Sticky

There is a lot of sellotape in this post.

This week saw Birmingham host Spring Fair, the largest jewellery and giftware fair in the UK. Quite aside from being the largest collection of utter tat I have ever witnessed in one place, the jewellery and watch section of the fair is always interesting and over the years, I've made a few visits here. This time around, we decided to take our entire cohort of HND Jewellery and Silversmithing students as a number of them had won some quite prestigious prizes from the jewellery industry.

Every year, we, uniquely, set up a number of industry-sponsored and industry-judged design and make competitions as part of the HND, giving the course a grounding in the challenges of the jewellery industry. These competitions are quite varied and this year saw the start of our association with Rofin/Coherent - who make laser welding and marking equipment - as well as the continuation of our long association with the CAD and casting company, Weston Beamor.

Rofin sponsored prizes for the best use of laser technologies in jewellery.

The winners this year included some fine jewellery, some small siverwares, some costume pieces and some kinetic pieces and the winners variously received cash prizes and work-placements in industry.

Winners! Left to right, Ophelia Stoker, Poppy Middleton, Sarah Parry, Daniel Bollard and Yuying Hu.

Most of the HND students with the teaching staff, along with the staff of Rofin, on the Rofin stand.

The afternoon was the prize-giving for the CAD project set by Weston Beamor, to come up with a contemporary take on a "halo" engagement ring with a matching wedding band.

The fantastic thing about this project is that the chosen pieces are made up and are included in the commercially-available Weston Beamor range. We were particularly thrilled as PatrickFuller, owner of the company, took the time to come and speak to the students and award them their prizes.

Patrick Fuller with Hwai-Jen Shiau.

Patrick Fuller with Bethany Ross.

Patrick Fuller with Ruth Hallows.

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At the Parkside building this week, I discovered an amazing installation made by first year students on the BA Visual Communications course alongside students on the BA Theatre Design course. It was made in one week, using only brown-paper and sellotape and is a magical exploration of the world of Roald Dahl:

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At the School of Jewellery, as we have a large cohort of students from China, we decided that we would have a celebration of the Chinese New Year, with Chinese food, tea and... Sellotape Cinema!

The students used a variety of printed images and old slides, transferring the images to sellotape which is then processed and linked together into long reels for projection.

The students loved this process and while we broke for food, Steve and Steve of Sellotape Cinema patched together the final product.

The end result is fascinating and it is incredible that such an apparently unco-ordinated experience could produce such an interesting result.

If you are interested, there are more films on the Sellotape Cinema Vimeo site.

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Finally, a musical outing to hear a BEAST (The Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre) presentation of works by the EMS - Elektron Musik Studion - from Stockholm. Introduced by the charmingly funny Mats Lindström, we were treated to a marvellous selection of live diffusions, live digital performances and his own spectacularly visceral "Low Fidelity", performed on malfunctioning electronic devices:

There is more about the EMS Studios here:

Iron Man

A bumper two-week post this week as I've been away in Brighton and London as well as generally very busy with marking and assessment at work. It is really remarkable what the students can do when I set them to it. My Level 4 students are half-way through their first year and already they can make proper, fine jewellery:

Hayley Jones

Some of them get very creative in displaying the work for assessment:

Erica Laver

And others go to town on making up experimental samples and documenting the results:

Menna Jones

I love this sort of enthusiasm and creativity even though it makes it really time-consuming to mark.

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Still with the students, this last two weeks has seen the Level 5 BA students working on their mid-term series of fast projects, each one taking no longer than a day. The object of these projects is not so much to generate wearable jewellery but to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas from other areas into jewellery. Over the last two weeks, they have completed a marathon three different projects, each culminating in a mini-exhibition.
Speculative Futures was about ideas for wearable technology which might be possible in the future:

This was followed by an issues-based project, where the students had to decide on a topic which concerned them and make pieces which responded to that theme:

Finally, came a one-day workshop run by Jessa Fairbrother (who currently has an exhibition at the Vittoria Street Gallery in the Atrium at the School of Jewellery) all about the concept of "Selfies":

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There have also been a couple of our "Talking Practice" lectures over this time, including one by Jessa - after the workshops mentioned above  - which I couldn't attend. We've had Anne Melke from Copenhagen talking about alternative readings of Jewellery History and Jon Privett from West Dean talking about colour and patina and the importance of these in (re)creating the history of an object.
I met Jon almost ten years ago, so it was a real pleasure to be able to meet up with him again.

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Spent the day in London last weekend where we had a very successful meeting at the British Library, discussing the forthcoming ACJ Conference. We vetted the papers and submissions for presentations and have secured a keynote speaker of legendary stature - more on that to follow!

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I also took the opportunity of heading off to see the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain. I've been a fan of Nash's work for a long time, admiring his understated, un-hysterical Surrealism and will always go out of my way to see the odd work by him which has ended up dotted about the country in little galleries here and there. This is one overwhelming, comprehensive and enormous show and I was unable to get round it without taking a couple of breaks.

One of the main advantages of getting to see his work collected together like this is that it allows the viewer to appreciate the themes which run through his work - it is possible to recognise individual trees and locations which pass from the very earliest to the very last works - as well as the broad sweeps of his explorations.

I have always maintained that the true home of surrealism is the UK: it was a flash-in-the-pan in France, modish Italy and in Spain and dominated by deChirico and Dali, never really rooted in Germany. In the UK, there is still a strong tradition of surrealism and it seeped into so many other movements here, from Pop Art to the NBA crowd, as well as colouring popular culture to a degree that is strikingly absent in the rest of Europe. Paul Nash in many ways set the template for British Surrealism, rooting it in the ancient woodlands, the seaside, the landscape, creating calm works - even his work as a War Artist are calm and coolly detached - within a very limited and unique pallet.

For me, the most surprising element was the final room: a series of canvases depicting the sun in various ways and painted in the last few years of his life. The pallet shifts, the forms change subtly (but the landscape remains) and it is as if he were about to embark on a whole new creative chapter.

The exhibition closes on the 5th of March 2017 and is an absolute must-see.

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Ending with The End.
This week I went to see the penultimate gig by Black Sabbath. I would have gone to the very last but by the time I had sorted out the booking system with my credit card - months ago - the tickets had all sold, unsurprisingly.

Needless to say, it was an amazing gig, complete with "Spinal Tap"-style overlong drum solo! Opening on "Black Sabbath" and closing with "Paranoid" to the very un-Rock 'n' Roll accompaniment of enormous baloons and confetti canons, it was an absolutely blistering tour-de-force in which all the band members showed what it is that has made them so amazing over the years. It is quite incredible to see - in a live setting - Ozzy change from the shambolic, mumbling creature we get on television into a coherent, charismatic and commanding stage presence and, of course, Tony Iommi's endlessly inventive riffs.
I was so pleased that they included "Iron Man" in the set as it has been a bit of a constant in my life, even before I became obsessed with making iron jewellery, since which it has become a theme. I first heard it in University when my friend, Dan Gotts, played it and I was hooked: up to that point I'd been fascinated by experimental and electronic music and had mostly written off Heavy Metal - despite really enjoying Led Zeppelin - until that moment.

Black Sabbath Confetti!

Bad Dreams!

So, we all know - I assume my readers to be fellow Liberal Elite snowflakes, of course - that Trump is a nightmare.

Unfortunately, I was 'triggered' this week, even within my 'safe space' of bed. Frankly, it is my own fault: I've been watching the fantastic Ridley Scott version of Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle", a book I've loved since I read it in my adolescent years (in part, because one of the heroes is a jeweller: a rarity in fiction!). In short, I had a nightmare in which I was forced to design a banner for a Donald Trump rally. The dream was very vivid and I felt compelled to create the banner in Inkscape when I awoke:

Now, this is not any work of genius, but it ties in with the Ridley Scott vision and also rather nicely with fellow-jeweller and Liberal Elite, William Aarons who, a few weeks ago, came up with this exceptionally well-considered graphic:

The fascinating thing about this final "⊥" is that it is also the logic symbol for 'falsisty'. William writes, "This symbol means 'contradiction' (unconditionally false in math[s])". I took his symbol - the 'uptack' in Unicode - and applied it to my nightmare banner:

Much improved!
Anyway, I think that William's concept is strong and he has generously - rightly - made it available in the public domain. You can download and use the work freely in opposition to Trump from his website or you can buy ready made buttons and stickers from his Etsy Shop.

I would very much like to see the 'uptack' come to be seen as a symbol of resistance to right-wing nonsense everywhere and will be working on a "BREXI⊥" version for the Unite for Europe rally in London in March.

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Another quick pop-up project for the Level 5 BA Jewellery students this week, this time making collaborative pieces for performance. I didn't manage to get to any of the performances but the presented work is interesting, as usual:

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One of the great things about people knowing that I work with found objects is that I get given all manner of random things. I was clearing up my bench this week and remembered that Tina Francis had dug deep into her handbag at a gallery opening some time back to give me this:

It is obviously part of an animated coin-bank and I'll need to think carefully about what to do with it.

Just before Christmas, I was also given a bag of the flat tops off of those old-fashioned signet rings which are not so popular nowadays: onyx or haematite carved with a Spartan's head; bloodstone; onyx inlaid with gold or set with a tiny diamond... I wasn't really sure what to do with them as they are not especially interesting on their own but it just hit me this week that they are rather good when put together and as Cursley & Bond had asked me to re-stock them with earrings, I couldn't resist laying them out and playing with combinations:

Also on the bench this week, my reconfigured health-and-safety conscious piece for the handling collection at The Herbert as part of the "Made in the Middle" show. You may recall that someone complained that the nail was too sharp, so I replaced the potential dagger with a potential blunt instrument:

I think it loses some of the poetry of the dialogue between the blunt deer's tooth and the pointed nail but it still gives an idea of what the work is about.

The nail, of course, became a pendant:

Which can nestle in any tender bosom without risk of damage.

I also finally got round to making the piece for my colleague, Jo Pond, who gave me the corroded iron staple from which it is made:

I love that it has a very early-60s vibe to it.

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Back at The Herbert this week for a second workshop, this time one on using found objects to make jewellery. We concentrated on tab-settings and making constructed cages and, much to  my surprise, a friend of old from my university days turned up with her partner to take the workshop!

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As my little end features on music seem to be popular, here is another gem I found. My absolute favourite song by The Smiths is "The Queen is Dead". I was transported back to my early 20s this morning when I discovered that it had a video by Derek Jarman...

Enjoy. It is worth going to the YouTube version to read the comments - for once they are really interesting.

More soon!

I'm Still Here

Not having posted for four weeks, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd dropped off the face of the earth, but I was just having an extended Christmas holiday and settling back into work again. I didn't feel inclined to do a retrospective of the year gone by and I've a horrible feeling that next Christmas I may not feel like doing a retrospective then. In short, I'm somewhat lacking in global optimism just now.

That as may be, things here are going along as normal.

Back to work again. The only thing that happened this week - apart from my usual teaching and colleagues suffering from colds, flu and sprained ankles - was a short intermediate show by the Level 5 BA Jewellery and Related Products students, where they had to make work out of really  non-traditional materials.

Work by Xiao Yang. Eggshell, spices, wool.

Work by Effy Ma. Bread, sugar, plaster, pigment.

Work by Tilly Wright.

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This weekend I was back at The Herbert on what seems to have been the first day of winter as I had to scrape snow and ice off the car for the first time. It warmed up to a wet, cold day:

I was teaching a workshop on precious-jewellery making and in a mere six hours (well, six and a half: we over-ran a bit), the participants made silver rings set with moss-agate. Everyone finished them but most still had to polish them up at home.

A photo posted by Snowflake Designs (@snowflakedesignsjewellery) on Jan 14, 2017 at 9:28am PST

There is another next week on using found objects.

This workshop was part of the Craftspace "Made in the Middle" show which is currently at The Herbert and you will recall that I wrote about the opening of this show before, here.

As part of the show, I've put a piece into the handling collection:

Rather amusingly, this was returned to me this week for reconstruction as someone felt that the nail element was too sharp to be handled safely!

'Elf and safety, innit?!

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Covered.

Songs used to be just "songs" and anyone could perform them. Over the holiday, Dingo pointed out that at some point the concept of "covers" came along but we couldn't work out when this happened. It may have been at the point when performers started to write and be identified with their own material but it isn't really clear. When Thelonious Monk "performs" Duke Ellington's 'Mood Indigo', we don't think less of him; when Chrissie Hynde "covers" Radiohead's 'Creep', there it is viewed as something second-rate, inauthentic, unoriginal. It seems to me that the important thing is that the "cover" brings something new to the material, exactly as musicians always have.

A minor digression to introduce a fantastic performance of a fantastic original! Nostalgia 77's soul version of White Stripe's 'Seven Nation Army'.