EYE-catching creations make the Jerwood Makers Open exhibition a must-see. Toni Marie Ford was among the first to visit.

AFTER months spent standing to attention on the walls of the Shipley Art Gallery, an elegant collection of portraits has finally been allowed a moment’s respite away from the gaze of the public.

They have made way for the prestigious Jerwood Makers Open, a new exhibition of work by five of the most exceptional craft makers working in Britain today.

Remarkable sculptural works such as these are more often seen in whitewashed contemporary spaces like Baltic down the road, yet they look wonderfully at home in the grandiose Edwardian surroundings of Gateshead’s Shipley.

Painted walls, parquet floors and the chime of an antique grandfather clock contribute to an unlikely yet fitting setting for these stunning works from artists Noa Matsunaga, James Rigler, William Shannon, Louis Thompson and Silvia Weidenbach.

It’s tempting to press your palm against the cool, smooth surface of Louis Thompson’s Hive, a collection of other-worldly curved glass sculptures that immediately inspire the question: how on earth did he make those?

Delicate yet sturdy, liquid yet solid, the way the light plays inside and against these glass sculptures convinces you they might just move beneath your hand. Thompson utilises safe levels of uranium glass to create his eerie, plant-like vase sculptures, Reap What You Sow, reminding us to be cautious while we create.

The most intriguing piece of the exhibition has to be William Shannon’s Kiln House, a functioning pottery workshop created in miniature form.

Shannon invites us to step inside for story time presenting an urban potter who builds his workplace from the work itself.

A shrine to self-reliant local manufacturing, Kiln House offers a utopian dream space for British makers against a backdrop of manufacturing decline.

James Rigler’s Precinct is a large-scale meditation on public space and the hierarchy of objects. Stirred by a Second World War-bombed city, where chunks of a cathedral were used to rebuild a corner cafe, his collection of ‘things’ ask what makes one object mundane and another one monumental.

Similarly, Noa Matsunaga’s work, Palace of Coming and Going, focuses on the sacred in architecture, his strange clay forms suggesting a prehistorical shrine where no one has ever kneeled to pray.

From the contemporary to the prehistorical via story and shape, we reach the technological future of ornate design with Silvia Weidenbach’s Fractual Inventions.

Using 3D printing and computer-aided design, Weidenbach has created her dramatic sci-fi baroque jewellery pieces without the constraints of manual working.

If you can think it, you can make it and the artists exhibiting as part of the Jerwood Makers Open are certainly testament to that.

The exhibition runs until July 16.