Collect

25 Feb-1 Mar 2026

PV 25 Feb 2026, 2-9pm

Overview

At Collect 2026, Cynthia Corbett Gallery / Young Masters will present a curated dialogue between ceramics and textiles that explores how contemporary craft can hold memory, repair histories and reimagine tradition. Our presentation brings together artists who use material intelligence to address identity, gender, mental health, cultural heritage and the politics of “who gets to belong” in art history.

The booth is anchored by Ebony Russell, winner of the Brookfield Properties Craft Award 2025 in collaboration with Collect Art Fair, Crafts Council and Cynthia Corbett Gallery. Russell’s piped-porcelain constructions push the decorative to architectural extremes, reclaiming aesthetics historically coded as feminine, superficial or excessive and elevating them as sites of power, pleasure and resistance. Her work speaks directly to labour, ornament and the politics of “too much”. Alongside her, Matt Smith continues his long-standing engagement with museum collections and queer histories, reworking established ceramic forms to surface stories that have been marginalised or erased, from palaces to public institutions. His practice asks who is remembered, who is forgotten, and how collections themselves can be gently but firmly re-authored. Textiles are given equal weight through the practice of Margo Selby, whose woven works bridge ‘art into industry’. Drawing connections between loom, circuit board and space travel, she explores the relationship between hand and machine, craft and engineering. Her structured, colour-rich compositions echo both the logic of weaving and the circuitry of contemporary technology. Across the booth, vessels and bodies appear as sites of inscription. Carolyn Tripp embeds fragments of a private visual diary into blue-and-white porcelain forms, layering overheard phrases, drawings and photographs into jewel-like surfaces. Her vessels become intimate story-containers where personal experiences quietly meet the viewer’s own memories. SaeRi Seo engages directly with the Korean moon jar tradition, reclaiming a form historically closed to women; by fracturing and reassembling jars, she transforms trauma into sculpture, using detonation and repair as a language for survival and self-determination. Freya Bramble-Carter brings a sensorial, cosmic approach to clay, creating “alien” vessels that meditate on nature, spirit and the roles we play, her forms reading almost as sentient beings. Figurative and narrative work deepen the conversation through Jemma Gowland’s Naughty Children and Bad Angels series, which use the language of porcelain figurines to question how girls and women are disciplined into “acceptable” behaviour. Humour, fragility and disruption sit side by side, turning ornament into sharp social commentary.

Together, these artists form a cross-generational, international conversation about how contemporary craft can both honour and trouble tradition, using beauty, rigour and material intelligence as a language for resilience, resistance and joy.

2026 Opening times

Wednesday 25 February 14.00 - 21.00 (Collectors' Preview by invitation only)
Thursday 26 February 11.00 - 21.00 (Preview)
Friday 27 February 11.00 - 20.00
Saturday 28 February 11.00 - 18.00
Sunday 01 March 11.00 - 17.00

Artwork: Jemma Gowland, Cherub Catapult, 2025