Festival Exhibition
2026
Our Festival 2026 Exhibition features artists from across the United Kingdom, delivering Jewellery, Ceramic and Metal sculptures and mixed metal boxes.
Contact us directly if you would like to find out more about our artists featured below or purchase one of their pieces.
Cornelius van Dop
Cornelius’s detailed copper, silver and gilded jewellery boxes and brooches are inspired by wild creatures, natural forms and childhood memories of landscapes, skies and moonlight.
His beautiful boxes using different metals - silver, gold, nickel, copper, bronze etc. Pieces are cut-out, soldered, hand-fabricated, textured, assembled and polished.
Cornelius's work is influenced by life's experiences and the surrounding countryside and is influenced by Japanese metal work. The scenes and landscapes he creates in metal include incredible detail, and humour.
Sue Hanna
Sue creates hand-built ceramic vessels, sculptures, and wall pieces, from intimate handheld forms to larger works. After completing a Foundation course in Cardiff she went on to study sculpture at St Martins School of Art in London. Sue’s work is deeply inspired by tribal art and African textiles, and the surfaces carry rich textures and rhythmic patterns drawn from textiles she has encountered and collected during her travels, often using slips made from wild clays gathered in West Wales. After an initial electric kiln firing, Sue’s pieces undergo saggar or raku firings, giving them atmospheric depth.
Rachel Higgins
Rachel makes animal sculptures in non ferrous metal.
Rachel studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, where she learnt metalwork skills in the sculpture department. Rachel was influenced by Alexander Calder's 'Circus' made from found materials, Muybridge photos of movement and The Cabaret Mechanical Theatre.
She grew up on a Warwickshire farm, and the farm animals and wildlife influenced the wire, perforated and sheet metal animal sculptures she created.
Sue is still influenced by the wildlife that surrounds her in Warwickshire, along with other wildlife encountered on trips and wildlife in the media
Julia
Mathias
Julia is an independent jewellery designer working with silver, mixed metals and precious stones. Each piece she makes is hand made and unique and Julia takes a lot of inspiration from the colour and form of the stones and from the tactile qualities of jewellery from ancient civilisations. She enjoys exploring the relationship between gemstones in their more natural forms and the unyielding nature of metal – both being formed with immense heat and pressure.
Julia gained a degree in jewellery design at Middlesex University in her twenties but living and working in London took her in other career directions. In the last few years she has returned to her creative roots to invest her time and energy in what she truly loves- art and design.
Ed
Willis
Edward has no formal training in art; he has a degree in philosophy. He began making simple mobiles as nursery decorations for his children, becoming interested in the more elaborate sculptural possibilities of the form after seeing the work of Alexander Calder. He also takes inspiration from artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Brancusi and Naum Gabo. Although his work is largely abstract, it often relates to animal and plant forms and the sculptures might be seen as “suspended animations”, lying at rest, waiting for a passing breeze to breathe life into them.
In his kinetic sculptures, Edward explores ideas of fragility and strength as well as opposition and resolution. The pieces have a sense of harmony and tranquillity, and are intended to be enjoyed as elegant, striking forms and also as objects for contemplation and reflection. In a way that echoes both large institutions and individual personalities, each sculpture might outwardly appear to be in a state of stability, but actually relies for its existence on the continual internal tensions resulting from the pull of each part against every other, so that the whole piece is comprised of elements in a kind of “dynamic equilibrium”.