Islands? Archipelagos?

This week kicked off with a flying visit by two wonderful jewellers from Chile, Nano Pulgar and Claudia Betencourt of WALKA Studios in Santiago.

I was introduced to them by Anastasia Young and as soon as I knew about them and their work, determined that they would have to come to the School of Jewellery to talk about their work. Fortunately, my colleague, Sian Hindle, runs an occasional lecture series, "Talking Practice" in which people connected with jewellery and jewellery-related arts talk to the students and she agreed that it would be excellent to have them come to talk as part of this series.

We rattled together a poster and hastily made all the travel arrangements and were so pleased to have done so.

The work that Nano and Claudia make is poetic, political and moving.

I spent the evening on Monday reading up on Chilean history, only to be reminded of the shameful situation when Margaret Thatcher sheltered Pinochet from extradition to Spain, where he was wanted for trial for war crimes. Another dark moment in British history.

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It was "Spring Fair" time in Birmingham and that meant that loads of people I know were in town. I took the opportunity to meet up with my friend and photographer, Andrew Neilson - if you follow this blog, you know his amazing work photographing my jewellery - who had taken a stand at the NEC. We went out for dinner and a cold, clear night gave me the chance to take some photographs of the new New Street Station Building.

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We've been somewhat spoiled this week at the school by having TWO "Talking Practice" lectures - first was WALKA, detailed above, the second was Michelle Jessop who is researching methods of displaying jewellery and who - as all good researchers should - left me asking more questions than she had answered.

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The annual ACJ show is looming again and this year there is no theme and it is a selling show. I've been racking my brains to think on what to make for it "a collection of 6 - 10 pieces" is a tall order, especially as I have two other exhibitions looming at the end of the year, so I decided to get started. Digging through my bag of scrap metal, I found a broken Weisslock connector, which I set about repairing...

And so was born my new series, "Seven Macho Bracelets", a take on the 1970s "ID Bracelet" of which I am sure we have all melted and scrapped dozens!

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The students all finished their medals for the British Art Medal Society's annual student medal competition and I am really proud of their achievements. Here are a couple of them and clicking them will take you to Flickr where you can see them all:

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Friday saw the "Jewellery and More" symposium for the BA Students. A collective of previous students, known as the Continued Collective, gave talks and brought along their pre- and post-School work. I was teaching and couldn't make it to the talks, but the exhibition was great.

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The reason for the late posting of last week's news is that I've been busy getting ready to move into my new house in Birmingham. It may be a sparse post next week!

A Quick But Packed Post!

I've genuinely been run off my feet for the last couple of weeks, what with the change in modules for the students, my usual commitments as well as getting the new house ready to move into, so this is just going to be a super-fast resume of what happened this week...

First up was the last of the four "speed projects" for the BA Jewellery and Related Products at work. This week they were looking at 'Speculative Futures' and imagining the type of technology they would like to see in the future. Because this was a speculative project, it felt a bit less confident than the others but there were still some marvellous outcomes.

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Yesterday, I was in London for an ACJ board meeting and took the opportunity to catch the "Bejewelled Treasures" show at the V&A before going.

This is a rather wonderful show which highlights the interchange of styles and technologies which have happened between Indian and European jewellery over the last few hundred years. From the point of view of a maker, the use of table-cut diamonds and foiling is very interesting and it is worth waiting to see the films about the contemporary production of jewellery in India. There are a few of them online here:

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Met up with Jo Garner before the meeting to have a look at the work she has been developing as part of her MA course at the Royal College. She's been looking at tools, quite literally and has produced these rather lovely objects:

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After the meeting, it was off to meet with Mark and Caroline at the Earl of Bedlam to commission another suit, drink tea and eat delicious biscuits. Always a pleasure.

I shall say no more than "Tedwardian" and that this is NOT the jacket I am getting...

Memento Mori and Bedlam

It was a fairly quiet week at work as I was assessing student submissions for their mount-making module and meeting with our External Examiner for the first time, the rather excellent Tim Carson, AKA Timothy Information Ltd. In addition to genuinely useful ideas about taking the course forward, we discussed Crass (band), the violin playing talents of Felieke van der Leest, cakes and much more!

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The BA Jewellery and Related Projects team were continuing with their "flash" one-week projects, this time "The Big Issue", where they had to make a piece of work about some contemporary issue. Some of the results were really impressive and they produced in one week many more thoughtful outcomes than I've seen as completed submissions for graduate shows...

Lois Wiseman

Tianyu Zhao

Cara Budd

Danielle Laurent

Next week is smart materials, robotics and new technology, which should be very exciting. Expect video!

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Saturday was spent in London with friend and colleague, Rachael Colley. We started off at the British Museum to see the work of our mutual friend, Heidi Hinder which is featured in the "Money" galleries and which looks at new ideas about payment.

After this we headed off to Kent - south London, really, to met with Anastasia Young and Paul Wells and to visit the Bethelm Museum of the Mind, a museum in what used to be known as "Bedlam" dedicated to art by people with mental health issues as well as to the history and treatment of mental health problems. I'm pleased to say that in a turnaround from the Victorian visiting policy, it is housed in a working psychiatric hospital and some of the patients work there.

I particularly liked the Rorschach Test wallpaper. Perhaps an inspiration for my new house?!

There is a big retrospective of the work of Richard Dadd on at the museum at the moment, and we thought that we were going to a talk about his work but instead it turned out to be a completely unrelated talk about how popular media portrays psychiatrists and psychiatric disorders, given by Jackie Hopson. It was one of those brilliant times when something unexpected proves to be fascinating and engaging and Jackie listed with humour - and a little anger - the appalling tropes of mental illness with which most of us engage unthinkingly on a daily basis.

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You will recall that in December, I posted about meeting with Anastasia and about her partner Paul Wells' collection of memento mori, which had been filmed as "The Death Collector". Rachael and I were thrilled to be able to actually view some of the collection for ourselves!

An absolute pleasure.

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The rest of the weekend has been bunged up drains and other work on the house. The bunged up drains are unbunged now and my greenhouse has been built:

It's all getting to the stage of selecting paint...

And I'm finding myself drawn to Kandinsky-inspired colour combinations.

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Just because it kind of fits in with the weekend in London, I was reminded of one of my favourite animations by the Quay Brothers, In Absentia, a piece about a mentally-ill patient who wrote endless letters to her departed husband. The music is by another of my favourites, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Tranformations

Not much to report this week. I think that everything seems to quieten down for this dark period between new year and spring. I've mostly been working on the house and getting the students through their first mount-making project.

The David Poston show is still on at the school and is worth seeing if you haven't had a chance to get to it.

The second-year BA Jewellery and Related Products students are still embarking on their one-week rapid projects - last week it was the 'alchemy' of non-traditional materials - this week it was "Transformations", works which seek to change the way the body moves or the silhouette of the body. This week we have a video!

This video is hosted on the new School of Jewellery YouTube channel, which has all of two videos on it just now but more will be posted very soon.

As ever there was a huge variety of work and approaches presented.

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Back at the Birmingham Conservatoire again on Friday for a concert of music by the Wind Ensemble and the Percussion Ensemble, all conducted by Christopher Houlding. It was a particularly inspired programme of some of my own favourite music, kicking off with Strawinsky's "Ebony Concerto", the clarinet solo being taken by Luke Newby:

This was followed by the only piece in the programme which I didn't know, Joseph Schwantner's "Percussion Concerto".

This was a real surprise. It didn't really sit neatly into the programme in terms of being very obviously a more contemporary piece - there being passages flirting with minimalism as well dense blocks of sound which move across the instrumental groups - but proved a very effective foil to the jazz-infused neo-classical works in the rest of the programme.

The concerto is for wind ensemble, double-bass, piano and five percussionists, with one percussion soloist - Yu-Cheng Chen, seen here in the purple shirt to the right of the photograph - who has to not only perform an incredibly complex part but must also improvise (yes, a six-minute drum solo!) and become a sort of shaman, dancing around the orchestra. An absolutely blistering performance.

After the interval came Kurt Weill's "Kleine Dreigroschenmusik" and Bernstein's "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs".

Anthony Clarke-Butler was the soloist on this piece, which deserves to be MUCH better known for its boisterous good fun. I am particularly fond of the passages for lascivious trombone, where one imagines a stripper about to emerge onto the stage!

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Today was spent at the house, getting the heating serviced, having a meeting with a builder - who used to be a bronze-caster, so we got on well! - and talking to Rick about the clearance of the trees from my back garden...

Garden carnage! Still, at least it will be sunny now. 

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Bearwood has some very odd places in it. I'm not quite sure what to make of "Wobble Box"...

Or, indeed, of "FLABéLOS". (Undoubtedly pronounced as the Spanish  - 'Flav-ay-yos"!)