Five Makers, and Not One of Them Can Take a Decision Back

Craft · London

Reading time: 6 min

Melted silver cannot be unmelted. Unglazed clay keeps every throwing mark. Sgraffito is a scratch through slip with no undo. Pine resin sets as it sets. TOAST has picked five makers for 2026 and, whether by design or by instinct, given itself a cohort of one-shot processes.

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TOAST New Makers 2026: The Making Of occupies the Hazel Studio at The Lavery, 4 Cromwell Place, for the length of Brompton Design District, from 12 to 20 September 2026. It is the eighth year of the programme, for which TOAST invites international craftspeople to apply, and the 2026 cohort is Jacob Marks, Yuichi Romita, Egle Silko, Hannah Watts and Linnan Ye.

Between them they cover wood-fired and wheel-thrown ceramics, vessels shaped from pine resin, and textural sterling silver. Set out like that it reads as a survey of materials. Read by process, it is something tighter.

A cohort that cannot correct itself

Take the five methods in turn. Egle Silko, working from a studio in Tallinn, uses freehand melting and reticulation, which means she takes silver to the point where the surface moves and then stops. You cannot un-melt a reticulated surface; you can only start again with fresh metal. Yuichi Romita throws visually delicate tableware and leaves it unglazed, so the raw texture and character of the clay are the finish, and every mark left by the wheel stays where it landed.

Hannah Watts works in sgraffito, scratching through a layer of slip to reveal the clay beneath. It is a subtractive technique: the line is made by removing material, and removed material does not come back. Jacob Marks works with translucent natural pine resin alongside paper, charcoal and plant-based pigments, and resin sets on its own schedule rather than the maker’s.

Four of the five are committed the moment the material moves. Only a glaze offers a second attempt, and the cohort has largely declined it. For an exhibition titled The Making Of, inside a district running on the theme Perfectly Imperfect, that is a remarkably consistent selection, and it is the reason the work rewards close looking. What you are seeing on each surface is a decision that was final when it was made.

Jacob Marks, twice in one festival

Marks is worth following beyond this room. He is a South London based designer and maker whose practice is built on materials that are overlooked or undervalued, and his central project is reviving the pine resin industry as an alternative to plastic, alongside work on British woodland management and traditional coppicing. He founded the collaborative maker space Studio Plait and works from a studio on Platts Eyot in Hampton.

He is also a core member of Design Everything, the not-for-profit collective, and is showing a few miles east at the same time: his pine rosin work, assembled with receipts, fabric scraps and paper offcuts, is in With Limitations, the flat Design Everything has furnished at Aram on Drury Lane.

The same material, the same maker, in two London Design Festival shows at once, arrived at from opposite directions. In Brompton he is a selected New Maker in a retailer’s programme, with the resin cast into vessels and home accessories. In Covent Garden he is a co-director of the collective that asked the industry for a free-to-enter exhibition and then built one. Very few makers this week are visible in both roles, and the pine resin is the thread that makes it legible.

Ceramics from Cape Town and San Francisco

Hannah Watts makes striking ceramic plates and platters, and her use of colour and sgraffito subtly echoes the traditional African textiles she has encountered on lifelong visits to Cape Town. Sgraffito is the right technique for a textile reference, because a woven pattern is also built from a grid of decisions that cannot be revised once the cloth is off the loom.

Linnan Ye is a San Francisco based ceramicist and illustrator whose architectural background informs the work, and it shows in the way the pieces are conceived: with a sensitivity to how an object occupies and interacts with the space around it rather than how it looks in isolation. She works primarily on the wheel and integrates hand-built elements, making quietly impactful pieces intended to improve an everyday ritual.

That is the through line across the cohort, and the reason a clothing and homeware retailer’s programme sits comfortably in a design district. Everything here is for use.

Eight years of the programme

New Makers has been running since 2019 and has become one of the more reliable routes into a national audience for an emerging craftsperson, because the selected work is stocked as well as exhibited. That combination, a show plus a shelf, is rarer than it sounds and it is what distinguishes the programme from a prize.

Placed inside Brompton this year, it also gives the district its clearest example of craft at the point of entry to a career. It pairs well with Byron Pritchard’s residency in the mews, where the same irreversibility applies to an axe on sycamore, and with Jesse Butterfield’s hammered steel, where the process is left on the surface deliberately.

The Hazel Studio is a small room and takes fifteen minutes. Go in close: on this cohort, the interest is at the scale of the mark.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

A retailer’s emerging maker programme is easy to file as a shopping opportunity with an exhibition attached. What makes the 2026 cohort worth twenty minutes is how consistent the selection is at the level of method: melted silver, unglazed clay, scratched slip and set resin are all processes where the maker commits and then lives with it.

That is exactly what the district asked for this year, and TOAST has answered it without needing to stage a demonstration. The evidence is already in the objects, if you get close enough to read it.