Meet Your Maker

Joan Baxter, Leah Black, Jilli Blackwood,
Frances Priest, Laura West

Meet your maker is a campaign led by craftscotland to develop new audiences for Scottish craft by emphasising the unique and personal qualities of craft. The exhibitions give audiences a behind the scenes peek into the workshops of the best emerging and existing craft makers in Scotland.

Our makers are passionate about what they do, whether it’s jewellery-making, ceramics, glass, textiles, or bookbinding. Meet Your Maker gives everyone the opportunity to share this passion. Explore creative minds by leafing through sketchbooks, prepatory drawings and samples; as well seeing makers demonstrate the techniques and processes behind their craft.

The first Meet Your Maker exhibition launched in January 2010 as a partnership between National Museum Scotland and craftscotland. It now tours to Timespan and craftscotland aims to take Meet Your Maker to venues across Scotland and internationally.

Our Makers
craftscotland is passionate about the wealth of talented crafts people in Scotland and now shares this with you.

The initial Meet Your Maker exhibition at National Museum of Scotland showcased the work of nine emerging and existing craft makers from Central Scotland. These included Stacey Bentley, Leah Black, Jilli Blackwood, Libby Day, Pauline Edie, Elin Isaksson, Alison Macleod, Frances Priest and Ebba Redman. Three were then selected to join two further highland makers to exhibit at Timespan, detailed below.

Joan Baxter is a tapestry artist and weaver. After studying tapestry and working as a weaver internationally, she set up her studio in Sutherland to live amongst the landscapes which inspire much of her work.

Leah Black is a jeweller and silversmith. She designs and makes work inspired by her fascination with the relationship between object and memory. Her monument series uses a piercing saw to draw and create intricate silhouette jewellery.

Jilli Blackwood originator of the Slash and Show style, is an internationally known textile designer and artist, renowned for her embroidery techniques. She is represented in many prestigious museum, corporate, and private collections worldwide.

Frances Priest is a ceramicist whose work explores the notion of a Language of Ornament. Her collection is designed to be handled and compossed, endowing the objects with an ongoing life beyond the studio and the gallery space.

Laura West is a classially trained award winning bookbinder specialising in traditional and contemporary hand-sewn books. Laura immigrated to England in 1982 and then to Scotland in 1999 where she established The Isle of Skye Bindery in Portree.

Gilly Langton | Designer Showcase

Gilly lives and works in the Scottish Highlands in a little village called Plockton.

Living by the sea, Gilly is inspired by nautical architecture, ropes and pulley’s on board yachts, safety rings on jetties.

She loves combining colour with crisp matt silver, the use of coloured elastic gives a playful quality to her work yet controlled by a minimal eye, Gilly is obsessed with clean line and elegant form.

Created through various jewellery and silversmithing techniques, each piece is bold, simple and easy to wear.

Louise Oppenheimer | Artist Showcase

I weave on frames nailed top and bottom to produce hangings and framed pieces, using wool on cotton warp.

Light and weather through the seasons, influence colours and designs and the simple process of pulling weft through warp allows for physical effort to be satisfied while ideas mature into solid, tactile results.

I enjoy condensing natural forms to design images which show their roots in nature but take a simplified approach and can be read by the viewer as an abstract pattern or a translation of place and its essence. Using the structure of trees, the flow of water and the lie of the land, together with the unseen but felt forces of wind and time, I aim to make sense of my appreciation of this natural world.

Hand weaving on wooden frames allows unpredictable and organic results, work often evolving quite differently from original ideas and sketches. The slow process using fingers as my only tools, allows for a sincere gauge of time, giving room for a wealth of detail and constant development through to the finished piece. One weaving may take weeks to complete and the solidity and tactile nature are both aspects I particularly enjoy.