Ellie Birkhead is a designer, maker and facilitator living in Cornwall, England. Ellie uses the power of craft and creativity to bring about social change and to highlight often unseen or underappreciated connections surrounding skillfully made objects of use. She is passionate about learning and passing on hand skills to build confidence and a deeper understanding and appreciation for natural materials and crafted objects.
Ellie holds an MA in Social Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven and a BA in Design and Craft from the University of Brighton. Ellie’s MA project Building the Local examines the threat that globalisation poses to small-scale industry. The project considers local manufacturing to be an essential part of cultural identity and sense of place, and explores the values - aesthetic, social, ecological and financial - embedded in crafts-based industries and their interrelationships. These themes are manifested in the craft of brickmaking, one of the casualties of deindustrialisation in the Ellie’s home region of the Chiltern Hills, England.
Ellie has crafted connections over the past decade in the world of making from grassroots creativity through to the luxury craft sector. She has worked for renowned furniture maker Gareth Neal, the artist and inventor Dominic Wilcox, designers Studio Glithero and the Heritage Crafts Association.
Images by Max Presky for Ellie’s project Building the local.
