Taken from the historical modes of embellishment, often those used within domestic spaces, Coco Crampton’s artworks perform with a double face; not deviously deceptive, but rather, playfully proclaiming more than their first appearance.

selected works

exhibitions and series

Plan for Living
Weald Contemporary, West Sussex, UK (2024)

Coco Crampton’s aesthetic developes through “A process of borrowing, hi-jacking and reinterpreting from various periods in design history”. Coco’s non-medium- specific practice reflects her dynamic and exploratory approach to making work, allowing for a fluid movement between different processes and materials. This flexibility enables the artist to draw from a diverse range of techniques and traditions, including knitting, carpentry, ceramics, and printmaking, each offering its own unique set of possibilities.
—press release

Sketches for the Future
miart, Milan (Italy), 2024

Coco Crampton’s practice stems from an interest in the design icons of the long 20^th century. Breathing new life into otherwise antiquated forms, Crampton co-opts craft traditions to create sculptural works which playfully twist the objective stylings of domestic life. Belmacz’s presentation at miart 2024, spotlights Crampton’s ceramic practice; a range of deliquescent neon chandeliers float aside a shelf of ‘functionless’ pots. United by both their clay bodies and the visuality of their long protrusions, these works suspend expected functions, transforming otherwise utilitarian matter into animate bodies — lampshades become lithe jellyfish-like forms whilst ceramic teapots become woodland creatures: squirrels, owls, and the like. Sitting with Crampton’s associative works, the mind drifts, sensorial memories of sunny days by seashores and ample walks through wooded paths appear in our minds, demonstrating how beneath the cotton wool of domestic life lies a hidden pattern; how, to quote Woolf, “the whole world is a work of art” and how we are parts of this everchanging artwork: “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” Performing anew, Crampton’s hand-crafted artworks allow us to glimmer — to find joy in — the relationality of life.
—booth text

Domestic Wears
Belmacz, London (UK), 2020 – 21

Reflecting on actual forms of domestic containment, Crampton exhibits a trio of sculptures: cabinet-like column structures and vessel-like ceramic forms arranged between and behind curtains as though to prevent total exposure. A reimagining of the quotidian and an allusion to daily rituals, from ablutions to dressing.

Tender Touches
AMP Gallery, London (UK), 2019

As part of Open Space’s exhibition series, artist Inês Neto dos Santos and co-curator Huma Kabakci commissioned twelve emerging artists to create pieces for a new gallery café, Tender Touches. Both decorative and functional, the artworks embrace every aspect of the space, both walls and furniture. Clementine Keith-Roach’s terracotta sculptures lovingly hold their candles in the centre of Coco Crampton’s playful tables. The walls, papered by Marco Palmieri’s delicate designs, carry Paloma Proudfoot’s decadent ceramic collars.

( click here to read the full press release )

Bowers from Form to Public
Belmacz, London (UK), 2016

A sense of precision criss-crosses Coco Crampton’s installations, creating a delicate sense of display. Here angles, planes or facets on metal, cut hardwood, hammered sheeting and smooth paint, faux finishes, woven fabrics and glazed ceramics, accentuated textures which vie for the viewer’s attention. Coco’s stately sculptures come out of simplified jigsaw, their palette, at times feminine, is off set by saturated inks and tonalities reminiscent of waiting rooms of the 21st century.

(continue reading here)

Gardeners and Astronomers
Caustic Costal, Manchester (UK), 2016

in this duo exhibition, Coco and Nicole Vinokur explore shifts in both interior and industrial design tastes across the 20th-century. With its title pulled from Edith Sitwell’s 1953 book of poetry, Gardeners and Astronomers works across themes such as the unity of life and the rebirth brought by Spring. In this way, the exhibition navigates similar cyclical births and rebirths of design and aesthetic trends in endless loops.

( click here for more information about the exhibition )

Kingly Things
Chandelier Projects, London (UK), 2015

Kingly Things articulates how the meanings of objects can be dissolved and re-imagined. The title is a term coined by social anthropologist Max Gluckman to define those objects which perform a symbolic inventory of a society: public lands, monuments, the paraphernalia of power and ritual objects. Over the course of their existence objects move in and out of the commodity state over the duration of their use-life. ‘Kingly Things’ are objects diverted from use as commodities to protect whatever value or symbolic power the object may transfer.

Handles on Romance & Other Girls also Common Tongue
Minories, Colchester (UK), 2015

Handles on Romance & Other Girls also Common Tongue was shown across three galleries. Each room explored a different proposition, although there are overlapping concerns. The three elements of the title act to support the suggestion of a separate narrative for each space and the collections of works within it – perhaps as three scenes or stages around which particular activities or exchanges might take place.

Approximating a restaurant layout, each room contained groupings of adapted fixed seating fast food dining units, upon and around which objects are placed. The language of modular canteen furniture and partitioning screens extended throughout the galleries in a possible sequence or development of events.

Cassius Clay
Marcelle Joseph Projects, London (UK), 2014

Cassius Clay was an exhibition of ceramic work made by an international selection of artists, each of whom brought a criticality to the history and materiality of ceramics with their varied practices

Not unlike Cassius Clay, the artists assembled play dirty, challenging the limits of the material of clay in the making stage of their artworks. These battles with materiality are won in the studio not the exhibition space. For this exhibition, the sculptures are presented on the floor, on custom-made tables and on the wall, removing any analogy to the traditional craft heritage of clay and allowing the objects to either “dance under the lights” or brawl with each other.

(click here for further information about the exhibition)

Protected Space
Belmacz, London (UK), 2014

Belmacz is pleased to announce the exhibition Protected Space which pairs the artists Jonathan Baldock and Coco Crampton and their site-specific work, that stems from the conception of the handheld fan. Fans are curious objects that have spanned millennia and have been used to give a sense of shelter, to fan air and fire and to conceal from the sun.

The artists have divided up the Belmacz space to create a sympathetic dialogue around this theme and its conditions. Both are concerned with the tensions and dilemmas that lie between form and function.

(click here for further information about the exhibition)

Royal Academy Schools Show
London (UK), 2014

Crampton has developed an aesthetic through processes of borrowing, hijacking and reinterpreting from visionary forms of 20th-century design, art, and architecture.

Slipped
Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (UK), 2011

Bonne Bouce
The Cut, Suffolk (UK), 2010

Swing
Outpost Gallery, Norwich (UK), 2007

From the centre of the gallery a mulberry tree extends into the roof space, pivoting four other works: a hand-stitched quilt comprised from a signature rhombus shape laying on a bed of stacked particle board; three sculpture-cum-furniture pieces housing strip-lighting; a black hexagon circling and hanging from one of the gallery’s i-beams and an alternating pastel coloured scalloped and spoked semi-circular screen.

(read a discussion between Kaavous Clayton and Coco on the occasion of this exhibition here)

publications

Domestic Wears
Belmacz, 2020

Bowers: from form to public
Belmacz, 2016

ARTIST BIO

Coco Crampton (b.1983, London, UK), studied at Norwich School of Art and Design before graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2014. Co-opting craft traditions through playful gesture, Coco’s work breathes new life into historical forms, ranging from Victorian furniture to 20th-century design icons. Weaving together function and fiction Coco’s work embodies a performativity, activated in the imagination of the viewer.

Select exhibitions include: Plan for Living, with Louise Bristow, Weald Contemporary, UK (2024); Contested Bodies, Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, UK (2023-24); Women of the ‘20’s, Belmacz, London (2023); RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023); Domestic Wears, Belmacz, London (2020-21); RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020); Odds, TOMA Project Space, London, (2019); Tender Touches, AMP Gallery, London (2019); Estragon, Belmacz, London (2019); Threshing Barn installation, Charleston, Sussex (2018-19); The Artist Practitioner, The Shoe Factory, Norwich (2018); The Ghosts are in the House, Chopping Block Gallery, London (2018); If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Roaming Projects, London (2018); Alpenglühen: 100 years of Ettore Sottsass Jr, Belmacz, London (2017); RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); Bowers: from form to public, Belmacz, London (2016); RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2016); All Over, Studio_Leigh, London (2016); Looking At People, Looking At Art, Division of Labour, London (2016); Gradation (recent graduates of the Royal Academy Schools), Art First, London (2016);  Kingly Things (a two-person show with Agata Madejska), Chandelier Projects, London (2015); Handles on Romance & Other Girls also Common Tongue, The Minories Galleries, Colchester (2015); Cassius Clay, Marcelle Joseph Projects, London (2014); Protected Space, two-person exhibition with Jonathan Baldock, Belmacz Gallery, London (2014); A Thing is a Thing is a Thing, The Minories Galleries, Colchester (2012); Slipped, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2012); Bonne Bouche, The Cut, Suffolk (2010); A Skvader, Norwich Castle Museum, Norwich (2009); Views from Afar, Vulpes Vulpes, London (2009); Kunstwerk Bazaar, OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich (2008); “18”, Centre Gallery, Berlin (2008); Swing, OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich (2007); WYSIWYG, F.A.I.T. Krakow, Poland (2006).

Coco was shortlisted for the Dorich House Museum Residency in 2020 and the Dentons Art Prize S/S 2018.