A collection of blog posts about art-jewellery, exhibitions, projects, artists, collaborations, workshops and collections.
It is a short walk from St John’s Wood Tube station to Tuan Lee’s London flat. You walk past the famous crossing on Abbey Road where an endless stream of Beatles pilgrims and tourists re-create that shot from that album cover while a resigned white van driver or two looks on. When I arrive, the concierge calls up ahead of me, and I am met at the door by a friendly and already chatty Tuan.…
Fitting my entire display into twenty three kilos of checked baggage to fly to Amsterdam was more liberating than frustrating as I shed unnecessary items and went with the bare essentials to run my stand. On the other hand the choice of bag I packed it all in will require revisiting next time. “The Elephant Bag” (as it is known) saw me through two, year long stays in the USA. Now I remember why I…
I first became aware of David Poston’s work was when I was still at art college, I took a trip to the Craft’s Council’s flagship show, Collect. His sculptural bracelets made from recycled treacle and golden syrup tins really caught my eye. I still remember them in the glass case now a colourful, positive image of what jewellery could be. This memory along with memories of seeing Peter Chang and Adam Paxon’s works for the…
Ana M. Lopez and I formed a temporary, transatlantic, creative partnership to make a piece of wearable art for the Crafthaus Co-Operation: Garnish project. This project was intended to join a more traditional artist with a non-traditional one. I am an Abstract Artist/Jeweller based in the United Kingdom and Ana an American Metalsmith who is fond of plastically deforming metal based in Texas. Our response to the theme of Co-Operation: Garnish was based on the structure…
As Editor of Findings (the bi-annual magazine from the Association for Contemporary Jewellery) I was pleased to be invited up to the opening night of the new contemporary jewellery gallery at The Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA). Contemporary jeweller Frances Julie-Whitelaw got in touch to invite me and see if I wanted a piece written on the opening for Findings. She and MIMA artist in residence Jan Hinchliffe-McCutcheon are both ACJ members and Middlesborough based…
I am synesthetic so I work with sound to create abstracts from what I “see” when I hear sounds or music. I’ve been working with two sounds at the moment one is a song and one a recording of an F1 engine I made at one of my visits to the Festival of Speed. I love my airbrush, it is helping me create the pieces as I imagine them with more accuracy than any other tool…
New skills are always inspiring, particularly when you know where you want to go with them and just require a bit of practice and experimentation to get there. My last post covered the course with Simon Murray and learning airbrushing and custom painting. Since then I’ve been busy applying my new found knowledge to a few projects. The first is the Association for Contemporary Jewellery’s exhibition “ICONS: Jewellery for the the Famous and Infamous” up…
