This last fortnight saw me off to the University of the Creative Arts (UCA) at Farnham for the conference organised by Rebecca Skeels, "Future Craft: Entrepreneurship or Enterprise", a great chance to catch up with old friends - Liz Shaw, Ana Young, Sandra Wilson and Karen Dicken - and to listen to some of my favourite makers talk about their practice, including Daphne Krinos and Adi Toch. It was also an opportunity to meet with and think about aspects of my own practice and especially my teaching practice and a conversation with Emily Öhlund proved to be very interesting, talking about dyslexia and dyspraxia.
In a certain sense, the conference lost the focus of the theme and became about the makers' own experiences of developing their practices, but this in itself was both useful and fascinating, from David Poston's view that once trained as a designer, even if one thinks of oneself as a jewellery designer, it is possible to develop a much larger career as a "design thinker", through to Vicky Ambery-Smith's acknowledgement of a somewhat hand-to-mouth existence as a maker.
Went to London with Dingo over the following weekend to pick up my shoes from The Old Curiosity Shop. It was bitterly cold and London seemed deserted. We walked past a remarkable building which I had not spotted before, "One Kemble Street" and its adjunct, CAA House, both by Richard Seifert, another stunning example of brutalist architecture at its very best:
This week also brought the staging of a new opera, "The Wake", especially commissioned by Birmingham Opera from Italian composer, Giorgio Battistelli - apparently the "greatest living composer" in Italy - of whom I had never previously heard. (The Guardian pointed out that Salvatore Sciarrino might be better known!) In keeping with the house style of the company, it was staged in an abandoned warehouse with a wandering audience and a community chorus and the principals were all fantastic. The orchestra were fantastic. The staging was fantastic. The audience were fantastic...
The music, however, was a mess.
None of it is actually bad. Some of it is excellent - the broken, Schnittke-esque "spiritual" in the middle is quite brilliant - but none of it really hangs together. It made me think of calculus, where sampling any given moment yields something quantifiable (and interesting) but the sum of the parts tends towards zero.
It is a re-telling of the biblical story of Lazarus with strangely pointless moments of homophobia and police violence and while Graham Vick and his cast of thousands worked hard to create something amazing, it failed to thrill. It almost failed to rise about "moderately interesting", which is a great shame.
Our Talking Practice at the School this week was Denise Reytan, a jeweller who works with scrap materials to create pieces and photographic installations which bridge jewellery and fashion.
She's been working with the BA students and I will post some of the resulting photographs soon.
My own students have been working with the BA Illustration students to create graphic works based on themes derived from the Jewellery Quarter. They had a selling show this week:
Vittoria Street Gallery hosted an exhibition of work by staff and alumni of the School, "Subterranea", a collaboration between Drew Markou, Bridie Lander, Rachel Darbourne and Nuala Clooney. Part performance, part exhibition, the show consisted of jewellery and objects and about 10 kilos of handmade marshmallow, which was served to the guests!
Knife with teeth, on a bed of marshmallow, made by Nuala Clooney.
Bridie Lander serving marshmallow.
Drew Markou
Although I love the work of all the makers, my favourite piece in the show has to be Rachel Darbourne's monkey-body neckpiece. Which I would wear.
A musical week, mainly, kicking off with the astonishing world-premiere performance of Gerald Barry's Organ Concerto by the CBSO, conducted by Thomas Adès. Part of the most satisfying programme of music I've encountered in a long time, kicking off with Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem": I've struggled with Britten for a long time and just gave up even trying to understand or enjoy his music sometime in the late 1980s, so it was interesting to hear this piece again after avoiding his work for so long and finding that I really enjoyed it. Time to re-appraise.
The main event, for me, was the Gerald Barry piece, which didn't disappoint. A riotous mess of sound, infuritating, funny, cantankerous and thrilling. It is hard to explain how the piece actually worked and I wanted to hear it all over again the second it finished: it is broadly programmatic and deals with the composer's early years working as a church organist but that is all gleaned from the hilarious programme notes, which include this image:
Blue Gadoo by Tamsin Shaw.
The image appears alongside the gnomic comment,
There are always unexpected triggers in writing. For instance, I know a cat who lives in Washington Square in New York. His name is Blue Gadoo and he's a very peculiar cat. I saw a photograph of him in a book called "Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde". By his expression, I knew he was mourning the loss of atonality. So I put his fight for atonality against tonality into the concerto.
This was followed - after an interval to allow us to recover - by Adès' "Polaris", beautifully realised with the distant brass on the very top tier of the Symphony Hall, and Stravinsky's "Symphony in Three Movements", all superbly played.
Friday night brought a visit to The Lab at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the experimental music space with sound-spacialisation technology, to hear bassist Chris Mapp's "Gonimoblast" and "Stillefelt" perform in a remarkable concert. Stillefelt Trio were up first, a gentle, meditative concert which felt like a showcase for the exquisite trumpet-playing of Percy Pursglove, not only a master of "Sketches of Spain"-era Miles Davis tone, but also of an holistic approach to extended technique. Quite wonderful.
Gonimoblast are a quartet of players, including percussion, electronics and keyboards, who were augmented by a brass section of five players on trumpets and trombones and who managed to make one almighty, exciting noise, part-composed, part improvised, the brass functioning - as Mapp explains in the notes - as an "ensemble within an ensemble".
Pursuing my casual interest in marginalised crafts, I headed off to "The Crafty Cow" in Castle Bromwich to meet with Kiarna of "House of Macrame" for a lesson in... macrame! (No sniggering: The Guardian, in 2016, declared, "Macrame Is Hip Again".)
This was a tiny class - just three of us - and I really got into it. I hadn't realised quite how meditative it would be and I found myself really, really enjoying it. We started off with a simple series of knots:
By the time I had learned the "Monkey Head" knot, I was away!
Plant-holders next!
Anyone interested should get in touch with Kiarna as she is running the classes regularly.
Saturday night brought another concert, this time one in keeping with the week in which International Women's Day falls: a concert of music by women composers, played by women musicians. "Illuminate" is organised by Angela Elizabeth Slater (in the red jacket in the photograph above), a composer herself.
Of the composers featured, I had only heard of two previously (three if you count Claude Arrieu, the gender of whom I had mis-attributed!) - Yfat Soul Zisso and Lilli Boulanger - and, if I am being honest, I struggle to think on many female composers... Gloria Coates, Ethel Smythe, Judith Weir, Hildegarde von Bingen: that is four off the top of my head but I could reel off literally hundreds of male composers.
The concert was fantastic - a selection of fourteen pieces by eleven composers, some contemporary, some historic - all tiny chamber works which gave the event the feel of a "tasting menu", a superb way of getting a feel for the composers. It was performed superbly by Késia Decoté (piano), Cassie Matthews (guitar), Sabina Virtosu (violin) and Gemma Mcgregor (flute/shakuhachi).
Looking forward to more in this series.
After my post two weeks ago about re-reading Don Delillo's "White Noise", I've now finished that and started on Alexander Langland's "Cræft", an investigation into the meaning of craft. I've only just started - kicking off with an account of the wisdom of Alfred the Great - but can already tell that I am going to enjoy it.
More once I've finished reading.
Some months ago, I sponsored the legendary Czech film-maker, Jan Švankmajer, to make his last film, "Insects". I've loved Švankmajer since I saw "Dimensions of Dialogue".
This film is compelling, funny and disturbing, and, as I subsequently found out, this is the pattern for all his work. His work has influenced so many film-makers, most notably the Quay brothers, and his influence can be seen in television adverts, cartoons, serious films, pop-music videos (The Cure seem to have been especially keen). When the opportunity to help fund his "last film" came along, I seized it: yes, it is sad to know that he will not make any more films, but it is also exciting to have been able to help him realise a vision.
Last week, an email arrived in my inbox: "Insects" is finished and now available for me to view. Of course, I viewed it. Needless to say, I can't share the video here but you can see the trailer in which Švankmajer explains a little bit about the incredibly complex film, a film about a film about an amateur dramatic group rehearsing an obscure Czech play...
The film is very different from his other films in that it is also a sort of documentary about the making of one of his films. There are some genuinely horrific moments but also some hilarious ones - who would ever have imagined that vomiting up a cockroach could be funny? - and the whole thing is as demented as I could have hoped. If you get the chance to see it, do.
In addition to this access to the film before it has been generally released, I have also a signed book of the script and a collection of all his films on disc to look forward to!
I will leave you with another of his marvellous short films, "Jabberwocky" from 1973:
Kicking it all off was the annual Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Awards in the gilded splendour of Goldsmiths' Hall. About thirty of us, staff and students, jumped on a bus to London to collect our prizes - not that I personally won a prize, but several of my students and ex-students did.
Hosted with aplomb by Theo Fennell, the awards celebrate all that is great in the UK jewellery industry (I was delighted by the Prime Warden's comments about how we need to be able to say that without being 'brexity'). The work, of course, is fantastic, not just the work from my own colleagues and students.
Work by Thomas Johnson.
Enormous hand-chased silver salver by Miriam Hanid.
With one of my first-year students, Hamed Arab Choobdar, taking a silver for his startling CAD design for a ring:
And with students from BA Jewellery and Object, MA Jewellery and BA Jewellery and Silversmithing Design For Industry, Staff AND our one of our Artists-in-Residence winning prizes, it is hardly surprising that the School of Jewellery won the coveted "College Trophy" for the second year in a row.
The winners:
Although my favourite version of this photograph is the one with added Rebecca Skeels:
On Tuesday we had the opening of the Staff exhibition in the Vittoria Street Gallery, "In The Loupe 2" - you can read about the secret box format in my previous post here. As I hinted in that post, I've been working on something very, very unlike my usual work but first, the fun!
Everyone had 30 seconds in which to open and explain the contents of their box and the contents varied from works-in-progress to pieces made especially for the show and every member of the teaching and technical staff was invited to take part.
Unfortunately, I forgot my camera and so all of these were taken on my mobile. The shots of the work below were taken later.
Bridie Lander.
Anna Lorenz.
Keith Adcock.
And, of course, I unveiled the work I've been so secretive about since mid-January...
Based entirely on a page of doodles from a long meeting:
Made in silver, enamel, CZ and stainless steel.
I've never thought of myself as someone who works from drawings and I certainly have never taken my doodles seriously: they are sub-conscious or semi-conscious outpourings, which I have always done (I can remember doing them on the back of rolls of wallpaper when I was about 6). Every notebook I own is covered in them, so it was a bit of a surprise when Zoe Roberston suggested I turn them into work. Problem-solving the piece was fascinating and it was a pleasure to be working in more traditional fine jewellery mode again.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Katy Tromans won the top prize at this year's Artistar Jewels competition, which is part of Milan Fashion Week:
Thursday brought a visit to the Birmingham Arena for the International Association of Athletics Federations World Indoor Championships opening ceremony, with my student, Menna Jones, designer of the medals awarded at the event. I am not going to post the medals yet again - you can see them here if you are interested. The very idea of going to a sporting event leaves me cold: I might just about be persuaded to go to a rugby match or to a mountain-bike event, but athletics?
Menna was part of the opening ceremony, which was amazing. Here she is being interviewed on the big screen:
I had originally planned to go along for an hour or so, show face, support my students - the two runners-up in the competition, Rachel Bromley and Sofie Macearnuig, were also invited along - and then leave again, but it turned out rather differently. The whole thing was actually rather exciting and we ended up staying until the very end!
It was the high-jump (men's and women's) and the women's 3000 metres and there is something compelling about seeing these competitors sail elegantly over the bar or strategically hang back for a dash at the end.
Of course, I probably fail as a sports fan because I want them ALL to do well, not even caring what country they represented!
It was so good to see the medals finally being presented and worn:
Unfortunately, outside, it had been snowing...
It has been freezing hard here. I've not been on the bike and my beard froze going to work!
The poor garden is buried under an unseasonal 150mm of snow and has suffered -8 degrees C. The beans were up, the garlic was up, the artichokes were positively thriving and now this! The only thing I can see is that the artichokes are now looking very wilted indeed.
SO, a weekend in the house.
Trying out some designs for next year's Goldsmiths' Hall Craft and Design awards!
Here is a stop-motion video of me making one of the drawings which were the focus of the piece in "In The Loupe 2", mentioned above:
This one starts off by drawing round a matched - but not identical - pair of smoky quartz. May lead nowhere, but it is interesting.
Lots of reading and cooking. I've nearly finished Don Delillo's "White Noise" (see last post here) and have started this terrifying guide to post-Brexit Britain:
Set in the town of Scarfolk, somewhere in the North England, somewhere between 1970 and 1979, this is part novel, part cultural critique, part artwork and wholly brilliant. My own theory is that the UK is the only place where surrealism really became entrenched in the national culture and where it is still alive and kicking as a thread running through the mainstream, an especially dark and sinister surrealism: think "Inside Number 9", "League of Gentlemen", "The Bed-sitting Room". This book fits squarely into that mould and is based on the blog "Scarfolk Council", simultaneously hilarious and deeply disturbing, I can't help but imagine that post-Brexit Britain will really be like this.
