Cavaliero Finn presents Grounded at Collect 2025

With less than a week until Cavaliero Finn reveals its presentation 'Grounded' for Collect 2025, we thought you'd like a sneak peek of some of the work we'll be showcasing at the fair. We have lined up work by 19 of the gallery's artists including: ceramics by Tim Martin, Sarah Purvey, Matthew Chambers, Annie Turner, Björk Haraldsdóttir, Lise Herud Braten, Nicholas Lees, Ikuko Iwamoto, Frances Priest and Mizuyo Yamashita; textiles by Richard McVetis and Sara Brennan; sculptures and furniture in wood by Robert George and Alan Meredith; and sculptures by metal artists Juliette Bigley, Cecila Moore, Helen Carnac and Adi Toch in a collaboration with Cavaliero Finn's glass artist Edmond Byrne.

Grounded is a curated selection of world class craft imbued with a sense of calm and tranquillity. Our artists capture the essence of an idea in their work by stripping away unnecessary elements, distilling their message to its purest form, evoking a sense of simplicity, purity, or essentialness. There's a focus on experimentation, with each artist working with their medium to create a sense of space, light and harmony.

You'll be able to see our full line up for Collect and purchase works from our Grounded presentation from Wednesday 26th February on our Collect 2025 exhibition page on our website. In the meantime, here's your sneak peek of the presentation.

We begin our initial reveal with furniture and vessel forms by Alan Meredith. Born and based in Ireland, this is the first time Alan has shown his work with Cavaliero Finn and what a debut it will be! We were overjoyed to hear that Alan had been selected as one of the five finalists for this year's Brookfield Properties Craft Award. This prestigious award, now in its sixth year is run in partnership with the Crafts Council and Alan's work was selected from over 400 artists exhibiting at Collect 2025.

Working with wood from an early age, Alan bought his first lathe at 15 and graduated with a Masters in Architecture from University College Dublin in 2015. His current practice involves using locally sourced wood, celebrating its natural properties, pushing its potential, adopting traditional processes to create functional, sculptural objects that are a synthesis of design, engineering and exceptional craftsmanship. Alan has won a whole host of awards since graduating, including, most recently, the Golden Fleece Awards in 2023, we will keep everything crossed for him to win the Brookfield Properties Craft Award at Collect 2025 and we look forward to introducing you to more of his work at the show.

Alan's work was recently featured in an 8 page article in the American Woodturner magazine which you can read on our website. Written by gallerist Stephen O'Connell, it's an indepth account of this extremely talented rising star.

We go from one Irish maker to another with Irish glass artist Edmond Byrne whose collaborative work with metal artist Adi Toch will be on show for the first time as part of our portfoilo.

Edmond and Adi collaborate to combine glass and metal, creating sculptural vessels and objects. As two makers with distinct practices and material languages, their work explores the dialogue created when substances and forms merge through the joint working method and unique processes that they have developed. The artists investigate ways in which the materials react, move, fuse, stain and mirror, creating a new visual language of textures, colours and forms. Sculptures from their collaborative work have previously been acquired by the V&A Museum and Ulster Museum.

Also debuting their work with the gallery at Collect is metalworker and enameler, Helen Carnac. We will be showcasing a selection of works by Helen including the exquisite Stitched Red Marl, one of two new vessels, created using vitreous enamel (glass) on copper mesh and iron wire. The lightness, delicacy of stitching and patchwork details on this piece are truly spectacular.

One of the things that attracted us to Helen's work initially was the ambiguity of the material she works with. Helen talks about this, “It came about through having an experimental approach to materials and making I think. I want to know what materials can do, I’m interested in their attributes - how soft or hard, light or heavy, ductile or malleable something is. I spend a great deal of time manipulating material, often it’s either paper or metal and I go back and forward between the two trying to find some sort of quality and texture. I want my surfaces to be papery, light and to convey a fragility.”

Last year Cavaliero Finn placed one of Helen's sculptures in the V&A which you can see in the Silver Room.

Another artist showing their work with Cavaliero Finn for the first time at Collect is Tim Martin. Over the the last few years Tim has been on several residencies including the International Ceramics Studio at Kecskemét, Hungary, where he has had valuable, creative time to conceive and develop a brilliant new series of Forest Collections for us. Each collection has been thoughtfully put together by Tim, incorporating minimalist forms, beautiful rich glazes, raw surface textures with differing heights and tones. Tim creates tableaus of abstract landscapes, drawing on his skills as a former architect and his love of 20th Century minimalist modernist artists. These collections can be arranged in different ways bringing a new perspective to each group depending on where you place it, some are trios, others pairs and some expand to groups of five. We had fun moving these collections around before he photographed them and we can’t wait to show these to you.

We will also be presenting a selection of Tim's larger sculptures one of which has been featured in the marketing campaign for Collect and this month's Homes and Gardens magazine and another in this month's Elle Decoration.

After her debuting her work at our 20th anniversary show in May last year, Lise Herud Braten has created a wonderful installation of her work for us for Collect.

Alongside a small selection of beautiful textured Moon Jar forms, Lise has created a series of tactile ceramic pods for us. These evolve so organically in the making process, as the creative process takes over, the forms take shape instinctively, almost beyond Lise's control. Formality is gone and the makers hand takes over.

The pods start life on the wheel using whatever clay is to hand, after which Lise encloses the opening, removing function, roughly carving and bashing the surface around using her hand, brushes, wood and rocks to create a wonderful organic surface. With only a hint of an opening, each one finds its natural lying point, almost randomly, like seed pods fallen to the ground. We can't wait to see this collect, which comprises of over 15 pieces, all together at the fair.

We have work by two textile artists as part of our Grounded presentation, tapestries by weaver Sara Brennan and three new pieces by embroiderer and Loewe Craft Prize finalist, Richard McVetis, both are monochrome and explore space, time and place.

When we asked how Sara Brennan was getting on with her work for Collect recently we received a joyful reply from her in her Edinburgh studio, that really conjures up a picture of a weaver’s life…
‘I really just sit in the guddle of yarns, bobbins and sewing threads and can often work away on a tapestry for a good few months. Sometimes a day’s work can be a cm of weaving. A slow process, but that’s alright’.

You can’t be impatient with craft, it’s a slow process that many underestimate and that’s why the process that leads up to a show like Collect is just as important as the finished piece. The art is in the making and great work takes time.

Speaking of time, this utterly tranquil embroidery by Richard McVetis, The Edge of Forever, is an exploration of time, pattern and the physical and conceptual interplay of space. Through meticulous making, Richard investigates repetition and the delicate balance between sameness and difference. His work maps space and visually embodies the passage of time, fostering dialogues between structure, movement, and materiality.

Inspired by American artist Frank Stella’s Black Stripe paintings and his search for what to paint, Richard uses the patterns and geometric forms generated through the permutations of his Shoben tape studies. Like Stella, whose Black Stripe paintings explored the tension between constraint and expression, Richard engages with structured frameworks to push the boundaries of his practice. Stella’s pursuit of what to paint mirrors Richard’s own ongoing inquiry into what to draw, stitch, and shape within the grid. By manipulating the tape through repeated and reconfigured lines, he generates geometric variations that serve as blueprints for his intricate stitched compositions. This process allows for controlled randomness, each shift in the tape creating new pathways, disruptions, and patterns that influence the final piece. The resulting work features an offset grid as a structural framework, within which meticulously hand-stitched marks fluctuate across the fabric in tones of black and grey, evoking grains of sand gathering in the cracks of an imagined world or seeds of thought taking root. At the heart of Richard’s practice is a commitment to slowness, both conceptually and practically. He embraces a deliberate, thoughtful approach to making, resisting immediacy in favour of deep engagement with materials and process. Each stitch becomes a record of labour, thought, and care.

You can find out more about Richard's work at the fair as he will be a panelist on the Collect talk: "Contemporary Craft: Updating Tradition and Transforming the Everyday" on Saturday March 1st from 13:30 – 14:15. Hosted by Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, President of the jury for the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize and Sheila Loewe, President of LOEWE FOUNDATION. The LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize talk will delve into the heritage lessons and the use of everyday materials in contemporary craft. The discussion will emphasise the importance of both precision and imperfection in the creation of contemporary craft. This Talk will also be live-streamed via Zoom. To register, click here.

Sticking with the monochrome theme, here's a taster of a new body of work by our artist Björk Haraldsdóttir that will, coincidentally, create such a visual dialogue with Richard McVetis' wall hanging above. We can't wait to see them together! Look out for the surprise introduction of red stoneware in some of Björk's new works which is a fabulous addition to her range of ceramic sculptures and shown for the first time at Collect.

Another Loewe Craft Prize finalist, Annie Turner, will also be showing her work with us. She has made a fabulous selection of new sculptures for our Grounded presentation, including one of her largest Keep Nets to date. Last year one of our collectors gave us a Japanese fishermen's basket to give to Annie. She made this Keep Net much wider, more basket like, inspired by this gift.

Annie’s work is much sought after and collected worldwide. It can be seen in permanent museum collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Shiply Art Gallery. Gateshead, The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, The York Museum, Yorkshire, The Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada and the Loewe Foundation.

Cavaliero Finn has been working with Mizuyo Yamashita since the gallery launched in 2004, shortly after the Japanese artist came to the UK. Over the years we have seen her work and reputation grow from strength to strength. We are delighted to show her work at Collect for the first time. This beautiful installation is the largest installation Mizuyo has ever completed consisting of 17 individual pieces.

In this series, Mizuyo explores harmony and subtle contrast within texture, colour, and shape. Drawing inspiration from Giorgio Morandi’s quiet yet profound still lifes, the artist focuses on the delicate interplay between each element, aiming to highlight the understated beauty of these simple forms. The influence of Morandi’s colour palette and subtle shifts in tone and shape is evident in Mizuyo's approach, particularly in her use of glazes and surface treatments. In some pieces, she combines two types of glazes within a single form, creating delicate transitions between them.

Mizuyo hopes the contrasting textures and colours in her work will encourage viewers to appreciate both the tactile and visual qualities of each piece. By emphasising surface nuances and form, she seeks to evoke a sense of calm and introspection, inviting a moment of pause and reflection on the intimate relationships between the objects.

For this year's presentation at Collect, Frances Priest has pulled back the colour, opting for beautiful subtle tones, creating relief motifs that feel very connected to the natural world. Frances explores pattern and abstraction with a definite nod to the landscape, bringing her illustrative skills onto these three dimensional wall works. There is a lightness of touch to these painterly works that appear to almost emanate light as the title suggests.

Robert George always works with timber sourced from his own carefully considered arboricultural practices and sustainable small-scale forestry operations, all from within a 30mile radius of his workshop in rural Northamptonshire. Provenance is at the heart of every piece he makes and this is especially true of two of the larch boules, St Martins 1 and 2, that we are showcasing for Collect.

A few years ago Robert removed major deadwood from the crown of a mature larch from his childhood, this work is done not only from a public health and safety perspective but also allows you to monitor the condition of the tree by whether or not new deadwood is occurring and at what rate the tree is in decline. It's part of good forestry.

Robert devoted a lot of time and energy trying to preserve this tree, often against the will of some local parishioners and a fairly damning tree report, but it was felled in the end, not by him but by a friend who kindly let him take a couple of sections of the stem. These were left until last January before being processed in the early summer and later lathe turned and hand carved to form two incredibly warm and tactile boule shaped pots ready for Collect.

At Collect 2024 three of Robert's tall Sycamore vessels sold on the first night and can be seen from time to time in Lady Bamford's Daylesford Farm Heritage House.

After a near sell out presentation of Sarah Purvey's work last year at Collect, we've lined up three new works for this year which we hope will be met with equal delight. Her work has a huge fan base including writer Ashley Thorpe. In his book Forms of Expression, Ashley talks about the raw power and directness of Sarah's work.

"In the same way that the wall of a vessel creates both an interior and exterior space, so her work represents a meeting point between the exterior perspective of the spectator and the interior emotions of the artist. She and her work are thus totally conjoined: each piece stands as a diary of unfiltered feelings, produced through a stream of consciousness." - Ashley Thorpe, Forms of Expression- Published by the Crowood Press 2023: Excerpt from Chapter 17.

Continuing her series of works which explore environmental concerns, Ikuko Iwamoto has created five new works for us for Collect including a new body of work called, “I ate lots of plastics, and now I am your dinner. Enjoy!”

Growing up near the sea in Japan, on a diet of mainly pescatarian food, these sculptures arose from Ikuko’s concerns about modern day fishing practices which are causing irreparable damage to vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems.

Commenting on the work Ikuko said: "These fish represent those whose homes have been destroyed by fishing practices such as sea bottom trawling, those captured and killed unnecessarily because they're not suitable for market and those which have been killed by plastic waste."

Ikuko and Cavaliero Finn will donate 10% of the proceeds of these new works created using antique plates to The Ocean Clean-Up initiatives and to Charles Clover’s Blue Marine Foundation.

Nicholas Lees' kiln has been kept busy these past few months. He has been beavering away on this six piece installation called Shoreline and several individual works including one of his latest orbit sculptures in purple - a really difficult and often elusive colour to achieve. Like many of our artists work Nicholas' work is the perfect blend of chemistry, creativity and technical prowess. For our 20th anniversary show last year we exhibited an 11 piece set which was Nicholas' first installation of this kind. It garned so much attention and was sold almost instantly. Our Collect installation features six pieces, larger in size than those in the first installation he created for us, and with a sharper gradient change from orange through to blue.

It’s still hard to believe how Nicholas achieves these colours, which he describes as ‘pottery maths.’ His ceramic knowledge is really quite incredible. We asked him about the purple orbit when we heard he'd managed to achieve this colour.

He said, ‘It’s one of the better serendipitous outcomes of mixing soluble cobalt and gold. The results have ranged from entirely separated red and blue to a very blended purple. I still don’t fully know why each outcome occurs or why I sometimes get a stronger colour response than others but this is one of the more fully blended/mixed results.’

This is why we love the handmade, no piece is ever the same. When chance comes into play we can expect the unexpected and it’s magical.

One of the latest sculptures by Juliette Bigley, Balance: Silver on Blue, is an extraordinary piece. Nested into the wall out of which it seems to grow, this brillaint blue cone appears suspended, literally floating off the wall with a silver white component just resting on top. It is a piece whose materials are ambiguous, the typical hard, coldness of metal dissolving into the whisper-white silver and a deep, gentian blue.

Talking about this work Juliette said: "It's such a striking blue that's new to my palette. It speaks to me of deep, open spaces, where there's both the time and place for contemplation. An extraordinary, stable colour, the blue is drawn out of the metal itself. It's a patination to which I will return, but not too often as it seems too precious – perhaps even too sacred – for me to use everyday.

"To create the colour, the surface of the copper, used for the base of the sculpture, comes about by a mixture of heat and chemical reaction, coloured by moving between these two ways of coaxing colour out of metal. Glimpses of the copper, darkened away from its characteristic redness, seen through the blue, reveal the true nature of the material, bringing a third, quieter but grounding voice to the composition. It's hard to believe that this sculpture began – as all my pieces do – as a flat sheet of metal."

Juliette's work has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Irish State collection and the Goldsmiths Company Collection. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Matthew Chambers has excelled himself with the work that he has made us for Collect this year. Despite being one of our longest standing artists his new sculptures still take our breath away when we see them.

Matthew's work can be found in a number of public collections including, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the National Museum, Scotland, The Ulster Museum, Belfast, the Swiss national museum of ceramics and glass – the Musée Ariana, Geneva and the Musee National de Ceramique de Sevres, France and private collections worldwide.

Much of Cecilia Moore’s work is inspired by memories from her childhood. The arrival in the 1960s of BBC 2 with David Attenborough at the helm brought nature programmes filmed all over the globe and under the sea, plants and animals we had never heard of or seen, a whole new world came into our lives.

This body of work is a developing series called Biomorphs which look at nature and its continuous growth and evolvement and also how we get to hear about what is happening in the world. The first piece from this series has been selected for the 142nd Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition in the Ulster Museum. As the series develops, the works have become more elaborate in growth and the patination is becoming more intricate.

You can see all of these works and more as part of our presentation at Collect. Come and find us in the West Wing, Room W17 (where we've been for the last three Collects). We look forward to seeing you and sharing our artists work with you and, if you can't make Collect this year, do follow us on instagram for daily updates from the fair.

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