On Thursday 23rd January 2025 the Crafts Study Centre (CSC) -University for the Creative Arts hosted a panel discussion with the 2024 cohort of Rising Stars. Rising Stars is a professional development scheme ran by the New Ashgate Gallery, with a long history of supporting early career makers with exhibition opportunities and commercial training. In 2024 the programme collaborated with the Crafts Study Centre for the exhibition Open, with five Rising Stars responding to the brief to be ‘curator for a day,’ to select work from the CSC’s collection that responded to their own interests and concerns as makers.

After a welcome and short introduction to the exhibition at the CSC, four of the five participating makers - Libby Daniels, Laura Gibbs, Charlotte Smith, Barbara Sulzberger - joined Director of the CSC, Stephen Knott, and Director of the New Ashgate Gallery, Outi Remes, for a discussion about their response to the brief, and their broader experience as early career makers.

During the conversations the panel touched on the transition from graduating from courses in higher education to establishing themselves as makers, the importance of home studios, teaching, craft fairs, and networks of support. In response to the brief to select from the CSC collections - a new diversion into curating and interpreting historic collections for the Rising Stars programme - the panel adopted a range of different approaches using a combination of intuition, browsing through the online database (VADS), and discussions with CSC staff during an on-site research visit. Libby Daniels admitted the task of being curator was initially confusing but that in the course of handling collection items and placing them in groups, her own written and made responses to the collections fell into place. For Charlotte Smith, a jeweller who mostly works in enamel, the research into the textile collections at the CSC had made her more aware of the convergences between textile and metal, and the relevance of sewing techniques in particular.

The CSC looks forward to collaborating with the Rising Stars programme again in the future.