Craft Masterclass: Advancing Sustainability in your Practice with QEST & Heritage Crafts

QEST’s first masterclass for 2025 explored how makers can practically enhance sustainability in their craft practice. We heard from the fantastic winners of the 2024 QEST and Heritage Crafts Sustainability Award – glass artist Allister Malcolm and jeweller and metalworker Rachael Colley. The event was hosted by QEST’s Katherine Dunleavy and Heritage Crafts’ Daniel Carpenter.

Watch the recording below.

The masterclass aimed to bring the issue of environmental sustainability to the forefront within the craft sector and champion different practices. For the past three years, we have partnered with Heritage Crafts on an Environmental Sustainability Award, which is currently open for entries. The award celebrates both innovation in materials or techniques and those making sustained, long-term changes to their practices.

Attendees were taken on the craft journeys of our inspiring winners. Allister Malcolm, a glass artist with 25 years under his belt at Stalbridge Glass Museum, shared how he fell for glass after seeing it in action. He explained that the energy crisis acted as a catalyst for him to seriously address the carbon footprint of his practice — tracking energy consumption during the glass making process, and then significantly adapting them to reduce the studios carbon footprint.

Rachael Colley, a Sheffield-based jeweller and metalworker, talked about her practice which uses food waste, often gifted to her, to create jewellery, drawing on her own experience with an autoimmune disease. She finds inspiration in historical methods of preserving materials and works with museum collections.

Both Rachael and Allister highlighted that being environmentally responsible is a continuous journey. Rachael is currently exploring her work further through a fellowship, including collaborations with other makers focused on biomaterials. Allister’s studio has now completely stopped using gas, and their next focus is understanding the environmental impact of their sourced materials.

Resources mentioned in the session include:

• Presentation of the museum: Musées de Grasse
• Visit Fragonard perfume museum in Grasse
• The Mater Podcast: Hosted by Maddie Rose Hills
• What is Speculative Design?
• Waste, the raw material of the future by Katie Treggiden
• Materiom
• The CHEMARTS Cookbook
• Craftspace: Made in the Middle by Hub Sleaford
• Services 2: John Feeney Charitable Trust
• INNOVATION: Riina O
• Carbon Calculator by Culture for Climate Scotland
• Creative Climate Action Checklist
• Allister’s journey to become more sustainable.
• Interested in obtaining information to calculate your carbon footprint? Click here
• Want to visualise better what a tonne of CO2 is? Click here

Applications for the 2025 QEST and Heritage Crafts Sustainability Award are open, running until Tuesday 1 July. Apply or nominate a craftsperson or microbusiness today. Click here to find out more.