Bloom at Crafts Alive
Bloom is a site-specific exhibition of work by 17 artists from Victoria Works Studios, a creative hub in the village of Chalford, a few miles from Rodmarton. Located in one of Rodmarton Manor’s intriguing attic bedrooms and curated by Charlotte Abrahams, the exhibition reflects the Flowers and the Maker theme of CRAFTS Alive 2025, and is conceived as a response to the view of the Manor’s formal garden and the wilder landscape beyond which is visible from the bedroom. Many of the artists will also have work available to buy.
Participating Artists
Emma Cooper-Key
is an artist and artisan. She enjoys seeing her work evolve through experiments with different mediums, whether paint, embroidery or pottery. She lives above Victoria Works Studios in Chalford and walks to and from the studio with her Lurcher, Olive. For Bloom, Emma will take inspiration from the house and its garden, creating pieces full of the spirit of this environment.
Katerina Gibb
upholsterer, restores antique and decorative furniture by hand, peeling back the dusty, threadbare layers of history and faithfully rebuilding the original form using time-honoured techniques. ‘My ancestors have always stitched and upholstery is my form of stitching,’ she says. ‘I love to emphasise and expose this stitching in my work so that it contributes to the aesthetic of the finished form.’ For Bloom, she plans to make traditional hand stitched squab cushions in response to the structure and formality of the topiary in the garden.
Ruth Hickson
is an illustrator and printmaker living and working in Chalford Hill. Known mostly for her colourful and fun illustrated maps, she is inspired by nature, everyday objects and a love of printmaking and drawing. Using a mixture of traditional lino cutting and digital techniques, individual motifs are hand carved and printed, bringing a playful texture and energy to each piece.
Emily Johnson
Under the label, Lampshade Rebellion, Emily Johnson challenges the notion that lampshades are dull, beige and designed to blend in. She transforms forgotten, drab lampshades into bold, eye-catching creations that command attention and become striking focal points in any space. Each piece is individually designed and handmade, ensuring no two are alike. Her aim is to bring new life to old objects, celebrating creativity and individuality. For Bloom she will be showcasing three pendant lampshades inspired by bell-shaped flowers.
Sam Lucas
is an artist from the Cotswolds who creates contemporary figurative objects predominantly in clay. The Arts and Crafts movement that inspired most of the objects in Rodmarton Manor was questioning the rapid move away from handicrafts and towards factory-model production and standardisation. For Bloom, Lucas will spend some time being immersed in the beautiful flora and fauna of Rodmarton Manor and create some unique pieces that, she hopes, will honour the beauty of the house and gardens.
Lizzie Mabley
is a printmaker and fabric designer who has gardens and nature at the heart of her work. She finds joy in the colours and shapes that appear in the natural world and enjoys the characterful charm and imperfection of lino block printing.
Mandy Coppes Martin
is a visual artist, based in Stroud. Her work seeks to confront the transient nature of time and its influence on the fragile natural world around us. Through the delicate reconstruction of natural forms, Martin creates a narrative that both celebrates and interrogates the mutable aspects of nature, bringing to life moments that are both fleeting and beautifully fragile.
Rachel McDonnell
is a painter whose preoccupations include our relationship with the environment and the role of artists in reflecting on our interactions with it. She tries to amalgamate thoughts and ideas about art and the world into something which draws the viewer in, and might lead them to appreciate the work as an object in itself, and also to think about both the work and its subject. Her recent work has seen a return to her first love: landscape painting and, particularly, the painting of trees. Her current thoughts, reflected in her work, concern how our actions affect the natural environment and, conversely, how the natural environment can affect us.
Teresa Poole’s
work is a reflection of memories and emotions; of beautiful Japanese screens and places glimpsed or visited, sometimes in the flesh but often in the imagination. Her paintings are a medley of vividly coloured but ethereal, dream-like images of running water and nature on glowing metal leaf and silks using inks, gesso and patination. For Bloom, she will paint two, three-panelled screens inspired by the seasons.
Sadie Rowlands
is a mosaic artist working in a range of materials, including porcelain, ceramic and glass tile alongside vintage bone china. She produces a wide range of pieces influenced by the world around her. Snowdrops will be one of the inspirations for the piece she is making for Bloom. Rowlands frequently works with schools, producing larger pieces with children to be displayed outside or in the school. She also enjoys teaching others and loves to see the therapeutic effect arts and crafting has on people.
Rebecca Simmons'
glazed ceramics using slips, oxides and enamels are made with playful techniques to summon up forms that are informed by drawings and quick, unconscious mouldings of clay forms. From these, she creates larger pieces that often circumvent ideas of outcomes and inhabit the land of stories or archetypal spaces. The pieces often give a feeling of both presence and energy that can seem simultaneously humorous, hopeful, sensuous and perhaps slightly uncomfortable.
Anna Simson's
work responds to the living world, often taking an intuitive approach to capturing the texture, pattern and forms found in nature. Using mostly porcelain and stoneware clays, Simson works instinctively, leaving fingerprint marks, weaving threads of emotion and nostalgia, often drawing on indigenous wisdom and the unnoticed reciprocal relationships between fungi, flora, fauna and man.
Lucian Taylor
works mainly in metal: often seeking out somewhat eccentric methods of creation, pushing his own technical knowledge and the expectations of how a material might present itself. He enjoys trying to control not entirely controllable processes – ‘happy accidents are my favourite inspiration,’ he says. For Bloom, his starting point will be a person.
‘I use photography to accurately capture silhouettes from opposing angles and use these to generate cutting patterns, which in turn are used to cut thin sheet metal. Seams are welded to create an enclosed form which is then inflated.’
Saira Todd
uses weaving and basketry techniques to manipulate and play with fibre made from plant material available in gardens and the natural environment beyond, collected sustainably. She creates random weave structures and vessels from plants such as bindweed and brambles, often considered unwelcome intruders, as well as dandelion, crocosmia and other strappy leaved plants. She is interested in the ways this fibre can knot, bind and be woven to create containing, capturing and expressive structures and how the making connects past and present, nature and art with methods first used by our Stone Age ancestors.
Stuart Voaden
‘How do I know where I am?,’ asks artist, Stuart Voaden. Spending his time walking, exploring the land in South Devon (including on Dartmoor) and up and down the Stroud Valleys area, he expresses, through a mixture of acrylic paint on wood board, his relationship, inner map experience and felt sense of belonging, rooted in both these places.
Jill Watton
is a multi-disciplinary artist working in ceramics and printmaking. Broadly working across the mediums of printmaking and paper, Watton will be responding to Bloom with pieces of two- and three-dimensional print and collage.
Jane Wright
is a mixed media artist and lacemaker and her work, whether lace or paint, has its foundations in the natural world. She starts with the traditional and explores her subjects and mediums to create contemporary art works. She is currently investigating how lace can be amalgamated with her paintings and creating 3d sculptural lace works which reflect her response to the spirituality of woodlands and sacred places.