DNNW X MCDC An exhibition in collaboration with Design-Nation

At Manchester Craft and Design Centre right now, you can get a snapshot of a region thinking through making. Created in collaboration with Design-Nation – the national network championing UK craft and design since 1999 – the exhibition brings together 14 artists from the organisation’s North West Hub, each exploring material, process and place in distinct ways.

The art works on show aren’t grouped by a single theme, but they all do share an attentiveness to the issues shaping contemporary life. Environmental urgency threads through Nerissa Cargill Thompson’s textile works, where discarded clothing and plastic packaging are transformed into pieces that juxtapose structure, texture and colour, particularly at the point where nature meets the manmade.

Rachel Peters builds abstract biomorphic stoneware forms through coiling. Inspired by both nature and the human figure, her sculptures balance structure and fluidity, strength and softness – forms that feel at once familiar and enigmatic.

Alison Waters draws on a post-industrial northern landscape, creating hand-built ceramic structures that reflect on regeneration, displacement and the way redevelopment rewires memory.

Helen Foot keeps traditional weaving alive while pushing it into contemporary territory – colour-forward textiles shaped by a self-described “Rebellious Nostalgia” that fuses handcraft with punchy geometry.

Across the rest of the exhibition, ceramic thinking runs deep – from Anne Haworth’s nature-studied porcelain and Tone von Krogh’s softly undulating vessels inspired by snow-covered landscapes, to Beverley Sommerville’s material-led storytelling, Emma Westmacott’s Brutalist texture explorations, Aneliya Stoyanova’s VR-imagined and 3D-printed Parian porcelain experiments and Jean White’s carved, bird-inspired slip-cast works.

Elsewhere, Toby Cotterill’s beetle-inspired silver pieces channel metamorphosis into jewellery; Juliette Hamilton’s willow animals suggest movement and character; Elizabeth Sinkova’s stained glass transforms light into architecture; and Dan Morrison’s engineered lamps, clocks and kinetic sculptures create little moments of theatre.

Together, these 14 artists make a persuasive case for craft not as nostalgia, but as a live, evolving way of thinking through materials.