Some for The Old Cinema in Chiswick, some for Cursley & Bond in Folkestone. I'm particularly pleased with the pieces for Folkestone, where they are part of the Triennial exhibition at C&B on the theme of "Double Edge". I'm making a pair of pendants from a pair of broken Victorian scissors:
Set with peridot, rhodolite garnet and a natural quartz "lens" which makes it into a kind of lorgnette magnifier.
There is an excellent exhibition on at the IKON gallery in Birmingham just now: work by Sheela Gowda made from old metal drums, flattened out, cut and some of them spun into bowls. Well worth a visit:
One of the courses at the School of Jewellery which is often overlooked a bit is the unusual Graduate Certificate course which is a short course designed to prepare non-jewellery graduates to enter the MA Jewellery course, run by Bridie Lander. Bridie is tasked with taking a cohort of students with BA qualifications in anything but jewellery, mostly from the Far East and South East Asia, and preparing them in 6 short months to be able to make jewellery. This sounds impossible, but...
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| Work by Xinrui Fu, exploring masks and Chinese theatre. |
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| Work exploring "preciousness" by Qiao-Zhen Lin. |
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| Work exploring "preciousness" by Qiao-Zhen Lin. |
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| Angelia Chen's surrealist ear-cuff. |
Friday night took me to Sleaford to the National Centre for Craft and Design (NCCD) where I have work in their newest show, "The World Is Your Dressing Up Box", covering all aspects of radical fashion, including jewellery. Once more, both Zoe Robertson and I are in the same show:
And I've just realised that this is the third consecutive show that I've been in at the NCCD! (Made in the Middle, ACJ 20:20 Visions and this one.)
The show is superb, great fun, thought-provoking and really well-curated, featuring a nice mix of big names, relatively mainstream makers (such as Irregular Choice) and some emerging voices.
There is a really pleasing mix of the thoughtful, the wearable and the outlandish too.
I was really pleased that my work opens the show with a little section of its own about men and jewellery...
And, of course, there is work for sale in the shop!
Holiday soon!