QEST to Return to Collect for 20th Edition of Fair

23rd November 2023

QEST will return to Collect in March 2024 for the fair’s 20^th edition, with a showcase of works exploring colour, movement and texture.

Held at Somerset House in London from 1-3 March, Collect is the leading international fair for contemporary craft and design.

QEST is delighted to return to Collect for the fourth time, showing works by QEST Scholars including a glass artist, a ceramicist, a sculptor, a leather artist, a silversmith, a jeweller and an origami artist.

Through the skilful manipulation of their materials, these makers have created seemingly free-flowing shapes or precise, sometimes geometric forms which make a strong statement but retain playful qualities. In some cases, they have established conditions to allow an element of chance to bring movement to the work – the fluidity of molten pewter or glaze, a rippling breeze, or the interaction of light.

More about QEST at Collect 2024:

*Chloe Monks ‘Lavish Flow’. Credit Guy Marshall-Brown*

Ceramicist Chloe Monks completed her MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art with support of a QEST Arts Scholars’ Company Scholarship. The programme enabled her to delve deeper into investigating material possibilities within ceramics, heavily led by interest in the fluidity of glaze. She will be showing a ceramic wall installation from her ‘Lavish Flow’ series. Fragments are displayed in a museological manner, their textural surfaces encouraging the flow glaze: exaggerated angles for glaze to break across, and concave spaces for it to pool with cosmos-like depth.

Whether cast or carved, Tom Palmer’s sculptures are united by a fascination with texture. Precise carved marble vessels – created using skills learned during his QEST-funded training with master carver Kyle Smith in Pietrasanta in Italy – celebrate the natural veining and brightness of the stone, contrasting with his cast pewter work, for which the flow of molten metal dictates the form. There is tension between the stone and metal, precision vs chance, darkness vs light.

*Tom Palmer ‘Diluvial Vessel II’. Credit Tom Palmer*

*Sophie Southgate ‘Drift’. Credit Sophie Southgate*

With support of a QEST Britford Bridge Trust Scholarship, Sophie Southgate recently completed her MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art, where she transitioned from a purely ceramics practice to casting in glass, developing a new material-led methodology to explore geometry, architecture and places of transience. Working with blocks of cast glass that are joined to become segments, Sophie finds a playfulness in the infinite colour combinations and iterations. Colour is not restricted by form, but instead fluctuates with light, movement and perspective.

Full list of participating QEST Scholars:

QEST Arts Scholars’ Company Scholar Sian Evans – jewellery
QEST Carpenters’ Company Scholar Carl Fox – leather & wood marquetry, in collaboration with QEST Garfield Weston Foundation Scholar Rosanna Bishop – textile design
QEST Winch Design Scholar Angela Fung (Fung & Bedford) – architectural origami
QEST Arts Scholars’ Company Scholar Chloe Monks – ceramics
QEST Scholar Cara Murphy – silversmithing & enamelling
QEST Scholar Tom Palmer – sculpture
QEST Britford Bridge Trust Scholar Sophie Southgate – glass