LDF25: Secondary Function

What is it

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 behavior—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

 

It is a pleasure to introduce Secondary Function, an exhibition that captures the inventive spirit and critical curiosity at the heart of contemporary craft and design. 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

Curators: Caiyang Yin, Xuan Xu, Yating Xie
Organiser: Alsolike Gallery

 

When is it

15 September, 2025 - Private View

18:00 - 20:30  🔗RSVP for the Private View

 

16 September - 21 September, 2025

10:30 - 18:30

 

Where to visit

Alsolike

16 Chance Street

London

E2 7JB

Artists

Ai Studio

Ai Studio, based in Cyprus, is a creative duo with a shared passion for contemporary, handcrafted jewellery. They work primarily with silver, creating unique pieces that combine art, quality, and creativity.

Each piece is the result of meticulous craftsmanship and thoughtful design, made to reflect the personality and style of its wearer. The duo explores the conceptual and cultural dimensions of materiality through objects that carry personal or social meaning, moving between art and function-or the absence of it.

They create jewellery for all ages and genders, offering designs that stand out for their authenticity and uniqueness. At Ai Studio, they believe that every piece of jewellery is a personal statement and an expression of individuality.

 

Alice Biolo

Alice Biolo (b. 1999, Padova, Italy) is an Italian artist based in Glasgow. Her practice explores body-related objects, wearable and standalone, combining traditional craftsmanship with innovative techniques. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art (BA Hons, 2023), she creates kinetic jewellery and sculptural pieces that unfold through interaction. Her work investigates insecurity, grief, trauma, and inner conflict, using symbolism and mixed materials to reveal hidden layers. By inviting interaction, her jewellery transforms hidden elements into intimate discoveries

 

Amy Findlay 

Amy Findlay graduated in 2022 from The Glasgow School of Art with a degree in Silversmithing and Jewellery Design. While undertaking an Artist in Residences at GSA, Amy has developed her collection of wearable slug jewellery that aims to celebrate the hidden lives of the garden creatures through realistic sculptures and gemstones. Amy creates contrast by using precious materials to challenge the stereo type of natural slugs found her home garden.

 

Ariel Jingyan Zhu 

Jingyan sees jewellery as a quiet, intimate medium-one that carries emotion, evokes tactile memory, and holds symbolic meaning. It resonates not only with the body, but also with the inner self.

Her creative process begins with the act of making, moving between intuitive engagement with materials and reflective thought, allowing both to inform and shape one another. She is drawn to gestures like wrapping, layering, and revealing-actions that speak to emotional and spatial experience.

For Jingyan, making is like weaving a fine net, one that gathers what she sees, feels, thinks, and imagines into something cohesive and meaningful.

Barbora Kukula

Barbora Kukula is an emerging artist who studied at UMPRUM in Prague and later earned her master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Her work merges a refined sensitivity to form and material with a distinct, almost otherworldly intuition. Through this sensibility, she brings to life creations that appear to emerge from parallel dimensions. Her objects resemble living organisms-strange entities, sometimes soft, sometimes spiky-existing in a liminal space between fantasy and reality. Kukula refers to them as “creatures” that respond to the evolving world and the human body. Her work has been presented at international exhibitions and design fairs, including in Tallinn, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, and Munich.

Caiyang Yin

Yin believes that contemporary jewellery is a material manifestation of human emotions and attitudes. When it fulfils its expressive potential, it need not conform to traditional aesthetic expectations or aim to please. Instead, it should provoke thought, stir emotion, and at times, create necessary discomfort.

 

Caodi Fang 

Caodi crafts humorous Jewellery which inspires the wearer through playful interaction.

 

Chuhan Xiao

Chuhan Xiao is a jewellery designer and silversmith, and recently completed her MA in Jewellery & Metal at the Royal College of Art. Chuhan’s practice challenges the conventional boundaries of jewellery, shifting it from ornament to intimate sculpture. Exploring self-identity and memory, her work investigates how the body becomes a site of emotional resonance and personal narrative. Through pieces, she wishes to invite the wearers to imprint their narratives and emotions onto them. Chuhan is drawn to the traces we leave behind-how touch, time, and memory linger in form. In this way, jewellery becomes not just something wearable, but something that remembers.

Helen Hae Young Kwon

Helen Hae Young Kwon is based in Korea and the USA, and holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She questions human value judgments toward discarded objects and explores the essence of their inherent worth through the language of jewellery. She conceptually experiments with overlooked or discarded objects-those deemed insignificant or unworthy of value by people-found in her surroundings, questioning whether such items can evoke desire in humans. As a jeweller, her ultimate goal is to reinterpret these objects beyond their original function, allowing them to exist with independent value rather than remaining dependent on human use.

Helen Russell

Helen Russell is an upcoming contemporary jeweller whose practice embraces unconventional materials and intuitive processes to create work deeply connected to the natural world. As a recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, she is interested in how objects can capture the tension between fleeting moments and lasting reflection. Her approach allows materials to shape outcomes through chance and incident, honouring their raw, untamed qualities. By working in dialogue with her environment, Russell explores jewellery as a way of navigating belonging, transformation, and the shifting landscapes of both place and self.

Hiroki Nakayama 

A New York–based Japanese designer. 

After working on new business development in one of the largest manufacturer, he began his career in product design. His practice focuses not on design as a solution—such as improving function or aesthetics—but on reframing the role and value axes of products to enrich future daily life.

His approach emphasizes innovation through creating new axes of value, while also engaging with primitive and essential questions: how we relate to products through physically and psychologically. Through the intersection of these perspectives, he seeks to create designs that may become the new universals of the future.

His design practice spans across various domains — from interior lighting and robotics to lifestyle devices—and his work has been recognized both in Japan and internationally, including exhibitions such as Milano Salone Satellite, Paris Design Week, and some design awards.

Jingyi Li 

Li Jingyi ’s creations revolve around the relationship between “materiality” and “body”, combining absurd aesthetics with the language of contemporary jewellery, questioning the absoluteness of ”standards“. She is adept at utilising everyday objects to break people’s inherent perceptions of their use and value through the dislocation of materials and the stripping away of functions. In her works, tools are seen as useless. She questions how people in a consumer society are bound by visual aesthetics and material functions, and tries to evoke a reflection on the viewer’s own ‘standardised’ perceptions. Her creations are not only a redefinition of objects, but also a challenge to the everyday order.

Kai Wang

Kai Wang is a maker with a background in Graphic Design and Visual Communication, currently developing his practice in Jewellery & Metal at the Royal College of Art. His work explores how the self emerges and withdraws within collective contexts, focusing on themes of visibility, fragility, and temporality. By translating two-dimensional thinking into three-dimensional forms, he works with paper, metal, and experimental materials to create a personal language of presence and disappearance. His practice integrates image-making, material exploration, and structural construction to reflect the unstable boundary between being seen and being overlooked.

Katia Lyubavskaya

In the practice of Katia Lyubavskaya, emoticons are depicted as a universally understood language. The work primarily focuses on the smiley, where the symbol serves as a global tool for communication, transcending linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Additionally, Katia creates visual tricks that are followed by or consist of puns, where the title itself occasionally becomes an object. Puns, as dynamic elements of contemporary culture, often involve the invention of new words or phrases through typos or unconventional combinations. In this practice, they also serve as a form of artistic expression.

Katia Lyubavskaya seeks to invent original techniques that showcase a conceptual approach and concise production.

Kristina Merchant

Kristina Merchant’s work is conceptual and performative, shaped by both urban environments and the quiet influence of land art. Drawing from her family's heritage of pub landladies, she explores memory, place, and everyday throwaway culture. Her process begins with collecting discarded fragments such as, cigarette butts, beer caps, chewing gum, ephemera that hover between waste and relic. In her 2025 collection, she transforms these materials using Baltic amber, oxidised silver and enamelled decals. The result is a series of pendants, brooches and earrings that elevate the ordinary into wearable artefacts. Kristina’s jewellery blends sustainability with visual storytelling, rooted in material curiosity and lived experience.

 

Lena Esaulova

As a jewellery designer, Lena Esaulova works at the intersection of beauty and function. In the E2J collection, each piece is both a modern reinterpretation of aesthetic heritage-from antiquity to the Victorian era-and a functional element of one’s wardrobe and image. The signature hand-shaped pendants are not only symbolic but mechanically functional, enabling transformation of the items they’re part of. In this, hands regain their original, nature-given purpose, uniting meaning and utility. Beauty and function converge at their point of origin, dissolving the boundary between them.

Merlin Lentz

The work of Merlin Lentz explores the interplay between vigor and vulnerability as inscribed in bodily postures. Embracing a hybrid idea of the human blending organ and technology, the tension between intuitive flow and geometric control is of key interest.

Lentz confronts brush with jigsaw, approaching painting not solely in terms of pictorial illusion, but also physical fact. It is an ambiguous dynamic between striving and falling that Lentz investigates in both depiction and construction.

Partly countering, partly surrendering to gravity and the material’s innate resistance, Merlin Lentz ultimately hopes to propose cathartic alleviation.

 

Militsa Milenkova (Photo by Matthieu Gill)

Militsa is an artist, designer, and maker based in Glasgow. She holds a BA (Hons) in Silversmithing and Jewellery from The Glasgow School of Art.

Her practice centres on creating objects as a way of expressing thoughts, emotions, and personal reflections. She is drawn to ideas that capture her curiosity, using material experimentation to explore them further. Through her work, she examines the everyday and the overlooked, questioning how we assign value and meaning to objects.

By reinterpreting familiar forms and materials, Militsa invites viewers to reconsider what is considered precious and why. Her work aims to prompt reflection on worth, memory, and material culture.Militsa’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in private collections.

 

Minjeong Kim

Minjeong Kim is a multidisciplinary artist working between Seoul and London. A graduate of the MA Jewellery & Metal at the Royal College of Art, she explores the body as both medium and subject. Through sculpture, performance, and jewellery, her practice examines barriers, symbolism, and ephemerality to question social structures and bodily presence. Rooted in embodied experience, her works move beyond adornment, creating sensory and conceptual dialogues that invite viewers to reconsider the body’s role in contemporary art, where function and perception intertwine to shape new forms of meaning and human connection.

 

Misha McLean

Misha McLean is a jeweller based in Glasgow, Scotland. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2024, completing an exchange semester at New York’s Pratt Institute, and is currently an Artist in Residence at the Glasgow School of Art. Misha was named a Hammond PR Bright New Gems ‘One to Watch,’ has exhibited at Galerie Marzee’s International Degree Show, and has taken part in Munich and New York Jewellery Weeks. With a background in hairdressing, she is deeply interested in how we adorn our bodies and how this can be a powerful tool for self-expression.

 

Monica Findlay

Glasgow-based maker driven by a curiosity for the material presence of the past.

 

Odile Yu

Odile is a cross-disciplinary artist and a researcher with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing and a Master’s Degree in Jewellery &Metal from the Royal College of Art, London.  Deeply inspired by Derrida and Deconstruction, she textually and visually analyses and narrates subtleness and vulnerability from different materialities like acrylic, glass and resin in the context of memory and emotion. Incorporating her cross-disciplinary exploration, she is urged to connect the past and the present, one with the other, human and society from the perspective of emotional instinct.

Oriana Catton

Oriana Catton (b. 1995) is a London-based artist of mixed heritage, born and raised in Hong Kong. Spanning performance, installation, jewellery and wearable object, film, sculpture, and sound, Catton’s interdisciplinary practice explores identity, belonging, and the materiality of the body, often positioning their own body at the centre of the work. Their current work investigates how boundaries manifest and are redefined within the feminised body, notions of home, national identities, and broader social constructs.

Shane Shi Yan 

Yan Shi is a China-based jewellery artist with a background in industrial and product design, and a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (2023). Drawn to self-expression and wearable art, Yan Shi has developed a practice that moves between traditional and contemporary directions. The work engages with Eastern cultural contexts through ethnographic studies of identity, ritual, and craft, including research into Miao and Dong communities (2023) as well as Tibetan Buddhist practices (2022).

Collective Intimidation was featured on the cover of YOUTH VISION (Issue 198); Eight Sand Swallow has been exhibited in Beijing and Chengdu; and Spoon.Sword.Mirror was shown at Gong Gallery (Los Angeles), accompanied by an interview. Yan Shi has also contributed as a volunteer with the Hong Kong Children’s Foundation.

Sheng Zhang

Sheng Zhang is an award-winning contemporary jewellery and silversmithing designer maker whose designs are usually influenced and inspired by minimalist art, contemporary architecture and geometrical form. Associating with boundary, volume, silhouette, capacity, shadow and subtle detail, his practice concentrates on exploring the connection of internal and external, positive and negative space in his jewellery, vessels and objects. Sheng’s work demonstrates the aesthetics of minimal style, embracing both traditional silversmithing skills and modern approaches, each piece of Sheng’s work is a result of a carefully controlled and purposely structured making process.

Studio EAST×EAST

Studio EAST×EAST, founded by DongHo Cho and Dong-eun Choi in Seoul (2022) and now based in London, is an art and design studio rooted in sculpture and woodworking. We explore the relationship between space and humanity, expressing this through sculpture, video, installation, furniture, and objects. Our practice centers on creating spatial experiences that challenge conventions and enrich daily life. A key focus is Art Furniture, blending functionality with sculptural form to invite tactile, human interaction. We aim to redefine how people connect with their surroundings, pushing the boundaries of contemporary art and design through bold, interdisciplinary approaches.

Thierry Bontridder

Thierry Bontridder (b. 1956, Brussels) is a sculptor and contemporary jewellery designer. After studying sculpture, he trained in jewellery with Émile Souply at the Institut des Arts et Métiers in Brussels, where he later taught from 1998 to 2021. Since 1982, he has been recognised for his original use of unconventional materials such as acrylic glass, nylon, corian, and especially titanium. Fascinated by its iridescent colours, Bontridder has continually explored the creative potential of this metal in both jewellery and sculpture. His practice gradually shifted from jewellery to larger-scale sculpture, including monumental public works. Yet his jewellery retains a sculptural essence: simple curves, plays of translucency and opacity, and subtle dialogues between light, space, and colour. For Bontridder, technique serves form-rigour becomes poetry, and materials are elevated into pure, exalted shapes.

Wenbin Sun

Wenbin is a speculative artist exploring the boundaries between image, object, and system. With a background in design and visual identity, the practice reconfigures design languages into material structures that question how visual culture shapes meaning, control, and belief. Through installation, modular construction, and research-led narratives, Wenbin translates abstract systems into tactile forms-inviting reflection on the tension between function, symbolism, and sensory experience in a hyper-visual world.

Xi Li

Xi Li is a London-based artist and designer, currently pursuing her MA at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Influenced by her multicultural background, her work draws on mysterious, dramatic narratives and integrates sustainable materials with intangible cultural heritage crafts. Working across contemporary jewellery, sculpture, and painting, she explores diverse materials and techniques, emphasising innovation in sustainable practices and the reinterpretation of traditional craftsmanship within modern fashion and art.

Yejia Xu

Jewellery designer and artist, Yejia Xu. The investigation of the cube as an abstract motif brings contemporary jewellery design into dialogue with traditional approaches, responding to the curves and organic forms of the body. Yejia is from China and studied jewellery design at undergraduate level. She arrived in London in 2024 to study Jewellery & Metal at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2025. She is developing her career in both the UK and China.

Yier Lu

Graduated from Jewellery and Metal program in RCA, Yier Lu is passionate about transforming emotional feelings and body related elements into narrative jewellery.

Yitian Luo

As a contemporary artist and jewellery designer, Yitian merge craft and interactive installation to question how social structures and philosophical ideas shape personal identity. Yitian’s degree project received the RCA’s Chris Massey Award for Interdisciplinary Practice for its cross-disciplinary innovation.

YUAN

Based in London and a graduate of Central Saint Martins, YUAN’s practice is shaped by a deep engagement with East Asian philosophy and five years of Ikebana study in Taiwan. This sensibility is interwoven with the structural clarity of Western design. Her work across jewellery and silverware explores the core ideas of stillness, balance, and form. This practice unfolds as a quiet dialogue between tradition and modernity, where digital processes meet contemplative craft.

 

Yujin Sung

Yujin Sung is a textile and interdisciplinary artist exploring embedded memory, social marginalisation, and restorative sensory resonance through illness. Her work delves into tactile materials, installation, and sound to reframe care as a site of emotional tension, ethical negotiation, and social reconfiguration. Rooted in slow temporality and repetition, she evokes intimate, embodied narratives and the affective residues of everyday life. Her research-based practice examines the clinical, domestic, and invisible labour of care, reimagining the home as a ‘micro-hospital’. Through multi-sensory and narrative communication practices, she maps a sensory topography of coexistence, vulnerability, and healing.

Yutong Liu

Yutong Liu is an artist who uses jewellery to explore identity, power, and emotion. Blending Eastern and Western influences, her work bridges tradition and modernity. Through experimental materials and fictional narratives, she challenges conventional aesthetics and value systems. Her jewellery becomes a medium for storytelling and reflection-inviting viewers to question cultural identity, social structures, and their inner worlds.

Zoe Yuzhe Zhang

In Zoe’s artistic practice, the exploration of metaphors and the intricate connections between objects and human behaviour serve as the foundation of her creative expression. She seeks to uncover the hidden meanings and symbolic relationships that exist in everyday interactions reflect on how our environment and the objects around us mirror our emotions, motivations, and societal roles. Building on this foundation, Zoe’s jewellery moves beyond simple decoration to focus on how we interact with it. She designs pieces that highlight the relationship between the wearer and the object, emphasising the ways jewellery can connect to and influence our bodies.