Over the last 18 months, 32 disparate makers from various backgrounds in craft, art and design, have formed 18 cross-disciplinary partnerships (or ‘pairings’) and in the process have had to engage with new technologies and techniques that are unfamiliar and sometimes unlikely. These marriages of materials, practices and creative identities has given birth to work and ideas that have redefined the nature of the object and of craft.

Claire Curneen, Ismini Samanidou, David Gates, Alice Kettle and Stephen Dixon are among the 32 contributors who combined traditional and new practices in and across clay, glass, textiles, metal, wood, paper, digital and film media, and computerised manufacturing technology.

This exhibition aims to display and interpret the processes and document the ‘conversations’, as sketches, tests and experiments, as well as finished outcomes; to show intriguing new objects that challenge our notions of creative identity and ownership; and to be a starting point and site for the second phase of activity, where the exhibition itself becomes a discussion between all the makers, and between the makers and the audience.

At Farfield Mill, the exhibition includes a piece/s created through a collaboration between glass-maker Kirsteen Aubrey and the Mill’s own weaving demonstrators, Weaving Friends.