It's Showtime!

It's that time of year again when the jewellery graduates gather up their work from the year and present it to the public. I'll start off with the show-stoppers from Horology.

Our BA Horology is the only degree course in Horology anywhere in the world and the results this year have been amazing.

Wall clock by Simon Colston.

The whole of the final year for these students is spent making a clock to their own plan and design. It can be a copy of an historic clock, a variant on something well-known. In this case, Simon has created a wall clock based on the mechanism from the clock in the Westminster Clock Tower (erroneously known as "Big Ben").

Ruth Dobie's clock is by far my favourite, taking the traditional idea of the clock as a miniature architectural form and fragmenting it. On first glance it is immediately obvious that it is a beautifully-made clock but further study shows that the forms are fragmented, that it is asymmetric. Although not installed at the time this photograph was taken, it contains a "Tellurium", a model of the solar system...

Tellurium Clock by Ruth Dobie.

Looking inside these clocks is no less fascinating:

Handmade mechanism by Thomas Wilkinson.

My own course, the HND Jewellery and Silversmithing contained the usual mix of large- and small-scale works and I especially like these vessels by Mike Mullaney:

Mike Mullaney.

Also in the impressive silverwares department are Vicky Faraone-Pirie and Daniel Bollard:

Polygonal teapot by Vicky Faraone-Pirie.

Space-age water jug by Daniel Bollard.

There was, of course, a lot of jewellery as well and we had some spectacular wax-carving this year:

Pendant and object exploring the Caeserian Section, by Bethany Brown. The silver blanket covers the figure.

Underside of the pendant and object exploring the Caeserian Section, by Bethany Brown.

Acrobatic pendants by Ruth Hallows.

Taking wax-carving in a very different direction is Ashley Lizamore, who has made some diamond-set gold dental grilles:

Of course, there is also some very impressive fine jewellery:

Fine Jewellery by Poppy Middleton.

Fine Jewellery by Sarah Parry.

Fine Jewellery by Wing Ting Leung.

I also particularly like the technological interventions some students have pursued:

Digitally-modelled tooth, set with pink sapphire, by Andrew Cowley.

Rings with digital engraving and rubies by Ophelia Stoker.

Which brings me neatly to the BA Jewellery Design for Industry (DFI) course. Most of these people have been on the HND last year and it has been interesting and exciting to watch how they have developed (see my blog for last year's show here).

For me, the most impressive work in the DFI show is that by Gil Hadden, who has made a series of knives:

The range of materials and techniques in the DFI group is amazing, stretching from Fine Jewellery by Georgina Stanley:

Through impressive plique-a-jour enamels by Mahroz Mirzahekmati:

3D printed nylon and silver by Timon Tio:

As well as some quite remarkable mokume-gane by Yi Feng:

Which leaves the behemoth of the BA Jewellery Design and Related Products with their more experimental approaches to design and materials. I'll start off with my favourite work from the show, that of Lois Wiseman:

I've commissioned a brooch from Lois and would love one of the pendants. Her use of colour and form is so fresh and once you know that it is all derived from the lobster-pots in her seaside home, the narrative is delightful.

There was quite a number of very interesting "issues driven" presentations, including these hilarious and thoughtful takes on the issues facing people with OCDs:

Work by Jinzi Yang.

Work by Jinzi Yang.

Ching-Ye Fang chose to tackle issues around food-waste and made "gemstones" which contain decomposing food waste and which will, presumably, change as they are worn. I love that these are so simply set:

Freya Gilgrist chose to tackle the mental health issues arising from domestic violence in a challenging collection made from metal and jesmonite:

I was intrigued by these beautifully made pieces by Xinyao Huang which deliberately challenge the boundary between "jewellery" and "object": they are all wearable, but some only just so.

Danielle Laurent's collection references not only historic jewellery but historic processes, bringing them into the 21st Century with digital production and flocking!

There was only one silversmith this year, Joseph Westley, with his beautiful, layered vessels:

The private view - our "Industry Night" was launched by Barbara Schmidt and was, as always, incredibly busy.

Barbara Schmidt

This is also a night when the students are presented with their prizes, many of which are sponsored by the jewellery industry.

Stephen Bottomley, Head of School with Barbara Schmidt, presenting a prize to Wing Ting Leung.

On Saturday, we had the second "private view", this one a much more relaxed affair and aimed not at the industry but at the friends and families of the graduates. It was so relaxed that here is a photograph of our Head of School, Stephen, and our Deputy Head of School, Jeremy Hobbins, staffing the bar!

Our students also took the opportunity to thank Jo, Kate and me for our input over the year, which is lovely.

Kate Thorley receiving some flowers from our HND Graduates, presented by Sarah Parry. 

Almost all over for another year (New Designers next).

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In the middle of the week, we had a fantastic interlude to go and help celebrate the opening of the new bakery/cafe/rooftop urban farm/social enterprise that is "The Hive" in the Jewellery Quarter, run by the Ruskin Mill Trust. We'd already been alerted to the top-notch food that was being prepared in The Hive and it has become a kind of de-facto canteen for the staff at the School of Jewellery but none of us had quite realised that there was a market garden on the roof!

This place is amazing. Not only is it a proper educational college for people with learning difficulties, but this is a biodynamic, organic garden and the food is all prepared from the garden by the students. This is the training kitchen:

The cafe itself is lovely.

Speeches in the cafe before the launch proper.

And the food is WAY better than anything else on offer in the Jewellery Quarter. We particularly liked the scones with cream and jam:

I hope this place goes from strength to strength.

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Friday night, I was off to hear Anna von Hauswolff at the Town Hall, playing the legendary Town Hall organ as part of the Supersonic Festival. Her music lies somewhere between Julee Cruise/Badalamenti, Diamanda Galas and Mogwai, but played on a pipe organ, supported by a fairly standard rock lineup of guitar, drums and synthesisers, creating music which manages to be both dark and uplifting.

The set was all too brief - around an hour - and it was annoying that we had been forced to endure an onanistic Oud solo by the curator of the festival for about 40 minutes beforehand, a heap of tedious noodling which went precisely nowhere. Another 40 minutes of Ms von Hauswolff would have been much preferred.

Have a listen to the unbelievable sound she creates here:

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The rest of the weekend was spent in the garden, harvesting artichokes, tending the basil crop in the greenhouse (yes, you can have too much basil, as I found out last year and seem to have made the same mistake again!) and planting out my odd Italian salad vegetables, Stridolo and Rampions. I'm also very excited about the prickly pear seeds which I took from a fruit I bought at the market here and which have started to sprout:

Primitivism and Power

Make no mistake, I am furious with the disgusting power-obsessed homunculus who occupies the tenuous and devalued position of "Prime Minister" in the UK after last Thursday's general election.

Theresa May is a puppet of the heaps of billionaire ordure who control the media in this tinpot island and she is also so spectacularly lacking in empathy and so desperate to stay in power - despite a resounding trouncing in the election - that she is prepared to do deals with a group - the Democratic Unionist Party  (DUP) - who are not only supporters of terrorists but misogynists, homophobes, young-earth creationists and climate-change deniers. You don't have to be cognisant with the sorry history of Northern Ireland to know that the entrenched mediaeval positions of knuckle-dragging meatheads (on both sides) was entirely to blame for what was, in fact, a war, no matter how the British government pretended otherwise. While the other parties looked back at their mistakes and moved themselves forward into the 21st Century, the DUP remained firmly in the dark ages: their ten MPs have openly declared such manifest nonsense as equating homosexuality with child-abuse, that the earth is no more than 4000 years old, that creationism should be taught in schools, that women have no right to choose, that the death penalty should be restored and that small towns in Northern Ireland should be "Libya-type airstrikes" to eradicate their Catholic populations. These are the people who now comprise the power-balance in the British government.

It makes Trump seem like a moderate.

Read more about the DUP here and about a much more interesting international plot involving them here.

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On the subject of Trump, one of our Visual Communications students at the University has this spectacularly damning image in her graduate show:

Credit for perfectly capturing the onanistic ego of President Trump goes to Bella Jackson Moss.

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Last week saw "The Meaning of Making" at Birmingham University, an absolutely excellent event which suffered - if you can believe this - from being too short!

Left to Right, Simon Topman - Acme Whistles; Kelly Sidgwick - Good Chemistry Brewing; Chris Holden - Ajoto; Emma Bridgwater - Emma Bridgwater Ceramics; Dr. Scott Taylor of the University of Birmigham.

The lineup included makers from all over the midlands, all of whom had one thing in common: a passion for making product and a belief in the importance of making that product well. It was fascinating to hear the divergent opinions - Emma Bridgewater's laisser-faire approach to copyright theft, compared to Simon Topman's, for example - as well as the areas on which they all agreed. The event ran for a couple of hours but would have easily stretched to a whole day and I'm delighted to report that it was packed.

Dinner afterwards was a fiery, political affair, this being held the day before the election!

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Yesterday saw the hectic culmination of a project involving the School of Jewellery, Craftspace and the women's craft collective Shelanu. The University decided some time ago that the would launch our graduate shows week with a big exhibition event which would be open to the public. The School of Jewellery was asked to contribute and I worked up a project involving teaching the craft collective members a new skill which they would then disseminate through the workshop at the open day. What a success!

We made several hundred pendants in the course of the day. Above, you can see my School of Jewellery Student Ambassador, Mahroz Mirzahekmati helping out. The Shelanu women were amazing, and I found myself mostly just wandering about handing out materials to people and trying to keep the punches in order!

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Today should have been the day I went to the Bearwood Street Festival but I've been so busy that I fell asleep after lunch and didn't wake up until it was over...

Preparations

A short hiatus in posts recently which is not that there's been nothing going on, more that it hasn't been anything major and I've actually been too busy to get time together to write. SO a longer post with a lot of photographs covering what went on in the last month...

At the School of Jewellery we've been preparing for the graduate shows, working through assessments and meeting with our external examiners. The work has been laid out and, as ever, looks fascinating:

(When taking the above shot, I was asked if I'd had my "Working at Heights" training - I hadn't!)

The above work is from the BA students, whom I don't really know - top, Joseph Westley, bottom, Maria Walmsley - but my own students have been submitting some amazing work too:

Vessels by Mike Mullaney

Pendant and chains by Poppy Middleton

Parure by Tanya Valaythen

Needless to say, it isn't all academic. Some of it is boring slog:

And some of it is silly fun. Here are the MA students making short films:

Life goes on as before for the other years, of course. You may recall that last year, there was a short enamelling project for the Level 5 BA students with the wonderful John Grayson and it was run again this year, but for a variety of tedious reasons, it was very, very short this time around and while the results were not quite as finessed, they show enormous promise for the students to build on in years to come. It was exhibited at the great 1000 Trades bar in the Jewellery Quarter:

Unfortunately, I don't know all these students, so can't give you their names beyond their own labels. I was rather taken with Fei's impromptu eye-patch!

(That beard is a mess! I'll need to visit the barber before the Graduate Show PV.)

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In other news, I've been to a number of concerts as well, starting with Swans at The Asylum, a rather marvellous venue in an industrial estate just on the edge of the Jewellery Quarter. I've come late to Swans, having first heard "Soundtracks for the Blind" very late at night sometime towards the end of the last century as a friend drove me back home from a weekend of mountain-biking in the Highlands of Scotland. I've followed them ever since but have never managed to catch them live until now, which is just as well as this is supposedly their last tour.

(Due to security, I didn't have my camera and had to use my phone.)

Michael Gira's baritone has been a constant throughout every incarnation of the band and strangely, rather as Blixa Bargeld had done at last month's Einsturzended Neubauten gig, he seemed to be channelling other singers, Lou Reed ("The Glowing Man") one minute, John Lydon ("Clouds of Unknowing") the next, swinging from classic Swans to the strangely fractured heavy funk of the likes of "The Man Who Refused To Be Unhappy". Special mention must be made of drummer, Phil Puelo, who deserves an award for endurance!

Fantastic night.

The venue is rather good too, a proper black-painted rock dive with a certain humour:

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It was also a joy to hear the BBC Symphony Orchestra performing Messiaen's behemoth, "Turangalîla-Symphonie", a piece which holds a special place in my heart. Strangely, the first time I heard it live was about 10 years ago, performed by the CBSO in the same venue, Birmingham's Symphony Hall. That time, my good friend James and myself were sat directly in front of the Ondes Martenot and the wonderful Joanna MacGregor on piano. The Ondes Martenot was so loud that we couldn't hear the enormous orchestra. This time I was seated in a much more balanced position (though James was, once more, in the front row, directly in front of the Ondes Martenot!).

This was a very lively performance, conductor, Sakari Oramo taking the whole piece at a blistering pace, faster than I have heard any other recording or live performance taken!

I go back a LONG way with Turangalîla, it being my equivalent of seeing the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, and it happened about the same time... I was sitting in my room, supposedly doing homework of some sort but actually playing with the radio (listening to shortwave radio is still one of my favourite pastimes) when I heard this most glorious NOISE and stopped on the channel to listen; I listened to the end. It was, of course, Radio 3, and the announcer helpfully told me that it was Messiaen's ecstatic symphony.

To that point, I had been listening almost exclusively to Roxy Music, David Bowie, various prog-rock acts and some "electronic" music of the sort that Tangerine Dream were making. With the help of my wonderful mother - who never sought to discourage me from anything creative - we found a 2-cassette (!) recording of it, which I listened to on repeat. Within a few months, I was listening to Lutoslawski - dragging my poor mum into Glasgow to hear his "Funeral Games" performed - to Berio and, indeed, to anything that smacked of the unorthodox. In many ways, I had been prepared for this shift by Bowie, Roxy, et. al., and so it is that this piece of music brings me more joy than almost any other musical work: I adore it.

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Which brings me to the most recent Friday and another excellent "Theatre of Jewellery" piece by my esteemed colleague, Zoe Robertson. You may recall that her last work was Flockomania, about which I wrote here. This time she has created something much darker, almost sinister...

Titled, "GatherIn", this piece was part of an event by a curatorial collective from Birmingham University called "Room7". The event title was "Flux" and featured not only Zoe's work but also installations by architects, painters and sculptors.

Mark Houghton

James Lomax

Once again, Zoe worked with Sellotape Cinema and two dancers with Steve Snell of Sellotape Cinema providing the music from his amazing little music box:

The whole performance reminded me of nothing other than the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", from the 'pod' forms, to the way in which the dancers ended up unified with the pods and even apparently giving birth to them. Quite, quite brilliant and a totally unexpected direction after the playfulness of Flockomania.

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Apart from all this, I've been working a lot on the house and garden: I can now use my front room and have nearly completely emptied all the boxes from the move down. I even got round to making a lamp using some found objects and some strange vinyl hands given to me by Mark Fenn!

The garden is starting to take shape but I was disappointed to discover this morning another buried patio... there seems to have been a patio on every part of the garden at some point and now I'm having to dig them all up.

I'm slightly concerned about the giant artichoke which has grown in the front garden.

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In terms of making jewellery, I've just been given these hilariously tacky objects:

They were given to my by Miranda, one of our gemmology lecturers. Apparently they were cut (from CZ) for Argos who then decided that they were too heavy. Needless to say, I am delighted to be able to use Argos rejects for my own subversive purposes!

Starbucks and yet another Guggenheim

A very full week last week, kicking off with meetings at Craftspace about an exciting project which is coming up in July, about which I will report in due course, and an opportunity for my students to design some very prestigious sporting medals. Mostly, the students have been working on their final projects - term is over in a mere 3 weeks from now - which always leads to interesting things lying about in the workshops:

This is going to be a salt and pepper shaker set.

Colleagues, Jo Pond and Drew Markou gave me a heap of old gramophone needles with which I started to construct a brooch:

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At the School of Jewellery, we have a large programme of Artists-in-Residence (AiR) who work with us, receiving workshop space, technical and mentoring support in exchange for teaching one day per week. There is an AiR for each course taught here and at the end of the year, they put on a show of the work they've made in the course of the year.

We all - obviously - love Katy Tromans' miniature, wearable jewellery tools:

Francesca Urciuouli's work is a sublime playing with layered and fused metals:

One of my own graduates, Stephanie Holt, has completed a collection of precious metal and resin pieces which are rather lovely:

All together this was an excellent show of work from an exciting programme.

Should anyone wish to apply for the Artist-in-Residence programme, details are here.

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It is many years since I was in Newcastle (Upon Tyne) and my memories of it are that it was very dirty, very aggressive and violent. On arriving in the city this time, I left the station into a full-scale altercation as a man resisted arrest surrounded by dozens of police officers and a screaming, drunk woman, leaving me somewhat apprehensive: however, like everywhere, Newcastle has changed...

I last saw Einstürzende Neubauten in 2008 when they played The Forum in London. Prior to that, I hadn't seen them since 1983 or 1984 when they played the strange and impossible-to-get-to Holloway College in Surrey. Seeing them again in the Boiler Shop -  unsurprisingly, a converted boiler-shop - seemed much more like that first gig in terms of scale and energy but how things have changed! Nobody seemed drunk, stoned or on speed - the band especially so - and Blixa Bargeld is now very much the 'singer' in a way that he wasn't in the early days. Certainly, he had assumed this role at the time I saw them in The Forum but that venue precluded intimacy. It is perhaps surprising that for a band with a reputation for noise and mayhem, I comment on the importance of 'intimacy' to the experience of seeing them but this is very much a feature of what is being touted as their "Greatest Hits Tour".

Rather than being the shambolic, dangerous, subversive event that characterised the early days, this was a refined affair, with Bargeld in a black, shimmering lounge-suit, almost louche, tapping into the European Chanson tradition. This was not an angry, aggressive Neubauten but a reflective one, the set focusing on the melancholic and dark songs rather than the noisy crowd-pleasers (though there were a few of those, including "Let's Do It A Dada"), allowing Bargeld to foreground his velvety baritone and impressive falsetto. The ghosts of Gainsbourg and Brel were not far away in the performances of "The Garden", "Silence is Sexy" and the deeply moving "Sabrina".

Quite wonderful.

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The modernisation of the city has made Newcastle a city of great character and some beauty; it reminds me a lot of my other favourite, underrated city, Dundee; but like so many cities, the danger of modernisation is homogeneity. As Bargeld puts it in 'Youme & Meyou', "'cause out there's always a construction site, a Starbucks and yet another Guggenheim".

Unfortunately there is too much evidence of the homogeneity.

I regret now that I had to leave the city so quickly and would have liked to spend more time there: the bad impression created by visiting years ago and the incident outside the train station when I arrived proved to be atypical and everyone I met was friendly, cheerful and helpful. Also, there is some fantastic brutalist architecture which I didn't get to explore fully, appropriate for the location of "Get Carter".

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Saturday, back to Birmingham and off to the CBSO Centre to hear the amazing Soweto Kinch and his quartet performing some of his new work from "Nonagram", a suite inspired by numbers.

Kinch plays Alto Saxophone and is backed up by a phenomenally talented band of Reuben James on piano, Nick Jurd on Bass and Ed Richardson on drums. Additionally, Kinch uses live sampling and loops to thicken the texture of the band leading to a music which is rooted in 1960s British Jazz without being in thrall to it, bringing in influences from other genres including Hip-Hop, Drum and Bass and the minimalism of early Michael Nyman and leading to a thrilling performance, one of the pleasures of which was watching Kinch enjoying his colleagues' solos.

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Most of Sunday was spent in the garden, transplanting seedlings, clearing rubble and digging a bed for carrots.