From 29 August to 20 September 2026, my collaborative project with glass artist Naomi Jacques, To the Moon and Back, will be exhibited at the National Trust’s Ickworth Estate near Bury St Edmunds as part of the Suffolk Craft Society Summer Show.

The work was created for Crossing Crafts, a collaborative project between the Suffolk Craft Society and the Society of Designer Craftsmen. Members from the two societies were paired across different craft disciplines and invited to exchange ideas, materials and approaches, with each collaboration developing in its own way.

Naomi and I brought together two very different areas of making: her contemporary glass work and my hand embroidery, including the heritage technique of Pearl Setting, which is rooted in my own cultural heritage.

Our collaboration eventually became To the Moon and Back, a project inspired by the Artemis II lunar mission and, in particular, by imagery of the Moon’s surface. We were interested in how something associated with technological development and space exploration could be interpreted through materials and techniques with a much longer history.

The final piece is a statement collar necklace combining Naomi’s individually made glass elements with my embroidery. Its construction is based on the structure of traditional folk jewellery, while the glass introduces colour, irregularity and a distinctly contemporary material language. The result sits somewhere between jewellery, textile work and sculptural object.

For me, the project has also been an opportunity to take a heritage embroidery technique outside its expected context. Pearl setting was traditionally used with pearls and other precious materials; here, it had to respond to Naomi’s glass forms, their scale, surfaces and shapes. That relationship between the traditional structure and the contemporary glass became central to the finished work.

To the Moon and Back will be shown alongside other Crossing Crafts collaborations as part of the wider Suffolk Craft Society exhibition.

Suffolk Craft Society Summer Show

29 August – 20 September 2026
West Wing Gallery, Ickworth Estate
Horringer, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP29 5QE
Open daily, 10am–4.30pm

Entry to the exhibition itself is free. Standard admission to Ickworth Estate is £15 per adult and £7.50 per child for visitors who are not National Trust members.

From 11–14 September, admission to Ickworth Estate will be free for everyone as part of Heritage Open Days.