Since its inception at Decorex in 2014, Future Heritage has come to be known as the showcase of craft to collect and commission. This year, renowned applied arts and design critic and curator, Corinne Julius, will return with a carefully selected group of designers and makers who represent the pinnacle of contemporary making. With alumni including Marcin Rusak, Katie Spragg, Tangent, Peter Marigold, Raw Edges and Max Lamb, the show has proven itself as a launch-pad for tomorrow’s stars and the natural home of leading contemporary designers. The 2018 edition will be no exception. Corinne Julius said: “Our Future Heritage exhibitors each have a vital understanding of how they can work together with interior designers and architects to enhance projects in a variety of ways.”
Among the first to be announced is Jochen Holz, a technically trained glassblower who specialises in lampworking, a practice dating back to the 4th century BC, combined with the use of borosilicate – a hard glass with a high melting point, originally developed for laboratory use.
One of the very few glassblowers using borosilicate lampworking in a creative context, Holz’s work bridges the gap between art-based practice and functional design, resulting in collections that range from table-top glassware to large-scale sculptures. For Future Heritage, Holz will apply his practice to form organic, free-flowing glass and neon lighting pieces presented in a number of distinct ways.
Next up is Glithero, the Anglo-Dutch, multi-disciplinary, design studio formed by Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren.
Known for bringing conceptual ideas together with innovative making techniques, Glithero’s work often explores the transformative nature of time as it passes. The natural world also characterises the duo’s output, and it is a combination of these motifs that they will present for Future Heritage at Decorex 2018, bringing nature into the home in unexpected ways.
Glithero will show a new series of botanical tiles. Originated from hand-drawn images of weeds collected from pavements around London, the tiles will be created in collaboration with a specialist team of Dutch craftspeople who will apply a tin glazing technique to tiles hand-cut from wet clay – a process unique to the Netherlands and practiced for over 400 years.
Further exploring plant-life, Glithero will present huge hand-turned vases. Using foraged seaweed specimens applied to a photo-sensitive surface, the resulting works will feature black and white images realised through exposure to a spectrum of light that creates a permanent photogram from the porcelain’s silver salts.
The third maker to be announced is Kaori Tatebayshi, a ceramicist born in Arita, Japan, the home of Imari pottery.
For Future Heritage, Tatebayshi intends to develop ceramic installations exploring the fragility and permanence of her material. The maker will use the flowers that grow around Decorex’s picturesque Syon Park home as inspiration, aiming to create lasting odes to the ephemeral states of the natural world.
Her work will form several installations, including a large-scale, wall-mounted piece and smaller-scale pieces designed to be handled.
Curator Corinne Julius comments: “As ever I am blown away by the creativity and skills of the Future Heritage makers. They combine head, heart and hands in their designs. They are intellectually rigorous in thinking out their ideas, which express unusual narratives and they push their materials and techniques to the full to produce beautiful objects to enhance the interior.”
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