New Voices of Craft: Artisans Shaping Tradition and Innovation

Every month, the Homo Faber Guide opens a window onto exceptional craftsmanship, welcoming new artisans whose work bridges heritage, material intelligence, and contemporary expression. This season’s selection spans continents and disciplines, offering a rich panorama of how makers today reinterpret tradition through deeply personal and place-driven practices.

Rooted in ritual and landscape, UK basketweaver Joanne Lamb creates woven forms that celebrate the Celtic year. Using Japanese tatami paper yarn shaped over moulds and interlaced with natural fibres, her baskets evoke memory, seasonality, and the four cross-quarter festivals—Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain. Each piece becomes both structure and story, carrying the quiet rhythms of land and time.

From France, Benoît Vauthier and Manu Lerendu carve mountain-like reliefs in wood, stone, and glass, leaving tool marks visible and textures unapologetically raw. Their approach resists industrial smoothness, favouring tactility and sensory depth. In a parallel dialogue between art and science, Australian embroiderer Meredith Woolnough works with water-soluble fabric that dissolves to reveal delicate, nature-inspired stitched forms, echoing shell lattices and leaf skeletons.

Minimalism takes on sculptural life in the hands of South Korean metal artist Sangsoo Lee, who constructs animal forms using the fewest possible lines. Digitally modelled and 3D printed, his works retain the immediacy of a single, fluid gesture. In Japan, ceramicist Maika Hirano turns convention on its head by treating glaze—not clay—as her primary sculptural medium, drawing inspiration from botanical textures and organic structures.

The dialogue with landscape continues in Norway with furniture maker Matthew John Coutts, whose fluid wooden pieces balance precision joinery with gentle curves and symmetry. His designs reflect the calm geometry and movement of the Norwegian environment. Meanwhile, Australian ceramicist Stephanie Phillips creates white-glazed works with a sandy, tactile surface, informed by her background in visual merchandising and a fascination with surrealist architecture and gardens.

Together, these artisans reveal a shared commitment to material honesty, experimentation, and cultural memory. Whether through weaving, carving, stitching, metalwork, or ceramics, their practices remind us that craft is not static—it evolves, adapts, and continues to tell new stories across borders.

As Maker Mag celebrates these new voices on the Homo Faber Guide, we’re invited to look closer, slow down, and rediscover the power of the handmade in shaping how we experience the world.