About
Freddie Armstrong trained as a gilder under Stefania and Carlo Martelli in Florence, one of the oldest surviving gilders workshops in the city. Beyond an education in technique and material came a new way of relating to old objects. On returning to the UK, he has dealt privately accumulating frames from the Italian Baroque and Dutch Golden Age, extending into furniture and works of art that catch his eye.
Practising an old trade led to research into the surviving heritage skills in the UK. Slow Ways Studio was founded in 2025 beginning with a walk, the length of Britain, to meet makers practising endangered crafts. The findings were shown at London Craft Week 2026 with the help of two charities close to the work: QEST (the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust) and Heritage Crafts gaining significant coverage. The exhibition channelled a month of conversations through interviews and panel events with renowned leaders in craft: Lulu Lytle of SOANE; James Stevens of Bard; Deborah Pocock LVO, CEO of QEST and Tim Hellier of Artichoke.
Heirloom brings these worlds together. A catalogue where old and new sit side by side. New work carrying on the tradition of cyclical design, every material chosen with care, worked by hand, and made to be handed on.
II. Statement
I am drawn to old things for their substance; an object built whole from one good material and with an expectation to last. With age comes character, creating textures and surfaces that cannot be replicated. The soul is there too, beginning at its creation and amplified through the many hands and histories an object has passed through.
I feel this particularly strongly with frames. A frame is built as a companion to a work of art, the intermediary between a painting and the room and architecture around it. Historically they sat at the top of the decorative hierarchy, often made with as much skill and consideration as the work they held. Art history often fails to include the frame within its subject, something Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts have dedicated their research to rectify. To find one now, often displaced, resized and in peculiar settings, is all part of the excitement. I want to return the frame to itself. I have found creating mirrors a very effective way of doing this, showing it in its most honest form, holding nothing but the light and the room in front of it.
Freddie Armstrong