bold, craft-led installations.

London-based textile artist Kamilah Ahmed stood out for her installation celebrating the cityscape of Dhaka, Bangladesh's. Using heritage embroidery techniques and weaving techniques (Jamdani weaving and Ari hook embroidery) the work included hand-wrapped silk warps, both digitally and hand embroidered, suspended from a metal frame. (More about the traditional textiles of Bangladesh here).

London-based Irish artist Chloe Lennon won the Collect Open Award for her sculpted rock dining table and three stools. Made to represent the rocks where cobalt is sourced, Lennon explores the ethics and systems of cobalt mining, specifically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where cobalt is mined not for art and ceramics, but for batteries that power electric cars.

Lennon's work explores the intimacy between extraction and destruction, where acts of removal are bound to both environmental degradation and human harm, and between beauty and consequence.

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