Collect 2026

Somerset House, London | West Wing | Stand W19
Public Days: 27 February–1 March 2026
Preview Days: 25–26 February 2026

 

Cynthia Corbett Gallery / Young Masters returns to Collect 2026 with a curated presentation bringing ceramics and textiles into a richly layered dialogue. The stand explores how contemporary craft can hold memory, repair histories, and reimagine tradition, foregrounding artists whose practices draw on 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 signature piped-porcelain constructions push the decorative to architectural extremes, reclaiming aesthetics historically coded as feminine, superficial, or excessive. Ornament becomes structure, and “too much” becomes a site of power, pleasure, labour, and resistance.

Alongside Russell, Matt Smith continues his long-standing engagement with museum collections and queer histories. Reworking established ceramic forms, Smith surfaces stories that have been marginalised or erased, from palaces to public institutions. His practice asks: who is remembered, who is forgotten, and how can collections be gently but firmly rewritten?

Textiles are given equal weight through Margo Selby, whose woven works bridge “art into industry.”Drawing connections between loom, circuit board, and space travel, Selby 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, proposing textiles as a language for the future as much as the past.

Across the stand, vessels and figurative forms become sites of inscription, repair, and transformation: Carolyn Tripp embeds fragments of a private visual diary into blue-and-white porcelain, layering overheard phrases, drawings, and photographs into jewel-like surfaces. Her works become intimate containers where personal experience meets the viewer’s own memory.

SaeRi Seo engages 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 of 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 perform. Her forms read almost as sentient beings.

 

Narrative and figurative work deepens the conversation through Jemma Gowland’s Naughty Children and Bad Angels series. Using the language of porcelain figurines, Gowland questions how girls and women are disciplined into “acceptable” behaviour. Humour, fragility, and disruption sit side by side, turning ornament into sharp social commentary.

Across generations and geographies, these artists use contemporary craft as a site where tradition is both upheld and questioned, with beauty, rigour, and material intelligence becoming tools for resilience, resistance, and joy.

• Ebony Russell – Thursday 26 February, 12:00 (official Collect talk)
• Jemma Gowland – Friday 27 February, 16:00 (in-booth talk at Stand W19)
• Margo Selby – Saturday 28 February, 15:30 (official Collect talk)