The Upper Hand
The leading craft fair Collect, under the direction of the writer and editor TF Chan, returns to London for its 22nd edition, bringing together 40 galleries and over 300 artists. In an age of AI infallibility, it is the human imperfections of the handmade that make these works so compelling.
As visual culture becomes increasingly defined by seamless and engineered digital production, interest in handmade applied arts has returned with greater intensity. Craft is now a tacitly insurgent cultural position. At Collect, the craft fair that returns to Somerset House from 27 February to 1 March, the creators have engaged in risk as a deliberate strategy, and from it, artisanal artworks emerge as a form of optimism, precisely because it affirms the enduring pertinence of human judgement, skill and visible decision-making in an era of ‘infallible’ algorithms. The fair’s new director, TF Chan, says: ‘Craft and design are integral to wider conversations about material culture and contemporary life,’ but at Collect 2026, that conversation has sharpened into something more specific: a defence of process itself as a form of knowledge that resists automation. The fair focuses on what makes the art form distinctive within contemporary culture: the human capacity to understand and transform physical materials, visible process and the human relationships embedded in the act of making.
Collect offers particularly clear evidence of how this shift is taking place. Here, its subject is structured according to approach, the methods by which artists and designers interrogate material and process, replacing traditional taxonomies of medium or category. It positions such artistic pursuits as an assertive form of optimism, grounded in collaboration and with an enduring cultural value.
