Garland magazine

07/08/2026

Branches of Baramada: A daughter's practice of care

Jayne Christian weaves branches from a fig tree her Mum has fought to protect into a reflection on time, care and MND.
https://garlandmag.com/article/branches-of-baramada/

✿ Excerpts:

There is a Moreton Bay fig tree on our traditional lands of Baramada that is at least 120 years old. My Mum has been a longstanding advocate for the protection of this tree, including advocating for the removal of a fence that the tree had begun to grow through.

The works feature branches from this tree, alongside projected footage of the tree itself, connecting the exhibition to Country, memory, continuity and care.

Find out more in our latest issue.

06/08/2026

The heretic at the loom: Kikuo Hirano and the last of Nishijin

Tomohiro Oshima visits master weaver Kikuo Hirano’s Kyoto workshop, tracing how one craftsman’s break from a collapsing Nishijin industry keeps the loom running.
https://garlandmag.com/article/kikuo-hirano/

✿ Excerpts:

Passing the gate of an elementary school with its weathered signboard, I found a park with a large ginkgo tree. I sat on a bench and looked up at its bare white trunk standing against the sky.

Kitano Tenmangu is a shrine dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane, the patron deity of scholarship and the arts. The weavers of Nishijin have long venerated the shrine as their tutelary god, offering textiles at its festivals across the centuries.

The shrine and the workshop have spoken the same culture in different languages: one in faith, one in technique. The festival required the robes. The robes required the craftsman. The craftsman required the tradition. When that chain is severed, what exactly is lost?

The owner of the workshop is Kikuo Hirano, eighty-five years old, with seventy-two years of practice behind him.

His latest piece uses an aurora as its design template—an image generated by AI.

Culture sustains itself when faith and technique need each other. When that mutual need dissolves, something more than a product disappears.

“Do you think Nishijin weaving will survive another hundred years?”
“It will certainly be gone,” he said.

With cheap overseas labour available, investing in the slow, expensive process of apprenticeship no longer made economic sense.

The craft circulated only within the industry’s own logic. But the moment a person steps outside, they become a heretic. And only the heretic can connect directly with what lies beyond.

When a technique that has been enclosed and corrupted by a closed system is opened to the outside through a single person, a new circuit of transmission becomes possible.

Find out more in our latest issue.

05/08/2026

Beyond the pagoda: Sơn Đồng reimagines lacquer and gold

Nguyễn Thị Thùy Linh describes the ancient roots of Vietnam’s lacquer-gilding craft, its material pressures, and a young generation reshaping it for global markets.
https://garlandmag.com/article/son-dong/

✿ Excerpts:

The Craft Patron, General Đào Trực... after retiring from his military career, he returned to the region to teach the locals how to reclaim land, establish hamlets, and pass down the foundational techniques of the craft.

“Tâm trong nghề, Đức trong sản phẩm” (Put your heart into your craft, and let virtue shine through your work.)

Young people are attracted to modern distractions like games and AI, but many who grow up in the village are also shaped by their ancestors, their fathers and grandfathers.

Find out more in our latest issue.

04/08/2026

Shell and shadow: A thousand years of craft in Chuôn Ngọ

Chuôn Ngọ’s artisans trace their mother-of-pearl craft to an eleventh-century general, adapting shell and timber into smaller luxury pieces as young workers leave for factories.
https://garlandmag.com/article/chuon-ngo/

✿ Excerpts:

The founding master, Truong Cong Thanh, lived around 1044 to 1110.

Every day, he rowed a boat along the river and noticed mother-of-pearl shells washed up on both riverbanks. He collected them and assembled them into patterns of flowers, leaves, and plants. Finding them beautiful, he began teaching the villagers how to make them as a way to relax after hard farming seasons.

Compared to traditional wet rice farming, this craft brings higher income and makes the villagers less dependent on weather conditions, resulting in more stable earnings. The villagers revere him as the founding master of the craft and as their tutelary deity, a guardian spirit who watches over and blesses every family in the village.

The villagers offer mother-of-pearl inlaid items such as horizontal lacquered boards and parallel sentences on the altar.

Artisans must delicately chisel a precise indentation into the natural hardwood that perfectly matches the varied thickness of the raw shell pieces.

Find out more in our latest issue.

30/07/2026

Jewellery as event: Anna Börcsök in conversation

Vica Gábor talks to Hungarian artist Anna Börcsök about jewellery that becomes an event, from a sealed soft-drink can to the standing sculpture Glory Hole.
https://garlandmag.com/article/jewellery-as-event/

✿ Excerpts:

Once separated from its original context, a fragment of an image begins to generate new meanings of its own: it can become a sign, a reference, or even a form of misdirection. My intention was for the viewer not simply to wear or observe the object, but to begin searching beyond it.

For me, *Glory Hole* exists within this boundary area. While formally and symbolically it begins with the idea of the ring, a symbol of connection, eternal return, and the circularity of desire, its monumentality and interactivity push it beyond the classical concept of jewellery.

It is an experiment in allowing jewellery to function not as an ornament or possession, but as an experience that disrupts, engages, and reinterprets the relationship between the viewer and the object.

For me, narrative jewellery has never meant a closed story, but rather an open structure that only becomes complete through the presence of the recipient.

The object is not necessarily the most important element; rather, it is the disruption that it creates.

Images:
Anna Börcsök, Premium Spritz Necklace, Out of the Box Series, 2021, aluminium can, stainless steel, canvas, PVC film, chain 500mm, elements Ø58 x 20mm, photo: Balázs Imre Szentesi

Anna Börcsök, Premium Spritz Necklace (reverse view), Out of the Box Series, 2021, aluminium can, stainless steel, canvas, PVC film, chain 500mm, elements Ø58 x 20mm, photo: Balázs Imre Szentesi

Anna Börcsök, Hommage à Joseph Beuys, 2023, recycled aluminium can, stainless steel, fat, Ø66 x 22mm, photo: Balázs Imre Szentesi

Anna Börcsök, Hommage à Daniel Spoerri, 2023, recycled aluminium can, stainless steel, bread, Ø66 x 23mm, photo: Balázs Imre Szentesi

Find out more in our latest issue.

29/07/2026

We hope you get to see today's wolf moon.

Shanon Garson, 2025, Atmospheric Phenomena Thrown porcelain, underglaze, glaze, terra sigilata, glaze stain 21cm h x 26cmwx26cmd

From Shannon Garson "Skyways" - https://garlandmag.com/article/skyways/

Skyways is composed of two bodies of work that look at the sky from different perspectives. The first group is 14 spherical vessels that reference the shape of the Korean Moon Jar. Each vessel is displayed on a single, high plinth and spot lit; this has the effect of drawing the viewer through the exhibition as they orbit the pots, following the line of the drawings and composition. Moon jars have a long history in Korean culture. They are typically pure white and made from porcelain in two hemispheres. They embody Confucian ideals of purity, modesty and simplicity. I cannot capture the true Korean spirit of the moon jar, but I hope that the homage to this wonderful vessel joins the long tradition of ceramics, moving around the globe, distributing and gathering meaning as pots touch each new culture and traditional forms, materials and ways of making evolve. My moon-shaped vessels function like the pages of a diary, capturing the ephemeral passing of particular days in the drawings. I will never be able to make those same pots again.

🌕

28/07/2026

Works and Days: Tradition remade by hand

Henrietta Eliezer Brunner gathers works where craft holds and contests tradition, from a glass bride’s farewell to wool vessels remade by refugee women.
https://garlandmag.com/article/works-and-days/

✿ Excerpts:

The Greek word *ergon* refers not only to labour but to meaningful action—suggesting that culture is built through countless acts of making, care and repair.

Drawing on the ritual of the bride’s farewell, *The Threshold* by Shahd Zoubi features a bride riding out from her family home, accompanied by her father.
The “*Ayuha Song*” is part of a Palestinian and Levantine bridal farewell tradition, performed by women.

Wesal Jubran Al Okbi presents a hand-drawn digital print on textile portraying a Bedouin woman enveloped in her *abaya*, set against the hues of a desert sunset.

Drawing on the visual language of traditional embroidered dress, Zenab Garbia translates stitched motifs into painted patterns on clay, transforming everyday utilitarian vessels as carriers of identity and feminine agency.

Working from her studio in *Segev Shalom*, Garbia engages deeply with the cultural heritage of the Bedouin tribe *El Azazme*, to which she belongs.

The *Wool Vessels* series is created by women who were formerly members of Kuchinate—African Refugee Women’s Collective, which closed at the end of 2023 after 12 years of empowering African asylum-seeking women.

My name is Arabic, yet I was raised to fear Arabs.

Zenab Garbia, From the series Between Tradition and Innovation, 2025, presented at the Tel Aviv Biennale of Craft & Design 2026, photo: Courtesy of the artist
HIWAT, Wool Vessels, 2025, photo: Courtesy of HIWAT
Omri Goldzak, Bat Galim 14, 2025. Sponsored by: Josephson Carpets. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Wesal Jubran Al Okbi, Al-Shudouh (The Cracks) from the series Wrapped in Pride, 2024, Graduation project, Department of Textile Design, Shenkar (advisors: Gali Cnaani, Hadas Himmelstein), presented at the Tel Aviv Biennale of Craft & Design 2026, photo: Roni Cnaani

Find out more in our latest issue.

28/07/2026

Twenty nonprofit organisations across five US craft hubs, from Asheville to Santa Fe, will each receive an unrestricted grant, with leaders joining a yearlong cohort to strengthen support for makers.

Twenty nonprofit organisations across five US craft hubs, from Asheville to Santa Fe, will each receive an unrestricted grant, with leaders joining a yearlong cohort to strengthen support for makers.

27/07/2026

Glaze and slip: the art of appearances

Susie Choi moves from linguistics to ceramics, tracing how a children’s birthday party, a Korean cabinet, and years of physical effort shaped a practice built on deception and hard work.
https://garlandmag.com/article/susie-choi/

✿ Excerpts:

I chose a really fun still from the movie *My Neighbour Totoro,* and I felt this strong urge to paint it. I hadn’t painted before. I just went to the art store and bought a gigantic piece of foam board and a set of acrylic paints and got to it.

I’ve always navigated the world, clocking fine details in shapes and subtle differences in colour, and I had thought that’s what everyone did, but then I learned that that’s what artists do.

A recurring theme in my work is the deceptive nature of appearances. Those rings, particularly, I think they’re a really interesting play on the senses in terms of inflatable versus ceramic, soft and hard.

I always find myself doing really laborious things. For example, the way I make tassels for my work is very particular – they’re held together by tension. So, to make it look very refined actually takes a great deal of exertion to have it hold itself together.

I have always been interested in the point between solid and fluid when it comes to casting. The more I work with clay slip, the more the space and time during which it becomes solid seems to grow. You can play with specific gravity, as well as the timing of when you can manipulate or remove a form from its mould.

Images:
Susie Choi, After Sunrise 2026. Porcelain glaze lustre. 28h x 33w x 10d cm; photo: Mark Pokorny
Susie Choi Poker face 2026. Porcelain glaze. 47h x 47w x 7d cm; photo: Mark Pokorny
Susie Choi Pussyfooting 2025. Stoneware glaze. 38h x 36w x 19d cm; photo: Mark Pokorny

Find out more in our latest issue.

Follow