The Contemporary Craft Festival celebrates 15 great years and cleans up at The South West Awards
Written: 27 February 2018
Winner of Winners
Celebrated as one of the finest craft events in Europe, The Contemporary Craft Festival is now officially the Best Event in the South West and scooped the overall Winner or Winners at South West Excellence Tourism Awards 2018.
The Contemporary Craft Festival team, who are celebrating 15 years this summer, were elated at winning GOLD and overjoyed to also receive the coveted, overall ‘Winner of Winners’. Presented by BBC’s Victoria Graham, the judges commended The Festival for “their commitment to excellence, people, partnerships, local provenance, education and to constant improvement and development.”
The South West Tourism Excellence Awards took place earlier this month, where businesses from throughout the South West gathered to celebrate their achievements of being the best in their field. The awards attracted a record 647 entries from across the Cornwall, Isles of Scilly, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.
Director, Sarah James, who picked up the awards said
“It was completely unexpected but such an honour to receive our awards in such excellent company. To see craft celebrated alongside big business is very exciting and helps us realising our dream of bringing craft to more and more people.”
And the celebrations continued: Behind every successful woman is.....herself!
Sarah James, Director of The Contemporary Craft Festival has also been nominated as one of Exeter’s 100 most influential women in conjunction with Grow Exeter. After an overwhelming response and around 500 nominations Grow Exeter are celebrating the region's most influential women at the Deer Park Country House Hotel next week.
The Contemporary Craft Festival welcomes 200 of the very finest designer makers to the idyllic setting of Mill Marsh Park on the edge of Dartmoor at Bovey Tracey. The handpicked collection of some of the country’s most exciting designer makers were selected to sell their handmade products to a discerning audience of 10,000 visitors.
Book your Workshops
It doesn’t stop there, you can book onto a great range of craft workshops where you can learn craft -skills, new Teen area-The Den, watch a range of top makers demonstrating their craft and a packed Children’s Craft tent will keep budding young craftspeople enthralled all day.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR WORKSHOPS
You can expect a weekend brimming with live action including The Pottery Showdown competition, the Out of the Woods tent which celebrates British woodland craft skills and the magnificent Craft Cinema, hosted in a vintage Bedford Bus. The unique opportunity to meet over 200 makers of contemporary craft is the highlight of the weekend which includes award winning silversmiths, potters, furniture makers, textile artists, glass makers, jewellery and next year includes demonstrations by The Boat Building Academy and Otter Surfboards from Cornwall.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR CRAFT FESTIVAL TICKETS
Nourish Festival and The Contemporary Craft Festival proudly presents the Brodsky Quartet
This year the Craft Festival has a very special extra element: a concert being put on under the banner of another Bovey festival that we work on, Nourish Festival. On Saturday June 9th the Internationally renowned and utterly fabulous Brodsky Quartet will give us a bit of ‘bottled sunshine’ in the form of Elgar’s string quartet, then - by total contrast - an epic picture of life in wartime Russia from Shostakovich, whose third quartet is gripping, harrowing and intensely moving. Add to that two pieces from present-day Mexico and it promises to be a great gig. If you haven’t seen the Brodskys … they’re the string quartet famous for collaborations with Elvis Costello, Bjork, Paul McCartney, and - as a live act - are just something else! They’ve played here to wildly enthusiastic sell-out audiences three times now, so don’t miss!