Cynthia Corbett Gallery returns to Collect Art Fair 2026 in the stunning setting of Somerset House with a powerful Young Masters presentation at Somerset House, spotlighting cutting-edge contemporary ceramics and textiles. Bringing together nine international artists including Ebony Russell, Margo Selby and Jemma Gowland, the stand explores how material-led practices in clay, porcelain, fibre and thread can hold memory, repair histories and reimagine tradition. From piped-porcelain sculptures to technologically inflected weaving and subversive figurative ceramics, this curated showcase positions contemporary craft as a vital space for conversations around gender, migration, identity, labour and belonging in art history.
Collect is one of the most important international platforms for contemporary craft and design, where serious collectors, curators, museum professionals, designers and artists meet on equal terms around material-led practices. At the Cynthia Corbett Gallery stand visitors to Collect Art Fair can expect to discover a treasure trove of contemporary craft and design created by innovative artists using a diverse array of materials to address important issues and push the boundaries of artistic practice.
Cynthia Corbett Gallery will be exhibiting works by nine Young Masters alumni Ebony Russell, Matt Smith, Margo Selby, Freya Bramble-Carter, Claudette Forbes, Jemma Gowland, SaeRi Seo, Carolyn Tripp and Amy Hughes.
Ebony Russell’s piped porcelain works feel like a breakthrough in contemporary ceramics: technically audacious, conceptually rigorous and visually seductive. Margo Selby’s practice bridges loom, circuit board and space travel, bringing together textiles, technology and architecture. Jemma Gowland uses humour and the language of porcelain figurines to explore female socialisation, obedience and resistance, opening rich conversations around gender, care and expectation.
“It gives me great pleasure for Cynthia Corbett Gallery to return to beautiful Somerset House and ‘our room’ (W19), where we curated our award-winning presentation last year. Collect is such a special fair, more like a series of uniquely inspired exhibitions celebrating the best in contemporary craft and object design, and we are delighted to return under Fair Director TF Chan, whose commitment to expanding Collect’s reach while safeguarding its international standing feels strongly aligned with our ethos.
The nine international artists we will be showcasing are all Young Masters Alumni and represent diverse cultural backgrounds, something we feel strongly about in our artistic vision. Narrative is also very important as each artist is a storyteller, and their artworks reflect their history and culture through beautiful, distinctive, highly skilled and handmade objects. We look forward to welcoming Collect’s wonderful audience as we celebrate these voices through their creative practices and we hope the artworks find inspiring new homes.”
Cynthia Valianti Corbett
Ebony Russell, Sea Goddess and Dolphin Urn, 2026. Porcelain and stain. Courtesy Cynthia Corbett Gallery
The Cynthia Corbett Gallery booth at Collect is anchored by Ebony Russell, winner of the Brookfield Properties Craft Award 2025 in collaboration with Collect Art Fair, Crafts Council and Cynthia Corbett Gallery. Russell’s signature piped-porcelain constructions push the decorative to architectural extremes, reclaiming aesthetics historically coded as feminine, superficial, or excessive. Ornament becomes structure, and “too much” becomes a site of power, pleasure, labour, and resistance.
Alongside Russell, Matt Smith continues his long-standing engagement with museum collections and queer histories. Reworking established ceramic forms, Smith surfaces stories that have been marginalised or erased, from palaces to public institutions. His practice asks: who is remembered, who is forgotten, and how can collections be gently but firmly rewritten?
Textiles are given equal weight through Margo Selby, whose woven works bridge “art into industry.” Drawing connections between loom, circuit board, and space travel, Selby explores the relationship between hand and machine, craft and engineering. Her structured, colour-rich compositions echo both the logic of weaving and the circuitry of contemporary technology, proposing textiles as a language for the future as much as the past.
Across the stand, vessels and figurative forms become sites of inscription, repair, and transformation: Carolyn Tripp embeds fragments of a private visual diary into blue-and-white porcelain, layering overheard phrases, drawings, and photographs into jewel-like surfaces. Her works become intimate containers where personal experience meets the viewer’s own memory.
SaeRi Seo engages the Korean moon jar tradition, reclaiming a form historically closed to women. By fracturing and reassembling jars, she transforms trauma into sculpture, using detonation and repair as a language of survival and self-determination.
Freya Bramble-Carter brings a sensorial, cosmic approach to clay, creating “alien” vessels that meditate on nature, spirit, and the roles we perform. Her forms read almost as sentient beings.
Jemma Gowland, Gin Cherub, 2025. Porcelain, Gold Lustre. Courtesy Cynthia Corbett Gallery
Narrative and figurative work deepens the conversation through Jemma Gowland’s Naughty Children and Bad Angels series. Using the language of porcelain figurines, Gowland questions how girls and women are disciplined into “acceptable” behaviour. Humour, fragility, and disruption sit side by side, turning ornament into sharp social commentary.
Claudette Forbes brings a socially grounded voice to the stand. An award-winning ceramicist, her work is rooted in her experiences growing up in inner-city Bristol as the child of Jamaican parents, and now draws on scenes from Peckham, London. She adorns her ceramics with her own illustrations, a contemporary twist on the traditional blue-and-white willow pattern, using provocation and humour to test the present while referencing the past. Her acclaimed ‘Poor Cow’ collection uses wit to examine consumption, identity and belonging.
Amy Hughes, Spirit of Alhambra Vase (I&II) with Blue Foot, 2026. Hand built grogged stoneware vase, coil built with slab additions, high fired with coloured decorating slips, transparent glaze and gold lustre detailing. Courtesy Cynthia Corbett Gallery
Amy Jayne Hughes reinterprets historically significant vase forms with a distinctly contemporary hand, celebrating clay’s material identity by leaving traces of process visible, from dribbles of slip to raw edges and exposed joins. Drawing on museum collections and sources spanning Grecian, Islamic and 18th-century French porcelain, she nods to original designs while reinventing them for new audiences, often translating her drawings into lively, painterly surfaces on hand-built forms.
Across generations and geographies, these artists use contemporary craft as a site where tradition is both upheld and questioned, with beauty, rigour, and material intelligence becoming tools for resilience, resistance, and joy.
There will also be a series of artist talks at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery stand including; an official Collect talk by Ebony Russell on Thursday 26th February at 12:00; an in-booth talk by Jemma Gowland on Friday 27th February at 16:00; and an official Collect talk by Margo Selby on Saturday 28th February at 15:30.
Cynthia Corbett Gallery, a London-based Contemporary art gallery, was established by American former economist, art historian and curator Cynthia Valianti Corbett in 2004. The Gallery is an international nomadic art gallery representing emerging and established contemporary artists and has a broad annual exhibition programme including international art fairs and collaborative projects worldwide. Since its inception, the gallery has championed the work of women artists, queer artists and artists of colour working across a wide range of media encompassing practices at the intersection of fine art and craft. The gallery has a remarkable track record of nurturing artists by placing their work in prestigious public collections, notably the V&A, National Museums of Scotland, 21c Museum Hotels, and private collections including Omer Koc and Jorge Perez.
In 2009, Cynthia Corbett launched the Young Masters Art Prize, a unique, not-for-profit curatorial platform supporting emerging international artists. The Prize celebrates artistic skill and innovation, with awareness of the Old Masters and art of the past. An independent judging panel that includes renowned art historians, collectors, curators and art professionals, selects the winners.
Image credits: © the artists. Courtesy Cynthia Corbett Gallery.
Cynthia Corbett Gallery will be exhibiting Young Masters at Stand W19, Collect Art Fair 2026 at Somerset House, London from 27th February to 1st March.
Preview Days: 25th and 26th February.
