LONDON.- Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London presents A Common Thread, a new exhibition exploring how material practice and craft processes respond to urgent socio-political and environmental concerns.

Spanning art, design, architecture, fashion, performance and material experimentation, A Common Thread reflects on how materials carry histories, techniques and how craft-based practice continues to shape contemporary creative work. The exhibition brings together over 30 works by Central Saint Martins’ students, staff and graduates, each framing craft as a shared language - one that connects disciplines, cultures and ways of working.

Set within a global conversation on materials and making, the exhibition foregrounds practices that draw on inherited knowledge while embracing ethical approaches and experimentation. From material and craft practices rooted in tradition to biodesign projects that collaborate with living systems, the works bring together traditional skills and contemporary approaches, showing how knowledge passed down over time can still shape new ideas and ways of making.

• Akir Hall, Sumi Table Lamp - a mycelium-based system developed with textile artisans in Sierra Leone that uses locally grown oyster mushrooms to filter toxic dye wastewater, positioning biodesign and craft as practical tools for environmental care.

• Andrea Carrera, Micromentum - a jewellery project created in collaboration with bacteria, where rings are grown rather than made, challenging extractive ideas of value through living, care-based processes.

• Charlie Butterfield, Living Lines - a graphic design project that uses plant growth to form visuals, with wheatgrass grown inside moulds to create evolving root patterns that foreground change, time and material behaviour.

• Lakshya Singla, Just Another Everyday Object - a series of oversized hand-carved wooden needles that reflect on domestic labour, skill and the slow passing on of knowledge through repetition, touch and care.

• Luca Reuben, dress, shoes, trousers, shoes, film - hand-made garments, shoes and analogue film that explore memory, embodied making and the social histories carried by objects, drawing together fashion, craft and storytelling.

A large loom sits at the centre of the exhibition, anchoring the space and drawing the works together. Visitors are invited to add their own thread and take part in the weaving process, and as the exhibition continues the loom slowly grows into a shared piece shaped by everyone who contributes.

A public programme will run alongside the exhibition, including panel discussions exploring traditional crafts and new technologies, film screenings, and a mend and repair day that invites visitors to take part in hands-on making and care.

A Common Thread grew from a desire to celebrate a shared interest in handcraftsmanship and material experimentation, particularly in a timeline when more aspects of our lives move further into digital space.

This exhibition gathers makers who work closely with materials, sensitive to material origins, intrinsic histories and responsibilities. Curated as part of an open call for students, graduates and staff members at Central Saint Martins, it was important to create a space where different voices, cultures and ways of working can sit alongside one another.

Sitting in the heart of King's Cross, the Lethaby Gallery serves as a window into the contemporary creative works in Central Saint Martins. A Common Thread seeks to invite visitors of all backgrounds to connect with, and participate in, the fundamentals of creative work. --- Jin Liang, Curator.

At Central Saint Martins, making is thinking. It is how we test what materials know, what cultures remember, and what systems demand of us. A Common Thread sits at the intersection of our College's three Schools of Thought — Culture, Systems and Material — where tradition meets experimentation, craft meets emerging technologies, and individual expression meets collective responsibility. The work in this exhibition demonstrates that craft is never only about the object: it is about the ethics embedded in process, the memory held in material, and the creative courage to respond to the world as it is. -- Rathna Ramanathan, Provost, Central Saint Martins and UAL Executive Dean, Global Affairs.