London Craft Week: Ancient Futures: Basketmakers Weaving a New World
The oldest crafts are sometimes the most radical. Think of a basket: formed from plants pulled from the earth, shaped by hand, and guided by the logic of material rather than machine, it carries within it a whole philosophy of making. But can an object so deeply rooted in agricultural tradition (think muddy hands and seasonal labour) also feel genuinely forward-thinking? This London Craft Week, a gathering of natural fibre artists and basketmakers across the city asks us to look again at these ancient practices, and to recognise in them not nostalgia, but vision.
Studio Amos hand woven pottles and gathering baskets, made from home-grown willow.
The case is made boldly at The New Craftmaker's Pimlico Road showroom, where Studio AMOS, the East Sussex practice of Irish basketmaker Annemarie O'Sullivan and designer Tom McWalter, present Settle, their most ambitious collection to date. Running across May and June 2026, the works emerge from materials Annemarie grows and harvests herself: around twenty varieties of willow cultivated on a half-acre plot, supplemented by rush, straw, and heather gathered from the surrounding landscape.
Annemarie O'Sullivan and Tom McWalter of Studio Amos, hands sorting, teasing and gathering lengths of willow.
Through baling, carving, weaving, and entangling, these fibres are shaped by hand into lighting, stools, a chair, and baskets. These are forms guided by texture, weight, and balance rather than trend or convenience. On 13 May, Annemarie and Tom will be in conversation at the showroom, speaking to the philosophies that drive their practice. What emerges from their work is a blueprint for making that was carbon-conscious long before the terminology existed.
Portrait of Hilary Burns in her studio. Photo: Kawakami Makoto
That same spirit animates Catherine Lock's Handmade City — a series of walks, workshops, and sessions weaving through the medieval and Enlightenment-era streets of the City of London. Ending at St Mary-le-Bow, three of these walks culminate with Hilary Burns MBE, a maker of thirty years who planted her own willow bed in Devon four decades ago, choosing varieties deliberately distinct from the Somerset Levels tradition, broadening the genetic and aesthetic range of a craft that depends on biological diversity as much as human skill. Her workshop, making a split-willow Pottle in the tradition of Cheapside's street sellers, is a reminder that sustainable material culture is not an invention of the present. It is a practice we interrupted, and might choose to resume.
Storage baskets by Sarah Loughlin
Elsewhere, Ella Merriman works with rush at Cockpit Studios in Bloomsbury, finding in her practice a reconnection to land that urban life tends to sever. Lisa Dear, whose time living off-grid shaped a lasting commitment to harmony with the natural world, brings that same ethos to baskets that weave traditional technique with a quietly contemporary eye. Sarah Loughhin of Hopewood grows her own willow in the Wyre Forest, her daily walks feeding directly into forms that carry the imprint of a specific, tended place. These are makers engaged in the full cycle of seed to stool and earth to object at a moment when that kind of integrity feels less like craft philosophy and more like urgency.
The future, it turns out, may be woven. And the knowledge of how to do it has been here all along, waiting in the hands of those who never stopped.
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Further Information:
London Craft Week takes place throughout the city from 11 - 17 May 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Irish basketmaker Annemarie O'Sullivan and designer Tom McWalter.
All images courtesy of the artists and London Craft Week.