London Design Festival 2025 : Secondary Function

Artist list

Ai Studio, Alice Biolo, Thierry Bontridder, Oriana Catton, Lena Esaulova, Caodi Fang, Amy Findlay, Monica Findlay, Helen Hae Young Kwon, Ariel Jingyan Zhu, Minjeong Kim, Barbora Kukula, Merlin Lentz, Jingyi Li, Xi Li, Yutong Liu, Yier Lu, Yitian Luo, Katia Lyubavskaya, Misha McLean, Kristina Merchant, Militsa Milenkova, Hiroki Nakayama, Helen Russell, Shane Shi Yan, Studio EAST x EAST, Wenbin Sun, Yujin Sung, Kai Wang, Chuhan Xiao, Yejia Xu, YUAN, Caiyang Yin, Odile Yu, Zoe Yuzhe Zhang, Sheng Zhang

As Head of the Silversmithing and Jewellery Department at The Glasgow School of Art, I am delighted to see our graduates and artists in residence—Alice Biolo, Militsa Milenkova, Misha McLean, Kristina Merchant, Amy Findlay, Monica Findlay, Helen Russell, Caiyang Yin and Sheng Zhang—contributing to this ambitious project within the London Design Festival. The provocation at the core of this exhibition—how function returns once it has been set aside—resonates deeply with our field. Jewellery and object-making continually navigate the tension between utility and expression, intimacy and spectacle, materiality and meaning. In this balance, function is never simply present or absent, but rather transformed into a language through which new narratives and experiences emerge.

The works in Secondary Function demonstrate the imagination, skill, and reflective practice that define our community at GSA. By rethinking what it means for objects to serve, perform, or connect, these artists ask vital questions about the role of craft in shaping social and cultural dialogues today.
I congratulate all the participants and look forward to the conversations their work will inspire.
/ Anna Gordon, Head of Department and Programme Leader, BA (hons) Silversmithing and Jewellery Design at the Glasgow School of Art. 


This exhibition celebrates the vitality of function, with close attention to how it gives rise to actions, relationships, and cultural meaning.
Through the agency of materials, the fine oxide layers on titanium and silver surfaces refract hazy illusions, evoking a perception of memories that are absent and invisible. A handful of soil, a fragment of plaster, or a cluster of found objects become translations of collective emotion. When a cube flows across the body, when a rubber band is shaped by the viewer’s hand, when a steel pin trembles against the chest, function shifts from questions of use to the orchestration of behaviour—opening space for the surrender of authorship and for provocations against established norms.

Secondary Function brings together works spanning fashion design, furniture, and contemporary jewellery, developed in collaboration with artists from the Glasgow School of Art. It reveals how function—once unbound from the confines of utility—re-enters the broader narrative of contemporary craft in exciting and unexpected ways, offering new inspiration for the ontological dialectic between technique and concept.
/ Yating Xie, Founder of TaJo Studio, MA Jewellery and Metal at the Royal College of Art


Private View: 15 September 2025, 18:00-20:30.
Public Visit: 16-21 September 2025, 10:30-18:30.