Christmas Gifts: Arts and crafts

If Christmas shopping fills you with horror, then you could maybe go to a gallery instead. As you consider the sculptures and ponder the paintings and wall hangings, your eye might fall on a great present for gran, or something for your sister. Well, it's a thought, and one that the Contemporary Applied Arts gallery in central London encourages. Set on two floors just off Tottenham Court Road, the gallery juxtaposes giant metal sculptures of birds and fish with beautiful hand-woven blankets and attractive-yet-practical dishes and bowls.

Works purchased during most exhibitions may not be removed until the show is over, but A Golden Christmas, the current exhibition, is different: you pay your money and take your work, just as in any store.

"We try to get as much in from all the makers as possible for Christmas," says Mary La Trobe-Bateman (right), the gallery's director. For many artists, the smaller objets d'art are the bread-and-butter work which fund the greater flights of artistic fancy. It also means that for pounds 20 or pounds 30, you can buy a brooch or a cup from a maker whose grander pieces would cost thousands.

The choice is startling. In the window are folk-art-inspired papier-mache dolls by Julie Arkell. A full-size doll - more for the adult connoisseur than a child - would cost pounds 172. But a doll brooch is pounds 39. In the upper gallery, a large metal sculpture of Girl Feeding Crow by Lucy Casson is on sale for pounds 2,900.

"Older people like to have things they can put on their mantelpiece or sideboards," says Mary La Trobe-Bateman. "Younger people want to have beautiful things around, but they want objects they can use." CAA certainly has plenty to choose from. Louise Jury

Contemporary Applied Arts, 2 Percy Street, London W1 (0171-436 2344)

`Flathead' sculptures by Christy Keeney (above). These free-standing hollow stoneware works so impressed the Prudential they commissioned Keeney to create the trophy for the arts awards they sponsor. Prices, pounds 115 for the small heads, pounds 250 for the larger; black and white (limed) wooden vases and vessels by Malcolm Martin (right). They are made using traditional tools - a hand axe, gouges and chisels. Prices from pounds 70 to pounds 425

Other galleries Six Chapel Row Contemporary Art, 6 Chapel Row, Bath (01225 337900); The Townhouse, 125 Great Victoria Street, Belfast (01232 311798); Alexander Gallery, 122 Whiteladies Road, Bristol (0117 9734692); Will's Art Warehouse, Unit 3, Heathman's Road, London SW6 (0171- 371 8787); The Cairn Gallery, The Old Stamp House, George Street, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire (01453 832483); The Art Supermarket at: the 5th floor, Harvey Nichols, Knightsbridge, London; the 4th floor, Jenners, Princes Street, Edinburgh; the 3rd floor, Brown Thomas, Grafton Street, Dublin