South Londoner Laszlo Beckett is someone for whom design, manufacture, craft, and indeed art, are fairly arbitrary divisions within the creative process. His furniture combines the hyper-modern - particularly in his signature pixellated decorative panels - with meticulous hand-crafting and satisfyingly proportions that reflect a broad knowledge of classic European, Asian and American design.His ability to seamlessly fuse inspirations and techniques can be illuminated by a look back at his unusual creative apprenticeship as an electronic musician. As part of the Hand On The Plow collective, Read more ...

Danish-born Lise Marker is the perfect example of someone for whom a heirarchy between art and craft is an anachronisitic irrelevance. With work spanning fashion, film, theatre, fine art, music and more, she is a designer, conceptualist and maker, who constantly recontextualises the familiar and makes it strange. Over on the Bruichladdich site, Joe Muggs finds out more.

A concert grand piano is a compendium of trees. Traditionally, the piano case is made of laminated layers of maple and mahogany. Then you’ve got your pine bracing, beech legs, pine keybed with more beech and maple, a pin-block made of rock maple, beech and a tough African hardwood called boobinga. The piano’s pièce de resistance is the soundboard, which resonates the sound produced when the hammer strikes the strings. It is made of spruce, an extremely light wood with a long grain, which offers exceptional transmission of Read more ...

With its team of artists and craftsmen Factum Arte resembles the workshops of old, the rhythmic clatter of hammer and chisel a sound that has rung through city streets for centuries. But alongside the painters and sculptors are software designers and engineers, 3D printers and robots, evidence of 21st-century technologies that, under the directorship of artist Adam Lowe are being brought into the orbit of traditional artisanal skills. Factum Arte’s unique approach to problem-solving and innovative methods for collecting and expressing data in two- and three-dimensions have produced Read more ...

Although her background is in mainstream magazines, Amelia Gregory always wanted to produce something more personal - from which urge the unique and intimate Amelia's Magazine was created. Now she has brought crowdfunding into play to allow the publication of a uniquely crafted book and series of art prints. Theartsdesk's Peter Culshaw met her at her print exhibition to find out more - see what he discovered over on the Bruichladdich site.

Bex Burch is a percussionist with a classical training at the Guildhall School of Music. First visiting Ghana as an undergraduate, on the recommendation of a Ghanaian friend, she initially felt very uncomfortable there, but gradually grew to love the people, the way of life, and the musical culture. Settling in the north, with the Dagaare People, for two years after graduation, she began an apprenticeship with Thomas Segkura, a professional maker of Dagaare xylophones, or gyilli. Musical performances are one of the essential rituals of Dagaare life, central to its important ceremonies, and Read more ...

Food, of course, is one of the places where the principles of our We Made It series are often best expressed. And in a culture where value is increasingly put on hand-crafting and traditional methods, few have an approach that is as purist and deep-rooted as Ole Martin-Hansen.From a tiny outhouse in Stoke Newington he has perfected a flavour that he grew up with, using an approach that he sees as art just as much as craft. Over on the Bruichladdich site, we find out about fishing under the midnight sun, the links to sonic arts, and "honouring the presence" of the fish itself.

Beardyman, aka Darren Foreman, began his musical career as a beatboxer, becoming in 2006 and 2007 the first performer to win two UK beatboxing championships in a row. He’s always been interested in the use of technology to create original sounds, and has been using looping systems to sample his own vocals for many years. To give himself more control, he developed the original Beardytron, his own bespoke system enabling him to create sophisticated live improvised music, with a complex keyboard and huge range of looping options.Keen to go far beyond the limits of existing technology, he Read more ...

Our aim in creating We Made It was to look at the way that invention, design and fabrication are every bit as integral to the arts world as aesthtics, concept and genre. This week's profile couldn't show that any better: over on the Bruichladdich site, we meet John Alexiou, a passionate music lover switched on by his experience of drum'n'bass soundsystems, who wondered how he could take that experience out into the world. By creating his wearable bass "speaker", the Sub Pac, he not only did that, but created entirely new possibilities about how music is experienced.

It's easy to forget among the pile up of high-tech and high-concept flash that Hollywood films still depend on handiwork and hard graft from all kinds of trained craftspersons. On the Bruichladdich Site, Katherine McLaughlin meets one member of this army: Nina Pratley, an artist whose canvas is the faces of some of the best-known actors. You can find out about life on set and the differences between film and television, from someone who's made up everyone from Formula 1 groupies to alien armies, Jennifer Saunders to Jennifer Lawrence.

Sawdust in your hair, paint on your face and fingers that look like they’ve never seen a tap: such is life as a model-maker for movie special effects. Work is grubby and relentless until the shots are done and everything looks “real” – and none is more precise and demanding than Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). It’s hard work but this is the crucible for the visual magic of films like Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean and Men in Black.Even in the era of CGI, physical special effects are vital. And in this environment of graft and creativity, a very special camaraderie develops. Here is a Read more ...

Photographer Brian David Stevens has contributed to theartsdesk before, most notably with his subtly powerful gallery of Scottish dunescapes with a piquant political edge. Over on Bruichladdich's site, Joe Muggs talks to him about his latest project, a set of portraits of the home-built technology of Notting Hill Carnival's sound systems – and about his long-running project to document the faces of Those that are Left: the veterans of WWII, who he photographed each year on Armistice Day.