Designer Marek Silka is preoccupied with trying to capture a moment
of metamorphosis frozen in time. His objects have a sense of dynamic movement, frozen in stillness.

 Working from a small studio in Ravensburg, Germany, Silka remembers his first drawing as a young child was a picture of a spider,
and the fascination with webs, nets, silks and cocoons has remained
a part of his consciousness and his artistic expression.

Silka has spent a lot of time researching cocoons and metamorphosis
in nature. The pieces that are included in the Cluster Crafts online exhibition and shop are the Bombyx Swoosh, Bombyx Loop
and the Cocoons collection.

He particularly liked the Bombyx Mori, a particular type of domestic silk moth, who makes its cocoon out of a 900-metre-long single thread, moving its head from side to side in the form of a figure
of eight to weave the cocoon.

The number eight appears often in Silka’s work,
along with the number 24. His pieces Blue Cocoon
and Yellow Cocoon are both made
with 24 pipe clip pieces.

Multidisciplinary artist Alison Brown is also fascinated
by ideas of material transformation.

She makes pieces that can be work as sculptural jewellery on the body or to adorn the space you occupy. Many of her more recent works include salvaged
and recycled materials, which are given new life and artistic beauty when they would otherwise
have been overlooked or discarded.

 Brown studied ceramics at Camberwell University
of Arts, London and then continued her studies
at Bath Spa University. She is currently based
on the East Devon coast.

Her pieces bring to light a strange contradiction:
that between purity and the damned, between strength and fragility, and between the freshness of the porcelain material and the detritus that chokes nature.

 “Porcelain is considered a luxury, delicate and fine.
Yet it is innately strong and robust.
My work is all about touch – to stroke and feel these sculptural pieces on the body or on the wall is part
of the experience of them.”