Jane Crisp is a British artist with a practice spanning furniture making and homeware design. Focussing on the trug as a sculptural object, her work is situated between biophilic design sensibilities and a contemporary aesthetic informed by traditional craft methodologies.

Crisp’s pieces reference the making mythologies of her native East Anglian Fen country, where trugs have been made by fenmen and women for generations. Positing the trug as a vessel borne from necessity and shaped by the rhythm and ritual of community, her work is a meditation on our symbiotic relationship to the natural environment and how its myriad repetitions influence and inform the human experience, as we mirror and respond to nature’s patterns by way of our own customs and behaviours.

Her work particularly references traditional boat building techniques, evidenced by her use of copper nail and rove fixings set amidst fluid formations of steambent wood analogous to an overlapping clinker hull construction.

Image: Pam Seale Photography (2020)