August Craft Month Exhibition 2025: (Un)Bound

13 May 2025

Craft NI are delighted to welcome applications to take part in the 2025 August Craft Month Exhibition! This exhibition will have a number of prizes aimed at supporting makers at different stages of their careers and will take place during August as part of the August Craft Month celebrations, held in the Craft NI Gallery, Belfast’s only dedicated crafts venue. All exhibitors will benefit from the promotional activity around August Craft Month, the support of Craft NI communications and Gallery staff and profile on Craft NI’s exhibition website.  

Exhibition brief: (Un)Bound

Do you feel the tug of elements of tradition that are important to you in your craft? Is it the traditional techniques, in use for centuries, that you love to use in a contemporary way? Or is it the traditional values of crafts which are one of your drivers? Co-operation, place, community?

Perhaps you feel released from the bonds of tradition, your chosen discipline enabling you to pursue your ideas freely. Or perhaps you want to turn your creative focus inwards, towards the concept of binding and/or unbinding. 

For August Craft Month 2025, we invite contemporary craft makers to submit work that addresses these contexts, showing us that the creative process is not linear and not the same for everyone. 

Whether you choose to submit work of your own, or that work that is the result of a collaboration with a maker from a different discipline, we look forward to receiving your proposals!

Header image: Caitlin Murphy

Guild Prizes

We are particularly grateful to the former Guild of Northern Ireland Designer Makers (The Guild) who have given us a legacy gift for the development and promotion of the craft sector in Northern Ireland.

We use these funds for awards for work in the annual exhibition highlighting the work of both emerging and established makers. There will be five prizes in all:

1st prize: £500

2 x commended: £250 each

2 x Emerging Maker prizes: £500 each for makers who have been practicing for five years or less.

Eligibility

• Makers should be working in one of the recognised craft disciplines listed here;
• All work should be the original design of the Maker and should also be made by the Maker;
• All work must evidence the skill of the Maker and must be a unique object, coming from the vision of that Maker.
• Demonstrate distinctive design and significant accomplishment in product construction and presentation;
• Demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the material with which they are working;
• Shows high level skill in the techniques used;
• Demonstrate the individual creative signature of the maker;
• Demonstrate creativity or create design and innovation in the use of materials;
• Reflect appropriate standards in the products’ durability, size, weight and materials.

Submitted work can be:

• a new piece of work that responds to the theme,
• existing work you would like to showcase as part of August Craft Month 2025 and meets the theme,
• All work must have been made within the last three years
• Submissions must respond to the exhibition theme and this should be made clear in your work description

Online

To ensure the exhibition reaches the widest possible audience, we are delighted to announce that all work chosen for the exhibition will be viewable online on our dedicated exhibition website.  The work can be made available for sale in our Craft NI Gallery as well as directly from our website, increasing the opportunity for craft enthusiasts, buyers and collectors.

Panel

Selection will be made by Craft NI’s Quality Group, led by Board Members Kim Mawhinney, Senior Curator at National Museums NI, Dr Christopher McHugh, Lecturer in Ceramics at Belfast School of Art, and Patricia Flanagan, specialist facilitator of design thinking/creative problem solving.

We are delighted to announce 2025’s guest judge for Craft NI’s August Craft Month exhibition: (Un)Bound  at Craft NI Gallery in Belfast, is Dónal Maguire, Keeper of Arts & Industry at the National Museum of Ireland.

He began his career as an artist before completing his MPhil in art history at Trinity College Dublin and moving towards exhibition and collection curation. He’s now responsible for the leadership, management and strategic direction of the Art and Industrial Division based within the Museum of Decorative Arts and History at Collins Barracks. His research interests are in modern and contemporary Irish Art. We’re delighted that Dónal will bring his expertise and experience to our exhibition prize winner judging!

Submission

To apply, you will need :

• Up-to-date CV
• Max 6 high res images (3-5 MB) of the work
• Description of your work and what motivated you to make it, reflecting on the exhibition theme (Un)Bound (100-300 words)

Please email your submission(s) through to imagescraftni@gmail.com by Friday, June 27th.

We will aim to notify all applicants by Friday July 4th.

Important Dates

All applicants will be notified of the results of their submission via email. If selected, responsibility for the delivery and collection of work is the maker’s own. Work must be:

• Delivered to the Craft NI Gallery between: Friday July 25th – Saturday July 26th
• The 2025 August Craft Month exhibition will take place from Thursday August 7th – Tuesday September 30th.
• Collected, if unsold between: Friday October 3rd – Saturday October 4th.

Upon notification of your successful application, you will be prompted to select a time/date for drop off and collection dates to avoid overcrowding at the gallery.