Introducing Inches Carr Craft Development Award Shortlisted Artists 2025

VAS is delighted to profile the 16 shortlisted artists for our Inches Carr Craft Development Award 2025 ahead of the showcase exhibition at Dundas Street Gallery, Edinburgh from 2 - 6 July.

Jennifer Alford creates contemporary ceramics in porcelain and stoneware. Leveraging abstract creative processes learned through studying and performing music, Jennifer endeavours to allow for moments of chance and the unexpected to find their way into her ceramic practice. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Ireland. www.jenniferalford.co.uk

Flore Gardner does not seek to represent anything seen, her aim is to conjure an otherness, an excess, by distorting into reality, in pictures that suggest a lurking madness. Her drawings often figure human bodies or animals, “gone a bit wrong”, not looking like anything seen, fragmented and merged, and through these she evokes existential themes: the body, meaning and absurdity, death, freedom. www.floregardner.co.uk

Ceramicist Carol Sinclair lives in a semi-rural location in Angus, and the proximity to nature has had a profound impact on the subject matter and purpose of her work. She has adopted a “closed loop" approach to make the best use of precious materials, repurposing and recycling when she can. She makes carefully crafted pieces with layers of meaning to focus attention on issues that she cares about, specifically the connections we have to one another and our environment. www.carolsinclairceramics.co.uk

Charles Young's work has its basis in architectural model making techniques and draws from the forms of the built environment, focusing on the relationship between invented new structures and the built history and memory of the existing city. He works with paper, wood and fabric and uses stop motion animation to introduce movement into some of these pieces. More recently he has become interested in other ways of creating larger surfaces and structures in his work, using furniture making techniques. www.paperholm.com

Erin McQuarrie believes ancient methods of textile making provide an innovative means of interpreting and responding to contemporary life. Through tapestry she reacts to the everyday - the medieval language of warp and weft is her vocabulary, providing an antithesis to our fast-paced consumerist society and a platform for historical recovery. www.erinmcquarrie.com

Felicity Bristow's studio practice spans fine art and the applied art of bookbinding. At the heart of her practice lies an ongoing inquiry into the book—not only as a vessel for language and narrative, but as a tactile, sculptural form. Her artist books often transcend conventional formats, evolving into abstract structures that speak to architectural rhythm, site-specific materiality, and the layered memory of place. www.felicitybristow.com

Scientist-turned-handweaver Lynne Hocking’s work takes inspiration from data. A seventh-generation weaver, her creative practice expresses concepts around genetics, ancestry and connection to place through sculptural textile objects. Her work sits at the intersection of analogue and digital making, hand skills and technology, art/craft and science, individual and community. www.lynnesloom.co.uk

Hannah Keddie is an emerging designer silversmith. Growing up in the coastal terrain of the Black Isle was a creatively formative experience for Hannah, which soon led to a fascination with the ocean’s flora and fauna. Her work celebrates the resilience and peculiarity of the living world through the tactile qualities of silver. Her practice is rooted in the ancient silversmithing techniques of raising and chasing, which allow her to craft fluid, bold forms enriched with intricate surface pattern. www.hannahkeddie.com

Ceramicist Hazel Frost's practise spans functional vessels and sculptural forms, united by a fascination with form, texture, and the possibilities of the material itself. She moves between utility and abstraction, exploring the space between art, craft, object and sculpture. Ceramics as a medium, is inherently linked to humanity and place, and creating with it is a process that has been repeated, unchanged, over thousands of years. She believes it makes the perfect medium for exploring our relationship with the world around us.  www.hazelfrostceramics.com

Richard Goldsworthy creates sculptural works, objects, and wall pieces that merge wood and pewter all within his ongoing exploration of material transformation. His practice combines traditional skills with experimental processes to examine the values and narratives of contemporary craft and art. Focusing on texture, form, and process, to highlight the beauty of handmade objects and our deep connection to natural materials. www.richardgoldsworthy.org

Nomadic Ceramicist Kevin Andrew Morris engages with concepts of craft, material, and place, often exploring themes of multi-generational craft. Making narrative work that considers traditional and contemporary practice, his work is shaped by northern landscapes, exploring themes of identity and place often through local eating and drinking cultures. www.scottishpotters.org/artists/load-artist/kevin-andrew-morris

Interdisciplinary artist Fionn Duffy weaves spiralling narratives that traverse the distance between the excavation of raw material and current systems of production and distribution, drawing threads between subjects as diverse as colonial tea merchants, ancient pottery techniques, legal disputes and cheese. Focusing on historically overlooked practices of creation and disposal, his work examines the transformation of social and ecological environments through the concept of permeability. www.fionnduffy.co.uk

Sculptor Kathryn Hanna examines the relationship between the ancient and the modern, influenced by scholars, authors, theologians and archaeologists who examine ancient worlds, uncovered through linguistic analysis and physical excavation. His work seeks to provoke thought and discussion around tradition, heritage, sacredness, monuments, community and identity while exploring how places and materials make you think and feel. www.kathrynhannasculpture.com

Martha Ellis aims to capture the often overlooked in our environment (from people to flowers and plants). She reduces complex everyday imagery into bold and simplified forms, working with positive/negative space to create her signature ‘cut-out’ drawings. Depending on scale and site for display she works with laser cutting, cutting with a Stanley Knife or Jigsaw, using wood, card, metal and plastic. All works start in the same way, with drawing. www.marthaellis.co.uk

Nils Aksnes is a designer, maker and photographic artist who uses analogue pinhole cameras as a tool for close study of coastal landscape. Although they are very simple devices, pinhole cameras are capable of creating beautifully complex images. Nils plays with this simplicity and develops modular cameras which can combine image making methods to construct his multi-layered images. www.nilsaksnes.com

Silversmith Scott Smith’s work is rooted in the landscapes and cultural heritage of North-East Scotland. His practice is grounded in the traditional techniques of hand-raising, forging, and forming silver: slow, meditative processes that echo the rhythms of ancient craft traditions. There is a quiet power in the act of making, and he is drawn to the work of early Scottish artisans like the Picts, whose carved stones offer a profound sense of connection between land, people, and material. www.scottsmith.design