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In the Spotlight 2018

3rd November 2018 - 5th January 2019

A selection of makers creating collections of jewellery, keepsakes and special objects that captivate curious minds with their ability to translate ideas and inspirations into unique pieces of contemporary craft to own, admire, collect or gift to a loved one.

Image; Toby Cotterill

Marcus Steel

Marcus graduated in 1981 from Loughborough College of Art as a silversmith and jeweller exhibiting his work both nationally and internationally.  Throughout this time he has always been involved in education as both a full time and visiting lecturer at several art colleges and universities on both undergraduate and postgraduate design programmes.  Over the years Marcus has worked across a wide variety of projects of varying scale and material designing and manufacturing items that ranged from jewellery pieces and site specific art works to bespoke furniture and lighting, mirrored screens and large silverware pieces for private and corporate clients including several of the high end London restaurants.  Marcus now produces distinctive and understated metal vessels inspired by an ongoing interest with both ancient and modern architectural styles and details from both vernacular and industrial sources that hint at a sense of function and simple uncluttered timepieces all constructed from sheet metal, formed and fabricated by hand with additional silver detailing.  The application of the patinated surfaces give the pieces a rich and vibrant colour and texture that imply a sense of age and history that help to make every piece individual and unique.

 

Toby Cotterill

Toby creates unique articulated jewellery, inspired by the natural world and the process of making.  Having grown up on a farm in West Wales, he spent his childhood immersed in nature, playing outside and making things.  His jewellery celebrates the natural world, particularly arthropods, the group of animals including crustaceans and insects, imagining them evolving onto and around the human body.  Using traditional silversmithing techniques, forging sheet silver over steel stakes and into wooden formers using hammers and punches, he creates unique three dimensional forms.  After soldering, fusing and finishing these are often articulated and combined with gold and oxides to create lively, humorous pieces of wearable sculpture.

 

Francesca Marcenaro

Francesca likes fairytales, she has never grown up and continues to love to play.  When Francesca works on a piece of jewellery she enters her little world and loses herself in her fantasies.  She also loves nature, its geometry and colors, elegant and harmonious movements of water and leaves, sky and impalpable clouds.  Her collections include Magic Berries; (sinuous, elegant, curved ornaments that twist around the body with a smooth and charming movement), Lake of Desires, Volcanic Treasures and the Enchanted Tree, all intertwined with a background in enchanted fairy tales. 

 

Ruth Laird

Ruth’s work is inspired by a variety of elements, underpinned by the notion of finding connections between maths and artistic expression in unusual places.  Weathered textures, distorted perspectives and architectural details form the basis of her visual research.  By applying an intuitive approach to traditional metalsmithing techniques, Ruth experiments with shape arrangements, colour combinations and surface finishes to create pieces which inhabit a sense of engineered precision combined with chaotic composition.

 

Sarah Perry

Sarah trained at Camberwell Art School where her teachers were Lucie Rie and Hans Coper.  She gained a BA Hons in Ceramics.  Driven by a passion for making in clay, Sarah’s inspiration for her work comes from seascapes and landscapes, textures and colours found in nature.  Intensely coloured glazes and metallic lustres are used on a timeless range of simple porcelain vessels and Sarah’s necklaces are made from clay tobacco pipes found on the foreshore of the River Thames in London.  Once upon a time these pipes were smoked and thrown into the river and some are 300 years old.  The method of firing the pipes and the temperature they were fired to in the kiln plus all the years in the water have produced a wonderful varied palette.  During the nineties her work was sold at Liberties, Heals, and The Conran Shops in London, Paris and Tokyo.  She now lives and works in Greenwich, London producing work for galleries all over the UK.  Sarah is a fellow of the Society of Designer Craftsmen.

 

Tania Clarke Hall

Tania is an award-winning jeweller working in leather.  Influenced by her background in chemistry and a love of Japanese design, with its wabi-sabi aesthetic, Tania’s bold and dramatic pieces are designed with a deceptively simple economy of line.  She delights in moulding, slashing, scorching and colouring the leather using experimental and innovative techniques that continually push the boundaries of her medium.  The result is elegant yet playful jewellery, created to be worn in a variety of ways: twisted, wrapped or draped on the body.  The beauty of her jewellery is only truly apparent when worn.  Then the pieces shift and change to reveal different perspectives, helical shapes and sudden bursts of colour.  Tactile, warm, malleable and beautifully lightweight, her jewellery is a pleasure to wear.

 

Jo Pond

Discovering jewellery during her formative years at South Hill Park Arts Centre, Jo progressed through Berkshire and Loughborough Colleges of Art & Design, establishing her design process some years later during her Masters at the School of Jewellery, Birmingham.  Jo comes from a family of 'Ponds' who appear to have a genetic necessity for hoarding; digging up metal detector finds was the foundation of a passion for objects which others might not quite appreciate.  This fashioned the beginnings of a lifetime of habitual collecting.  Utilising this drive to accumulate the unconventional and unwanted, coupled with an aesthetic appreciation of the details of decomposition and change, Jo chooses to incorporate items potentially paradoxical within jewellery, to create beautiful and on occasion, confusing objects.  Employing symbolic references of form, material and technique, Jo dabbles in the potential for wearable items to become vehicles for communication; whether through sense, nostalgia, or knowledge.

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