THE 17TH ANNUAL edition of Collect, London’s International Art Fair for Contemporary Craft and Design, will open to the general public on 26th February. In cyberspace. “We had to make a really difficult decision in September and switch all our energies online,” explains the Fair’s director Isobel Dennis. “It’s not ideal but we have to embrace it and the lovely thing about this format is that it’s allowed us to be really inclusive.”
The heritage of Collect has always been aligned with the exploration of materials, and despite the immateriality of the digital format, this year’s edition is no exception. Glass and ceramic are both exquisitely and inventively represented, and several artists, such as Phoebe Cummings and Marcin Rusak, both at Sarah Myerscough, have used fragile or perishable materials to investigate ideas of transience and the ephemeral.
