This year, DCCI is delighted to announce that 16 designer makers will represent Ireland at Collect, the leading international fair for contemporary craft and design.

Collect offers collectors an opportunity to acquire new, museum-quality handcrafted artworks from some of this century’s finest craft talent.

It is a tremendous mark of recognition to have such a significant representation of Ireland on this expansive international stage, showcasing some of our talented craftspeople.

‘Four Seasons’

The title of this year’s DCCI exhibition for Collect is ‘Four Seasons’.

The contributing artists have been selected from an open call that went to participants in Portfolio 2021/22, Irish Craft Heroes and makers who have exhibited internationally with DCCI over the last two years.

The collection by the sixteen artists brings a fresh perspective to the rhythms of the four seasons. Furniture sits alongside textiles, ceramics, and woodwork, jewellery, metal work, glass, knives, and organic materials, with each piece echoing shifts in light, colour, and form. Spring’s renewal, summer’s abundance, autumn’s reflections, and winter’s clarity appear as gentle thematic threads rather than overt motifs, allowing the work’s individuality to come to the fore. The result is an engaging experience that invites the viewer to connect with the seasons in surprising ways.

The pieces below are those that will feature at Collect (with the exception of John Lee whose piece will be updated shortly).

Cathy Burke (Ceramics)

Cathy Burke is a ceramic artist based in County Wicklow, whose practice is deeply rooted in a long relationship with botany and geology. Drawing inspiration from nature, Cathy’s work explores emotion, movement, fragility, and decay. Working primarily in hand-built stoneware, Cathy finishes each piece with complex, layered glazes that evoke textures like flaking rusts, mosses and lichens symbolising cycles of decay and renewal in a fragile environment. An acclaimed artist, she has received numerous awards, including the Golden Fleece Special Award (2023), and support from the Arts Council and DCCI on a number of occasions. Cathy’s work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, the UK, Korea, and Japan.

 

Ramelina Form i

 

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Hugo Byrne (Knives)

Hugo Byrne’s blades are made of contrasting laminated steels which echo the waves crashing on the Atlantic coast. The handles are made from materials native to Ireland, from ancient Bog Oak to stabilised peat, highlighted with colourful Ocean plastic gathered along the beaches of the West of Ireland. Deeply inspired by Ireland’s landscape and its influence on our culinary culture, his work is a descendant of and an homage to both, and aims to promote the importance of craft, making, and sustainability in every element of our lives.

 

Talamh

 

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Mike Byrne (Ceramics)

Mike Byrne’s work is continuously evolving. Each piece a direct descendant of the one that came before. A constant exploration of material, process, form and surface. Mike builds soft clay slabs into shapes that express the material’s malleability, sometimes highlighting this by using contrasting sharp edges and severe cuts into the forms.

The surface patina is built up using multiple layers of coloured engobes and dry glaze; each piece experimental, each piece a moment in a lifetime of exploration. Mike has exhibited extensively and his work features in a number of private and national collections. He is co-founder of The Irish Contemporary Ceramics Collection at the Hunt Museum.

 

Urbanesque 8

 

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Seliena Coyle (Metalwork)

Seliena Coyle is a jeweller, educator, and curator with over twenty-five years of experience working at the intersection of craft, narrative, and cultural history. At the heart of Seliena’s practice lies a commitment to narrative, memory, and making— using the language of craft to recover, honour, and amplify voices too often unheard. Each icon combines traditional metalsmithing techniques with a visual storytelling language that draws on historical, fictional, and contemporary female figures. Through these pieces, Seliena seeks to create acts of remembrance and reclamation—objects that invite reflection on how narratives are constructed, whose stories are privileged, and how art can redress historical imbalances through representation.

 

Music Entertainment

 

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Paola Di Legge (Mixed materials)

Stillness in Motion interprets the landscape as an evolving system shaped by time, erosion and movement rather than a fixed geography. Crafted with preserved amaranth filaments, the work holds organic material in a suspended state, reflecting how landscapes are constantly changing while momentarily fixed in our perception. Through sculptural wall-based works, Paola works primarily with preserved plant materials, drawn to their capacity to hold both fragility and endurance. With a particular interest in how natural environments are experienced rather than measured, texture, depth and colours encourage slow engagement and close looking, aiming to create contemplative spaces that foster an intuitive connection with the natural world — shaped by sensation and presence rather than definition or control.

 

Stillness in Motion

 

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Noel Donnellan (Ceramics)

Noel Donnellan’s practice bridges craftsmanship, sculpture, and design through a material dialogue between ceramic, scagliola, gold and pigment. Rooted in Ireland yet shaped by two decades of work across Europe’s finest interiors, Noel’s work reflects a deep respect for traditional craft, reframed through contemporary sculptural form. Originally trained in mechanical engineering and the classical techniques of the decorative arts, Noel evolved from creating architectural ornament to producing autonomous sculptural objects. The transition from wall to vessel, from surface to form, allowed him to explore the inherent tension between precision and imperfection — between the human hand and the timeless pull of nature.

 

Offering to the Sky

 

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Jennifer Hickey (Ceramics)

Jennifer Hickey is an Irish porcelain sculptor who lives and works on the west coast of Ireland. She is drawn to the beauty and subtlety of the natural world, and her work investigates the rhythms and movement of nature and her relationship with it. Each of Jennifer’s sculptures is made from thousands of tiny, wafer-thin fired porcelain pieces. These are made by hand-working the porcelain to a fine, almost paper-thin finish. After firing, the pieces are sewn onto a tulle fabric over a porcelain sculptural form. It takes months of hand sewing to complete each work and the slowness, repetition and ritual inherent in this making are essential to her practice.

 

Wintering I & II

 

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John Lee (Furniture)

John Lee graduated from the Furniture College, Letterfrack (ATU Connemara), in 1993 and has worked from his purpose built studio in his native Co. Meath since 2004. He is a third-generation cabinetmaker and his bespoke furniture is inspired by naturally occurring geometric forms and the effects of weathering and erosion. Flowing between the boundaries of fine furniture and fine art, John creates objects that feel alive, as if shaped by natural forces but carefully crafted by human hands. He sees furniture not as static, utilitarian design, but as a medium for poetic expression — a form of sculpture that quietly inhabits our daily lives.

 

Inishnee Table

 

Cara Murphy (Silversmith)

At Collect 2026, Cara Murphy will be showing her piece Long Grass Teapot. Cara is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths; a QEST scholar; an Associate Academician of the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts; a selected member of Contemporary British Silversmiths; and a selected maker with the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland Irish Craft Portfolio. Cara’s silver tableware is represented in many national and international, public and private collections including: the V&A Museum; The Silver Trust Collection at Downing Street; The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths; the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; the Ulster Museum; the National Museum of Ireland; the Irish Embassy Collection; and the Pearson Silver Collection.

 

Long Grass Teapot

 

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Jane Murtagh (Metalwork)

Jane Murtagh is an artist and a metalsmith. Jane’s intention is to move towards a visual narrative that can be expressed through the forging, etching and patination of non-ferrous metals. She enjoys the equilibrium between ethnobotany, music notation and the written word. Her work draws on the challenging and relentless surrounding nature in Ireland which brings life and work together. Jane’s practice is an ongoing exploration of techniques, and using these techniques, she creates one off pieces of metalwork for exhibition and commission.

 

Winter Wandering 2

 

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Helen O’Shea (Textiles)

Helen O’Shea is an Irish artist based in Cork who exhibits internationally. Helen has developed a practice of sculptural making that directly involves us with issues of waste and recycling while challenging our anthropological perceptions of the deep ocean. By use/reuse of existing materials, she creates forms that mimic the natural world and engage our relationship to it. Helen uses techniques and equipment synonymous with fibre and textile arts – the sewing machine, tacking pins, embroidery threads – and boldly takes ownership of plastic waste materials. Helen attained MA by Research in MTU Crawford College of Art and Design 2021, where she focused on new narratives for waste Plastics.

 

Cluster

 

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Mary Palmer (Textiles)

Mary Palmer’s work is grounded in the construction and style of traditional patchwork and quilting, but plays with definitions, expectations, and how we perceive the world around us. The Poison Apple is the first of a planned series around Poisons and Perceptions. When the tomato was first introduced to Europe, it was widely believed to be poisonous. This is likely for two reasons. First, it is a member of the deadly nightshade family of plants, which are poisonous.

The second being that supposedly, people who ate tomatoes became unwell. This is believed to have been caused by a reaction between the tomato’s juice and the lead in pewter plates.

 

The Poison Apple

 

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Michael Rice (Ceramics)

Michael Rice’s work is driven by a long-standing fascination with natural systems and the transformative qualities of clay. In the studio, he uses traditional techniques to explore form, texture, and surface. Michael is drawn to archetypal shapes and often incorporates patterns inspired by nature: coral, seed pods, erosion, or cellular structures.

These forms carry a quiet resonance, something timeless and grounded, that echoes in each piece. Surface detail plays a central role in Michael’s work. Michael is interested in finishes that feel ancient, as if they’ve been uncovered rather than created. Michael’s aim is not just to make beautiful objects, but to evoke a sense of balance, memory, and material intelligence.

 

Red Coral Vessel

 

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Emer Roberts (Jewellery)

With an MFA in Sculpture, Emer Roberts transitioned from large scale sculptural works to luxury fine-art jewellery. Aspiring to arouse wonder, Emer’s intentions to explore the culture of ornamentation and curiosity is through the process of taxidermy with mould making and repetition in casting. The legacy of taxidermy is symbolic of the devastating ecological impact on the natural world. Within Emer’s practice, it provides visual, social and moral analogies to enable artistic expression. Bird in the Nest is the creative origin of Emer’s Murmuration piece which focuses upon the dynamic visual of Starling birds and the disordered yet seamlessly interwoven movement of murmurations as marvels of nature.

 

Murmuration

 

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Andrea Spencer (Glass)

Andrea Spencer is a glass artist based in Ballintoy on the North Antrim Coast, creating delicate flameworked glass sculptures and ephemeral installations inspired by nature. At the flame, Andrea engages in a dialogue between control and spontaneity. Using both traditional and experimental flameworking techniques, she manipulates molten glass with precision and intuition, shaping and assembling components into complex structures. Andrea exhibits nationally and internationally, including a recent show at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (USA), which acquired her work for it’s permanent collection.

 

What Remains

 

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Zelouf & Bell (Furniture)

Zelouf & Bell and their small team of master cabinet makers have been making museum-quality one-off and limited edition custom furniture in their workshop in rural Ireland since 1992. Ginkgo Bar Cart honours the ancient, sacred Ginkgo Biloba, witness to sages and history, a living fossil and archive of retained memory. Inspired by the Art Deco Normandie Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the streamline moderne Art Deco SS Normandie ocean liner, the Ginkgo Bar Cart in black bolivar features a fan of delicate marquetry ginkgo leaves inlaid in white mother-of-pearl, with custom polished stainless steel hardware and concealed castors.

 

Ginko Bar Cart