Exhibitions, New Designers and a Holiday!

Summer time at last. I've spent the last week or so in Brighton after shutting up the workshops, which I always find slightly melancholy.

Before I left there was loads of work to be done, including setting up an exhibition and making a pin for the O-pin project which I mentioned in a previous post about the Glasgow School of Art degree show. I'm fairly pleased with the pin I made from old steel dressmaking pins and a huge synthetic ruby:

Karen Dicken, a Glasgow-based jeweller who works extensively with new technologies, has  been the powerhouse behind the exhibition which involved the three colleges teaching jewellery in the city, "Handmade By Machines" in which students and staff showed off how they use technology to create jewellery.

Karen's own work is really interesting. She builds models and prints them in 3d which she then uses as an armature around which she constructs amazing laser-welded structures:

My own entry was "Supercollider", which you've seen before but which hasn't appeared in a show before:

And my colleague, David Webster, made this ring:

And the students work was great. It was cool to be able to see how the other colleges approached the technology...

It was then off to Brighton to begin my holiday after a quick visit to London to check out New Designers, the most important exhibition of work by recent graduates of the art schools and colleges around the UK. Obviously, all the people I have previously reviewed in my degree-show roundups were there and it was lovely to get to talk to some of them again - or, in the case of Sally Morrison, for the first time.

The show is enormous and the quality is universally high. The photograph below gives an overview of the main space, but there are further spaces all around the main space and it was in one of these spaces that the jewellery was exhibited.

It would have taken ALL day to photograph and talk to everyone who was involved but I can report that it is a marvellous event and the quality was exceptionally high. I will, however, take a moment to single out the work of Alexander Flood, a knife-maker who has impressed me hugely with his beautifully-made pocket-knives. I sent him my deposit yesterday!

Only a few days until I head off to Pittsburgh. Can't wait, as ever!