Jewellery

My jewellery is a way of bringing together a fascination with small-scale sculpture and the challenges of  working with and combining a range of materials from the precious to the commonplace. I like to carve semi-precious stones, wood or ivory to incorporate in pieces that then exist both as wearable jewels and pieces of personal sculpture.

I use a representational element in jewellery design  -  imagery of natural forms realised in natural materials. For many years this approach has been a way to help the wearer to create a personal private mythology.

I haven’t wanted to focus on jewellery that is for adornment, status or fashion:  these do provide a means for the owner to demonstrate mastery of some aspect of the world or self, which is possibly a function of all art.   I feel I can do that in a different way though in this sense "jewellery" is perhaps an inadequate term for what I try to do.

Some more recent work can be seen as satirical or commenting on social issues, and perhaps these are more valid as pieces of small scale sculpture, although they could be worn.    I particularly like rings - I make all these things hand-held, where you can see them and handle them, so it's natural to turn them into rings. 

Jewellery has been a consistent art form for me, although it's part of a wider range of interests and media including larger sculpture, drawing and photography and the teaching of sculpture and drawing.

The work shown here includes examples from the past 40 years.  Fashions, tastes and outlet opportunities change and  technical interests develop.  Some of the work was done in response to commissions or to make something for specific exhbitions, others as part of the work’s continual development.  I've found I can never repeat a piece, rather they go in series of stages or variations of an idea.

(All ivory used is old, recycled.)