One from the Cutting Room Floor

An Exhibition by the Inches Carr Award Shortlist 2025

24th September – 29th September

Behind every finished artwork lies a quiet world of trial, error, material tests, failures, breakthroughs, and moments of uncertainty. One from the Cutting Room Floor invites audiences into that space—the rarely seen landscape of the artist’s process.

Presenting work by the nine shortlisted artists and makers for the 2025 Inches Carr Craft Development Award, this exhibition sets out not just to showcase completed artworks, but to open up the working space behind them: the notebooks, sketches, raw materials, reference objects, maquettes, mock-ups, fragments, and even tools that inform and shape the final outcome.

By bringing together resolved pieces alongside what didn’t quite make it, what led to what, or what remains unresolved, this exhibition dissolves the conventional boundary between public-facing artwork and private studio practice. It celebrates process as a form of knowledge and research in its own right, messy, intuitive, rigorous, and alive.

Here, the cutting room floor is not a place for discarded ideas, but a fertile ground of experimentation and transformation. Visitors are invited to explore the logic (and illogic) of making: the quiet repetitions, dead ends, and flashes of inspiration that are so often edited out of exhibitions. What emerges is a rich, intimate portrait of practice in motion.

One from the Cutting Room Floor honours not only the excellence of these shortlisted practitioners, but the complexity of craft itself. Reminding us that the path to creation is rarely linear, and that meaning is often found in the margins.

The exhibition of 9 Artist/Makers art work will also provide the additional opportunity for Artist/Makers to show supporting materials alongside their work, from sketchbooks to equipment, moodboard to research videos, books  to work in progress, influence, inspiration, references to examples of materials, process etc.