Jewel Narratives: Making...

I’m writing an update to my profile page for the Goldsmiths’ Fair website:

“Trained at The Cass, I’m a studio jewellery artist primarily concerned with light and space. I use wild stone tools percussively, to create intimately land-marked surfaces, on fine silver and high-carat gold, alongside traditional goldsmithing techniques.

Bespoke commissions present heirloom gemstones and personal objects in miniature tableaux, evoking those who once wore them, those who gifted them, or past aspects of the self.

Celestial Jewel Narratives are one-of-a-kind, ready-to-wear jewels for Sky Gazers, Sun Worshippers and Moon Bathers.

New for Goldsmiths’ Fair, Pearl Essence is a series of fine silver pieces that allude to ‘ghost’ pearls.”

I’ve been hammering metal with wild stone tools since Autumn 1999, during the second year of my Degree. I use fine silver 999, effectively pure silver, with 999/1000 parts silver. It is beautifully white, and considered soft compared to alloys such as sterling silver 925. Fine silver takes the imprinted textures imparted by percussive strikes of my wild stone tools more deeply, and becomes work hardened as I continue to hammer it.

When precious metals are not shiny and reflecting the world around them, I believe that their true beauty is revealed. Think of the sumptuous colour of ancient gold jewellery, before highly polished surfaces became possible.

I’m convinced that the ancients associated silver with the moon because, in its natural state, it is a glowing white. I like to think that my work, with its matt textures, harks back to the works of those ancient metalsmiths, with the added connotations of archaeological finds.

Last winter, I took custody of a rather splendid fly press.

Thinking about what might be possible with it, I had the idea of producing what I thought of as ‘ghost’ pearls amidst the stone-hammered surfaces of my silver. Disruptions within and throughout the space, possibly cut out of the metal, perhaps delineated with black oxide in places. So many possibilities.

As ever, the devil is in the detail; the elevation of an idea is in the definition of its essence and the tight editing of its expression. My work strives for simplicity of form, not content, and I sometimes spend more time thinking about what not to do to the metal in order for a particular piece to truly inhabit itself in the way I want it to.

This is never more relevant than when working on an idea that is abundant in its possible directions and iterations.

As is my process, I’ve been working through my ideas before looking at references and further inspiration. This morning I pulled out a book of Hollywood portraits, as well as the catalogue from the ‘Pearls’ exhibition at the V&A some years ago. I thought I’d find the atmosphere of early screen sirens and photographs of Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor and Jackie O to be the most stylistically similar to my own thoughts.

Instead, I found that my thoughts around disruption of line and segments of repetition are rooted in the glorious paintings to be found in a favourite spot of mine: the Tudor Galleries in London’s National Portrait Gallery. The lustre of pearls in some of these paintings is skilfully depicted in a way that resembles a lunar halo, or suggests an adjacent spectral presence of luminosity.

Perhaps this is why I’ve been musing overlong about what to hang possible Pearl Essence pendants from. I’ve been wondering about silk, velvet, or grosgrain… when my instinct is to present them simply, on vintage French linen thread or hemp twine, as appropriate.

I do try to think of alternatives to string-based materials, because its inclusion in my work dramatically cuts the audience and therefore the client base. Sometimes, however, it just has to be done.

As I oxidised one side of an earring to turn it black and delineate the disruptions of the ‘ghost’ pearls in the metal, I perceived allusions to Black Tie… not so different, perhaps, to those Elizabethan swags of pearls stitched onto sumptuous fabrics, disrupted by be-jewelled satin bows.

We talk about ‘a string of pearls,’ or ‘the string section,’ in an orchestra. So, I shall make my silver sections hung on string, alluding to the movement in music, of fabric on the body, and strings of pearls.