James McEwen Hood - Artist
Ericeira - Portugal
James paints cities that might or might not have existed, buildings that exist between the blurred boundaries of history, reality and fiction.
James Otter - Otter Surfboards
Cornwall - England
The boards are beautiful and long-lived, and a good deal kinder than the foam and resin most of us ride. People arrive knowing nothing about joinery and leave with something they made themselves, working with natural materials the whole way through.
Nigel Legge - Traditional Withy Lobster Pot Maker
Cornwall - England
Nigel is one of the last fishermen still making traditional withy lobster pots, woven from willow grown in the same woodland his father took his from. He learned at fifteen, when it was less an art form than a requirement. "If you didn't make pots, you couldn't go fishing."
Miguel Saboya - Furniture Craftsman
Lisbon - Portugal
Miguel designs and makes furniture in a small workshop in Lisbon, and his pieces sit in restaurants and shops across the city, including Sem and Loja de Cá. I photographed the work being made, then again in the places it ended up.
Valentina Amaral - Embodied Food
Lisbon - Portugal
Valentina is a food ecologist working with koji, the mould at the root of miso, soy and sake. It needs warmth and stillness held steady over days, which is a slow, attentive kind of making, and it sits at the centre of how she thinks about food, health and the living world around us.
Ruby Taylor - Native Hands
East Sussex - England
Ruby makes pots and baskets from clay and plant fibres she forages locally, and teaches other people to do the same. The work is a quiet argument about materials: where they come from, how they are gathered, and the knowledge that gets lost when nobody makes anything by hand.
The Cruz Family - Masters Weavers & Natural Dyes
Teotitlán del Valle - Oaxaca, Mexico
Fidel Cruz Lazo and María Luisa Mendoza weave Zapotec wool rugs at Casa Cruz, coloured only with natural dyes: fruit, flowers, minerals, clay, insects. The old recipes were lost long ago, so Fidel worked his way back to them himself. Their youngest, Luis David, is learning the dyes now, cochineal among them.
Renan Castilhos - Artisan Baker
Santo Isidoro - Ericeria, Portugal
Twelve years learning the craft, much of it in Copenhagen, before the ocean pulled Renan south to Santo Isidoro, inside Ericeira's World Surfing Reserve, where he opened a bakery. Two years on it still has no name, and the queue still runs around the front of the building.
