Wallpaper* takes a turn around Somerset House for Collect 2025

‘I’m drawn to objects that make you question what they’re made from – that incite your curiosity and defy expectations,’ says Collect art fair director, Isobel Dennis. There were surprises in droves in the 2025 edition at Somerset House, from wall-based works made from moss and paper that look like weavings to vessels fashioned from denim that you could mistake for ceramics.

That was part of the thrill of a walk through the fair, where classic materials were also pushed to extremes: metal crafted so finely it could have been spun yarn and wood turned as thin as paper. A journey through Somerset House also transported you across continents and back and forth in time, with makers telling stories about places, people and traditions in contemporary forms.

We bring you the standout artworks and installations from Collect 2025.

Magic in moss

Preserved moss was the unlikely star of the Design & Craft Council Ireland’s Weathering Revival presentation, which looked like woven silk in the hands of self-taught artist Paola Di Legge. Evoking the undulating landscape near her Dublin home, ‘Grounded Perspectives’ was a part of curator Maria McLintock’s mission to upend the hierarchies of luxury objects and local materials and vernaculars at Collect. Di Legge’s work and others in wood, ceramics, textiles and metal embraced ‘the enduring, the fragile and the regenerative’, as McLintock puts it.

Denim reimagined

Denim has a global story, more often associated with mass manufacture than one-off works of art. But its ubiquity is part of the appeal for makers, including Momoka Gomi (of NM Art and Design) and Minyeol Cho (Siat Gallery), who have transformed it into woven landscapes and vessels. Denim grew in prevalence during the Industrial Revolution, a time when weavers were being replaced by machines, but Gomi reclaims it for the loom in her series Recollections, depicting scenes reminiscent of her native Japan that are half dreamed, half real. Meanwhile, Minyeoul Cho collects scraps of denim from Seoul’s garment district, cutting and stacking them to form his vessels, their bleached patterns recalling the journey of the material and the passing of time.

Dialogues between past and present

The star of this year’s Collect Open – a platform for experimental works by individual artists – for Wallpaper* was undoubtedly Wanbing Huang, whose sculptures in ramie, Chinese grass cloth and bamboo reference the myth of Hundun, a symbol of the world’s creation. It was easy to get lost in the intricate depths and hypnotic geometry of her forms, woven using ancient Chinese craft techniques.

Webbed wonders

One of the most intriguing gallery presentations at Collect came from Charles Burnand Gallery, which devoted its space to the gossamer installations and furniture of Kyeok Kim. The Seoul-based artist crochets with copper wire, creating ethereal lattices that she handpaints in ottchil lacquer to give them lustre. She conceived her cellular works to evoke the strength and fragility of human skin.

Bringing lightness to hard materials

Korean artist KO Hyejeong transformed cold, hard brass into delicate, feathery forms. ‘My work aims to give viewers a sense of rest,’ she says of her pared-back organic pieces, made using a micro-welding technique. They were snapped up by both the V&A and National Museums NI at Collect.

Award-winning ceramic confections

You’d be forgiven for wanting to eat Ebony Russell’s towering sculptures, which won her the 2025 Brookfield Properties Craft Prize. The Australian artist has developed an innovative technique of piping porcelain like icing sugar to create both form and decoration simultaneously. Her mouth-watering works reimagine Wedgewood ceramics, while taking a swipe at gendered aesthetics and labour.

Narrative threads

Artists harnessed the story-telling power of textiles throughout the fair, but particularly at Candida Stevens Gallery. Among works by Alice Kettle and YiMiao Shih, Manya Goldman’s meticulously detailed works stood out despite their humble size. The artist came to London with her family in the 1960s to escape the Apartheid regime in South Africa and her haunting, hand-stitched images evoke forgotten selves and places.

Industry meets the handmade

Lee So-ra brought a modernist sensibility to textiles at Collect – her translucent works recalling stained glass and abstract architecture. She uses scraps of Osaka silk to reimagine ‘Jogakbo’, a type of traditional Korean patchwork, dyeing them with homegrown botanicals to give these fabrics a soft, natural tone, before assembling them using her meticulous ‘saamssol’ stitching technique. In doing so, she transforms fabrics from the clothing industry into handmade works of art.

Visual trickery in paper and wood

Suspended from the curved Nelson Stairwell at Somerset House, Isobel Napier’s floating, diaphanous pieces looked like ultra fine weavings. She makes her work by laser-cutting paper, however, fusing digital design with elements of chance. The burning process lends the pieces a smoky hue and a ghostly presence.

Totemic ceramics

Collect-goers could see the expressive potential of ceramics pushed to the max in Andrés Anza’s Loewe Foundation Craft Prize-winning work, ‘I only know what I have seen’ (2023), which found the perfect home in a curved alcove at Somerset House. A jumble of spiked limbs appeared to wriggle and writhe in the towering sculpture, made with refractory clay and assembled from five interconnected parts.

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