London Craft Week: Nature's Palette, From Ground to Cloth.
With Selvedge Issue 130, Flower, currently on shelves, we couldn't help but follow the thread of florals and botanicals as they bloom across London Craft Week this May. From earth pigments and plant dyes to living root textiles and paper wildflowers, nature is not merely an inspiration this year, it is the material itself.
Colour Rituals: Unearthed. An exhibition at the de Le Cuona Pimlico showroom with Anna Starmer of Luminary Colour.
At the heart of this year’s programming is a conversation about where colour comes from, evocatively expressed in Colour Rituals: Unearthed, an immersive installation at the de Le Cuona Pimlico showroom. Here, Anna Starmer of Luminary Colour brings de Le Cuona’s refined natural textiles into dialogue with hand-crafted earth pigment sculptures by Polly Bennett. Minerals foraged across Britain (London clay, Sussex soils, the Isle of Wight’s rich strata) are transformed into pigment and placed alongside woven cloth. The result is a deeply sensory experience in which colour is not chosen from a chart and applied, but excavated, revealing de Le Cuona’s enduring commitment to material authenticity and a profound connection to the natural world.
Neera Sehgal in her studio at Chiswick House
The printed surface is another place where the botanical world finds its voice. Neera Sehgal, working from her studio at Chiswick House & Gardens, brings an intimate understanding of block printing through a technique that carries the warmth of the hand in every impression. Rory Hutton's richly detailed lino-printed designs reinterpret historical sources (William Morris wallpapers, the planting schemes of great gardens) with a contemporary sensibility that rewards close looking. And from her Shropshire studio, Speronella Marsh produces hand-block printed antique linens featuring natural forms in gentle, muted palettes, each piece unique and entirely suited to a slow and considered interior life.
Erin Mcquarrie, sculptural tapestry. Photo: Courtesy of Darbyshire Ltd
Erin McQuarrie's sculptural tapestries, built from natural dyes, deadstock yarns and hand spinning, carry the authority of things made with both knowledge and conviction. In Scotland, the Dye-Weave-Pleat Collective unites natural dyeing, hand weaving and hand-stitched kiltmaking in a capsule collection that is as much a statement about heritage as it is about cloth, with Cavan Jayne McPherson's low-impact colour working in dialogue with the handwoven textiles of Vevar and the bespoke constructions of ACME Atelier.
Elizabeth Benson, Surface Tension 1
For Elizabeth Benson, ecological colour gathered from the Welsh landscape becomes the foundation of fibre works shaped by slow geological pressure through pieces that hold the atmospheric weight of place. Benson will be exhibiting at the Blackdot Gallery as part of the show 'The Invisible Made Visible'. Verity de Yong of VED COOKS, meanwhile, transforms discarded fruit and vegetable skins into colour on 100% Irish linen, her dyeing process taking two to three weeks to reach its full, luminous depth.
Catherine Hammerton, Common Study No. 1. Image courtesy of Future Icons Selects
Botanical forms take literal shape in the paper sculptures of Catherine Hammerton, whose wild flora draw on common lands, plant lore and matrilineal memory. And at the living edge of natural materials, and Zena Holloway of Rootfull cultivates textiles from grass roots guided around beeswax templates, producing artefacts that echo the organic structures of marine life, in a radical interpretation of botanical making on show this season.
What these makers share is a form of knowledge that cannot be downloaded or accelerated. Here, an understanding of material is built through repetition, observation and time. In returning to the earth for their colours, fibres and forms, they are not looking backwards. They are proposing a more intelligent way forward.
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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: Erin McQuarrie, The Language of the Air (detail)
All further images courtesy of the artists and London Craft Week