Fashion house Loewe has revealed its annual craft prize winner, as part of an exhibition of shortlisted projects at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

Japanese ceramicist Kunimasa Aoki took home the €50,000 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize for their terracotta work titled Realm of Living Things 19, which the jury admired for the “element of risk in the firing process”.

The piece was made from thin coils of clay that have been repeatedly stacked, moulded and compressed into layers.

Kunimasa Aoki’s terracotta work (centre) has won the 2025 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize

The work was then fired in an electric kiln, to the point of beginning to burn and smoke, before being coated with a decorative finish made of soil, glue and pencil marks.

The jury celebrated the “honest expression of the ancestral coil process” in the design.

Elsewhere the jury awarded two special mentions, one of them to Nifemi Marcus-Bello for a furniture piece made from recycled aluminium.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello received a special mention for his aluminium bench with bowl

Reclaimed aluminium from the Nigerian car industry was was melted and poured into moulds created from plywood and found objects from the artist’s studio.

It was then cast in pieces and welded together before being sanded to create a sculptural, functional furniture piece that combines a bench with a bowl.

The Jury appreciated “the simplicity of the raw material combined with geometric forms” in Marcus-Bello’s work.

The exhibition of the shortlisted artists is at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid until 30 June

Jury members included Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, designer Naoto Fukasawa, South Korean architect​ Minsuk Cho and last year’s winner Mexican ceramicist Andrés Anza among others.

Many of the 30 shortlisted projects share similar themes, such as the innovative transposition of ancient craft techniques from their traditional medium to new materials.

There was a focus on “reimagining and reinterpreting traditional motifs” in the work of the shortlist and a searching for hybrid ways of expression across different mediums, the jury explained.

Elsewhere, Japan’s Akari Aso wove delicate, colourful strips of dyed bamboo using the traditional Japanese Yotsume-ami technique to create a multi-faceted 3D sculpture.

English multidisciplinary artist and jewellery designer Caroline Broadhead crafted a necklace with thousands of tiny Japanese glass beads threaded together using the peyote stitch, which is an ancient off-loom technique.

Caroline Broadhead’s necklace is made from thousands of Japanese beads

Broadhead used rolled paper as a guide to form the tubular links, each of which is made from 1,500 beads and took a day each to create.

Inspired by both medieval and arts & crafts tapestries and the human form, Brazil’s Jessica Costa used a tufting gun to thread wool into canvas before cutting and shaving into the fibres creating an original, purposefully tactile work that bridges sculpture and textile.

Drawing on colonial-era craft techniques in the United States, artist and furniture maker Aspen Golann aimed to subvert and reinterpret them with a five-headed broom which references traditional two-headed Appalachian wedding brooms.

The final piece blends together fine furniture joinery with humble domestic tools.

Jessica Costa presented a hybrid textile-sculpture that pools on the floor

Last year’s Dezeen Awards Emerging Designer of the Year Didi NG Wing Yin took strips of split wood and joined them together to create pleated vessels, simultaneously highlighting the natural properties of the wood while making them look like delicate fabric creations.

Byssus, a fibre secreted by mussels that was known as sea silk in the 16th century, was used to create an insulating textile work in a collaboration from hors-studio and Cécile Feilchenfeldt.

The fibres were harvested, cleaned, dried and dyed, before being knitted into a fine, mesh fabric, accented with recycled yarn and copper wire.

The work of 30 finalists is on display in the exhibition

This year marked the eighth edition of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize.

Loewe’s outgoing creative director Jonathan Anderson founded the prize in 2016 to provide a global platform for craft, inspired by Loewe’s beginnings as a collective craft workshop in 1846.

The 30 finalists represent were chosen from more than 4,600 submissions. The prize was awarded by Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar at a ceremony in the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum on 29 May.

Other exhibitions recently featured on Dezeen include a retrospective of Australian architect Harry Seidler at the newly opened SMAC in Venice and Brazilian design exhibition Aberto which, for the first time, is on show at Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche in Paris.

The photography is courtesy of the Loewe Foundation

The post Reclaimed aluminium furniture and mussel-fibre textiles feature in Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2025 exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.