The Western Cape, so synonymous with a diversity of natural beauty, has an equally rich history of beautiful craft and design.
Our spectacular coastal landscape, the perpetual sounds of the sea, the rush of the wind, the complexity of the city, our diverse heritage and identities, the busy harbour, and the elements of nature – sea, light, animals, shells and fynbos – provides a contemporary living context for MAKE IT NEW, an exhibition currently on display in the V&A Waterfront’s just-opened Watershed .
The exhibition is a striking timeline of the Cape’s rich craft and design heritage, with more than 160 local craft producers and designers adding their contemporary flair to historical inspiration.
The Cape Craft & Design Institute (CCDI) exhibition explores relationships and connections across time.
This starts with an exploration of how traces of our indigenous pasts and our global connections have shaped innovation and transformation; processes such as communication, the settlements of people, and the legacies of sea travel that marks the Cape as part of a network of ports have formed a locale for making beautiful things.
Over 100 images from the Western Cape Museums’ archives and objects from antiquity and tradition are counterpoised with contemporary design objects, linking functionality, material or making methods.
From the earliest human settlement, tool creation and body adornment, visitors will move through time to the finely crafted furniture and ceramics, and innovation found in the repurposing of materials.
This contemporary showcase also explores how the Cape’s creative producers of today demonstrate design thinking, innovation and problem solving in a variety of ways, and how they are re-visiting the long established in a totally new way and making it new.