The Dawn of Making
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Amidst the whirl of London Design Festival, Qloud Collective will carve out a sanctuary of slowness within Mayfair Design District.
Its group exhibition, The Sun is but a Morning Star, will gather together nine international artists whose tactile works offer a poignant counterpoint to our age of urgency. The title is a quote from American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, and frames making as an act of quiet revolution: a dawn emerging from darkness.
“Thoreau speaks to the promise within every ending,” says curator Dana Goh. She founded Qloud Collective with the aim of bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and blurring the lines between contemporary art, craft and design. Assisted by Dana Chang, this collaborative curatorial vision helps shape Qloud’s commitment to thoughtful, cross-cultural programming. Here, craft – through its slowness, repetition and attention – represents that sense of continuity and rebirth Thoreau hinted at.
Artists from the UK, USA, South Korea and Singapore will come together to explore memory, intuition and feeling, their cross-cultural conversation revealing shared languages that transcend borders. Cheong Ah Baik’s sculptures unfold through slow and instinctive formation, exploring the balance between softness and solidity. Sebastian Sochan’s delicate mobiles explore balance as intimacy, while Isabella Tallulah reflects on stillness, ecology and transience. Onzième constructs surreal floral landscapes that blur artificial and organic time, offering a dreamlike meditation on temporality. Each piece materialises Thoreau’s ethos: surfaces hold memory, gestures resist haste and soft forms signal emergence.
Other exhibiting artists include Breezebeats, Fray, Isabella Tallulah, Villa Oasis, Vladimir Guculak and work by Dana Goh herself. The collective works ask not only how craft feels – but how it feels to craft.
Against a backdrop of systemic global overwhelm, Qloud positions craft not as escapism but as resistance. “It reframes value, prioritising presence over productivity, care over mass production,” says Goh.
“The handmade reconnects us to material, memory and time – and it’s inherently political.”
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Extending the experience, Qloud’s Material Sessions workshops transform observation into action. Guided by exhibiting artists Sebastian Sochan, Cheong Ah Baik and Onzième, participants will sculpt with Korean mulberry paper, assemble textile still lifes, or craft small charms that embrace intuition and ‘childlike play’. “We invite visitors to engage emotionally with material, and observe how process and intuition shape meaning,” says Goh.
“Slowness and handmaking aren’t luxuries – they’re ways of being.”
Key moments include a private view on 13 September at 5:30pm (ticketed), and participation in Mayfair Design District Lates on 15 September (free entry).
In a world racing perpetually onwards, The Sun is but a Morning Star champions acts that are deliberate and intentional. As Goh puts it: “These acts offer a different rhythm – one that’s tender, reflective and quietly radical.”
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