Saturday 26th October 2024 – Sunday 12th January 2025
Making Dorset
Building on the county’s rich tradition of craft, design, and making, Dorset Visual Arts announces the return of its Making Dorset project group in a major exhibition at The Sherborne. Making Dorset will present the very best ceramic, furniture, silversmithing, print, glass, and textile work produced in the county, providing an important showcase for many skilled practitioners.
Dorset is home to many maker’s studios, often secluded sites of individual enquiry, reflection, and effort, bound by a shared sense of narrative and place, form and function, tradition and experimentation.
Making Dorset explores the intrinsic dialogue between environment, heritage, and creative practice in the county. It establishes Sherborne as a new home for design and making in the region and puts Sherborne on the map as the county’s craft town.
This new exhibition, featuring over 30 makers, forms part of the evolving cultural programme at this emerging destination for the arts in Southwest England.
Making Dorset celebrates the county’s best contemporary craft, design and making. The initiative features a vast array of works with a variety of approaches, responses and use of materials, including award-winning international furniture makers such as John Makepeace OBE, Simon Thomas Pirie and Petter Southall.
Amanda Notarianni and Charlie Macpherson (Notarianni Glass) have been working together to make award-winning contemporary glass for 25 years. They have a passion for design excellence and an exceptional commitment to creating unique works of art.
Ceramicist Victoria Jardine is a selected member of the Professional Craft Potters’ Association. She has taught Museum Studies at London Metropolitan University, examining how objects’ meanings can change as we move them through different environments, from home to museum or studio to gallery.
Each piece of Karina Gill’s silver is designed and handmade from her workshop in Dorset. Her work captures the transformation of hard metal into brilliant organic forms that mirror the geometry of nature. She has established a unique voice through the crafting of exquisite contemporary pieces that demonstrate her characteristic experimental approach.
Making Dorset also features other unique forms, including work by Jane Atkinson, whose practice in contemporary lace encompasses pieces designed at scale to examine aspects of the climate crisis and explorations into pattern and design to lead her lacemaking into wearable art and domestic ornament. It is an art that talks and works hard for its living.
The initiative’s relaunch also welcomes guest makers ahead of a call for new and emerging makers in early 2025.
At its inception, Making Dorset was open to professionally and/or academically trained designers and makers who had established their practice in Dorset, including trained or apprenticed emergent designers and makers. The group sought to share ideas and experiences and undertake critical reviews to explore the content and processes associated with each individual’s practice.
‘Once they get to Dorset (or return) place holds them fast. The work, whatever the medium, sings of Dorset’s holloways, chalk and faltering edges, whimbreled cloudscapes and its brilled and dabbled seas.’ Professor Simon Olding, Foreword to Fifty Dorset Makers, 2017
Artwork from Making Dorset will be available to purchase through The Sherborne. and many makers will be featured in our shop. Please talk to our Visitor Hub Team at the reception desk for further information.
