Cockpit Arts welcomes Turners' Award winner, Rafael Santoliquido

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Cockpit Arts welcomes Turners’ Award winner, Rafael Santoliquido

Cockpit welcomes new makers to our creative business incubator studios on a regular basis – with the coming summer months bringing an exceptional group of talent.

Access to our unique package of support comes via many routes and often, importantly, with the generous funding from our Awards sponsors. These organisations, and the individuals within them, enable us to deliver our services to many more craftspeople than we’d be able to alone and the value of their partnerships with Cockpit is immense. Cockpit Arts June 2018

Turners award winner for 2018 is Rafael Santoliquido, a Brazilian-born turner with a passion for recycling wood to create new objects and containers.

Rafael has been in contact with wood since his childhood, and began his woodturning career in São Paulo where he owned a small workshop. Wanting to improve his skills, he decided to travel through Europe to learn the art of woodturning from the best woodturners, and spent some time at the Glenn Lucas Woodturning Study Centre in Ireland.

: Glenn Lucas bowls

: Glenn Lucas workshop

: Glenn Lucas workshop

Every time Glenn asked me to make something with the lathe or even showed me some new techniques, I was in the paradise! There I realised I didn’t know anything about the art of woodturning. I was very happy as in Brazil we don’t have anything like the technology found in Glenn Lucas’ workshop. We don’t even have a bowl gouge for example. Brazilian turners use motorcycle parts to make gouges. Glenn taught me all most everything I know, how to select a good part of the wood in the trunk, what part is the best to cut, how to do a ruffing shape properly, how to dry wood, steps that are necessary before turning and so on.

After realizing how much wood was wasted, I started to think about design projects for using recycled wood. To begin with, I was collecting any piece of wood and just putting some round parts in the piece. But then, just before leaving Brazil, I started to think more in the design of the object and then in London I have been concentrating on developing a solution for this. Now I wish to continue this project for a while.

Rafael Santoliquido

Cockpit Arts

Cockpit Arts is an award winning social enterprise and the UK’s only business incubator for craftspeople, housing up to 170 small businesses at our two centres in central and south London. We support craft practitioners at the start of their careers, as well as those who are more established, to grow and build successful and thriving businesses both in the UK and internationally. We work with a wide range of talented individuals, including master craftspeople, artist-makers, batch producers and more scalable businesses.

Our business incubation services comprise workspace, on-site business coaching and business support workshops, selling and promotional opportunities, as well as referral to specialist advisors and access to finance. We also work with hundreds of other craft businesses based in other parts of the UK and overseas through our training workshops and consultancy arm.

Since opening in 1986, Cockpit Arts has helped thousands of talented makers grow their businesses, many of who have gone on to achieve national and international success. Our business incubator model is proven to work and our impact reports are positive, showing higher than average economic outcomes as well as social and cultural impact.

As a Social Enterprise, our services and studio spaces are offered to designer-makers at affordable rates. Any profit made is reinvested to support those most in need. We offer special Awards and Bursaries to early stage craft businesses. Cockpit Arts also delivers a unique Creative Careers Programme to provide opportunities for young people referred by The Prince’s Trust. In addition, our Creative Employment Programme generates wider craft employment opportunities in the craft sector through our Traineeships and Apprenticeships Programme.