Made with Love 2019
12th January - 9th March 2019
Our annual exhibition exploring the romance of British Craft. These talented British makers come together to showcase their beautiful jewellery, ceramics and works in mixed media resulting in an array of ideal gifts for Valentine’s and Mother’s Day.
Image; Tracy Wilson
Jewellery
Tracy Wilson
Design has always been one of Tracy’s passions. She studied Interior Design and then followed this with a Masters, working in a design environment for 17 years. Her career changed direction when she completed a Higher National Certificate in Jewellery. Her current collection ‘Identity’ was inspired by sound waves and how individual sound is to everyone and everything. During the design process she explored pattern, form and texture to complete this collection. Each piece is hand crafted using sterling silver wire which is constructed to create a unique, memorable, tactile item of jewellery. As no two sound wave patterns are the same, no two items in this collection are identical.
Penny Warren
After graduating from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Polytechnic with a BA Honours degree in Designer Craftsmanship, Penny began to develop an interest in pattern and its application to jewellery. Penny’s jewellery is made in anodised aluminium combined with silver and is inspired by land, sea and skyscapes. The attraction of this material in its use for jewellery is primarily about making permanently colourful accessories without using gem stones, but it is also an incredibly light metal making it easy to wear, and the diverse range of colours achieved whether bright intense blues, pinks and turquoises or soft subtle greys, greens and lavenders has an eternally powerful appeal to the wearer.
Rose Ellen Cobb
Working from her studio in Sheffield, Rose designs and makes contemporary jewellery in precious metals and porcelain. Beautiful surface textures, taken from lace and crochet, have been used to create an original body of work which is elegant and timeless. A simple and refined palette of materials gives the jewellery a luxurious yet unostentatious feel. Rose is inspired by the processes she uses, namely slip casting in porcelain and lost wax casting in silver. Her work often has an organic feel and celebrates imperfections and the surprises created when using these processes. Both slip casting and lost wax casting lend themselves to capturing fine detail and this has allowed Rose to explore the idea of transforming textures, taken from perishable fabrics such as lace, into enduring pieces of jewellery. Prior to setting herself up as a jeweller Rose had significant success as a furniture and product designer, being published in the likes of Blueprint, Elle Decoration, Crafts magazine and many others. She also had work displayed at the V&A and the Design Museum. Having been a designer for over ten years, working on interior, furniture & product design projects, Rose realised there was an element of the design process which was missing and so she decided to turn her hands to making. With a personal passion for jewellery and ceramics Rose combined the two to create original pieces of jewellery.
Evie Leach
Evie works with silver and semi-precious gemstones and beads. She take inspiration from the geometry found in both nature and architecture to create clean, angular designs. Evie decided to follow her creative passion by studying Jewellery and Silversmithing at the Birmingham School of Jewellery where her basic knowledge, learned from her jeweller parents, transformed into traditional skills.
Joanna Wakefield
Joanna’s training culminated in a Degree in Design, specialising in Textiles, which was no surprise having grown up in a family environment of 3 generations of needlewomen. Her degree took her into work as a Fair Trade designer, travelling extensively around the world developing traditional handicrafts with producer groups and their artisans. After more than 10 years she could no longer ignore her personal desire to extend and develop further creatively and so she retrained at York School of Jewellery as a designer jeweller. A huge part of her jewellery designs are influenced by haberdashery, stemming from a fascination that grew from admiring her Grandma's talents and fond memories of sorting through her button stash. Joanna continues to expand her haberdashery collection, from cotton reels and thimbles, to various button inspired pieces including the use of vintage and found buttons and she is drawn to the thought of re-loving and reviving something and bringing an old or found object back to life through her jewellery.
Jodie Hook
After studying a degree in Jewellery and Silversmithing at the School of Jewellery in Birmingham Jodie moved to London to pursue her dreams. Here, she spent 7 years working for fashion jewellery designer Scott Wilson, where she created collections for many trade shows including London Fashion Week. She also created one off commission pieces for major fashion houses and celebrities including Pringle, Swarovski, Robbie Williams and Kylie. In 2008, Jodie returned to her home town of Cardiff and launched her solo business and first jewellery collection. Design is an intrinsic part of Jodie’s everyday life and is reflected in every aspect of her work. Ultimately, she seeks to create wearable jewellery that makes a statement on and off the body.
Jill Stewart
Jill specialises in making jewellery from unusual combinations of metals; silver with etched copper and brass, and heat-treated titanium. When these metals are heated during soldering they create different colour effects and patterns. Organic forms are taken as inspiration for her jewellery where they are simplified to echo the shapes of leaves, flowers and forms found in nature.
Amber Cooper-Green
Amber is a Nottingham based jewellery designer and graduate from Birmingham City University’s jewellery design and related products course. She is interested in the investigation of materials and simplistic forms with her main focus currently is the combination of wood, acrylic and metal. She uses reclaimed exotic hardwoods, copper, silver, acrylic and steel nails to create statement fashion accessories. Each article is individually hand crafted and holds a certain warmth, transpired through both the pieces tactility and earthy colour scheme, often interrupted by small explosions of colour. Lamination is the key process Amber uses to gain seamless transitions between wood and acrylic. It was this process and its material outcome that inspired her whole collection. Newer pieces are inspired by pebbles, both their shapes and her inadvertent attraction to hold them. Amber has always loved tribal jewellery and believes she has subconsciously drawn aesthetic similarities to this style of work.
Olive Rose Jewellery (Emma Trott)
Emma (business name Olive Rose) is a Middlesex University graduate based in Taunton. The name of her jewellery business is inspired by her daughters’ middle names. She uses a Victorian lace craft called tatting where she is able to manipulate a single line of thread into a complex structure. This intricate textile process involves knotting threads in particular ways, to form loops and lines. She stays true to the original technique, yet her designs have a contemporary feel. Each design grows and develops through making where the threads themselves and colour are her inspiration. Olive Rose came about in 2015 after she organised a craft raffle in aid of mitochondrial disease in the summer of 2014. Whilst on maternity leave in 2014 Emma discovered an artist friends little girl Daisy had been diagnosed with Mito, a degenerative disease. She decided to contact all the contemporary makers she knew and asked them to donate a prize. For every £5 donation on her just giving page you received one entry into the raffle. They ended up with 25 prizes and raised over £850 for the cause. Doing all this with a 4 month old baby made Emma realise anything was possible and so Olive Rose was created in early 2015.
Ceramics & mixed media
Frances Noon
Frances has enjoyed several career paths in the world of contemporary craft including printmaking and jeweller making. For this exhibition her 3D sculptures are displayed where garden birds play a big part in the collection. Her work is predominantly figurative and she gets her ideas from observing & drawing in her garden. Frances has been exploring 3D pieces for about 4 years now seeing them as an extension & a combination of her jewellery & print techniques. Frances combines base metals and copper & brass with wood which allows her to use colour in her work. Frances hand textures the metal using a rolling mill & by hammering; she has a variety of punches to draw with on the metal surface & she files the shapes around the edges. Some of her pieces have integral wooden parts now, especially the boats & trees so she spends an equal amount of time sawing & sanding down wooden pieces. She uses layer upon layer of paint to build up the coloured surface so it looks aged & worn. The birds & animals are presented on a wooden framework, a plinth or peeping out of their own houses.
Moya Tosh
Moya has a Master's Degree in Ceramics from the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Moya’s work is informed by nature and landscape. Her thrown porcelain vessels celebrate the colours and textures of the seasons with blocks of intense glaze colour and precious metal leaf. Moya uses strips and drips of lustre and leather stitching to create an added visual and tactile dimension. Her sculptural pieces reflect the rugged and imperfect elements of the natural world with porcelain clay pulled and stretched until it wrinkles and cracks. Glaze colours are toned down to allow the form to predominate.
Bev Seth
Bev lives and works in Sheffield; a city bustling with makers and activity, with the benefits of city life but scattered with and surrounded by parks and green spaces. It is important to Bev to walk through the park on her way into the city centre. She is interested in the clash of ideas, solitude in the city, still and forgotten areas in woodlands and the point where traditions and folk tales collide with modern life. This is her starting point, not a literal interpretation, not an illustration but the stories are hinted at and held in the design. After graduating from Bath Academy of Art, Bev went on to work with people with Learning Disabilities, which proved to be an interesting and creative career. It wasn't until years later when she started attending a ceramics class at Penny Withers studio at Persistence Works in Sheffield, that she realised how much she missed clay. She began to find more and more time to spend making, trying to develop her ideas into cohesive collections and along the way improving her skills and technical knowledge.
Grainne Watts
Grainne works with porcelain and stoneware clays and uses layers of vibrant under glazes and slips to create interesting surface detail. She uses various techniques such as throwing and hand-building to create her sculptural forms and vessels. The coastline of Ireland has been a major source of inspiration in Grainne’s work as a ceramic artist. Over a lifetime, she has collected and recorded 'treasures' that inspire her practice, from weather eroded flotsam and indented stones, to vibrant seaweeds. In recent years, her work has developed into specific themes that she explores and expands through limited edition series. There are unifying sources of inspiration that run through each body of work. Many of these influences relate to colour, pattern and the visual and tactile marks evident in Nature.
Heather Mathieson
Heather grew up in the North East of Scotland, surrounded by hills and heather. As a child, many rainy days were spent scribbling and sketching her ideas and imaginings or playing with lumps of clay in her mum’s pottery studio. Heather’s background is in ecology and she has a real passion for nature, wilderness and the outdoors which influences her ceramic work greatly.
Liz Cooksey
Liz’s inspiration comes from natural habitats; hedgerows, garden boarders and meadows. She creates shapes and structure with wire and copper in which she combines delicate fine crochet in a varied palette of subtle colours. In her more recent work there has been a development from mainly framed relief pieces to free standing three-dimensional work, where simple wooden plinths become fertile ground from which springs an exuberance of natural forms.
Sam Walker
Sam’s inspiration comes from a love of pattern and colour, as well as hints to textile construction. Though Sam did not go through any formal training, she spent a long time experimenting with techniques best suited to applying pattern to the surfaces of her pieces. Her work is made from flat slabs of clay. Coloured liquid clays, called slips, are applied to the surface before the slabs are constructed into their 3D forms. Sam enjoys the imperfections the process brings, quite often pushing the clay out to create a more textured and interesting surface. Though she works with templates, the methods ensure no two pieces will ever be exactly the same. Sam tries to approach her life with a sense of fun, and hope that this translates into her work.
Makiko Hastings
Makiko is originally from Japan and moved to England in 1997. Most of her work is hand-thrown stoneware. Each piece is kept in a simple form to be functional and she loves exploring within the surface decoration and colours. Makiko’s passion for tableware is strongly influenced by the food culture from her background. Makiko intends for her work to be used in daily life to bring joy to the user’s home.
Hannah Staniforth
Hannah creates thrown and hand-built ceramics out of terracotta from her studio in Sheffield, where she uses both controlled and uncontrolled methods of mark making. Coloured slips are applied through the use of mono printing sgraffito and slip trailing techniques. Terra sigillata is also applied for a contrasting surface effect. Hannah is a Design Crafts Graduate From De Montfort University, and is now based at the Yorkshire Artspace in Sheffield. Her work is predominantly thrown on a potter’s wheel in a variety of clays; smooth black clay, white stoneware & white earthenware.
Mary Johnson
Inspiration for Mary’s ceramics comes from many places. Allotments and messy back gardens are a favourite place, where ordinary people interact with the environment. Mary thinks they have a chaotic order and rich texture which is a feast for the eyes. This work tries to capture some of these surfaces and ideas, along with the creatures that exist within them. All of the pottery is made using red earthenware clay and traditional craft methods. Most of the work is thrown on the potter’s wheel and decorate using coloured slips and glazes. Sometimes materials are added to vary the texture. It may then be torn or broken and reassembled to make contemporary vessels created or recycled from pieces.
Karen Dawn Curtis
Karen is a ceramic artist based in Cardiff. She has produced aesthetic art pieces for many years but has recently rediscovered throwing; taken with the unique appeal of ceramics as functional art. Inspired by the Brecon Beacons as a place where rugged nature has been lived in but not lost, Karen creates her different collections to explore the point where beauty and practical purpose meet. Karen has always been fascinated by the naked surface of clay. She adds oxides to the clay body to create the exterior colours without having to mask the natural texture of the material. In developing these glazes she has discovered a rich palette of colours which are reminiscent of Wales itself. It is her hope that this work is art which will be touched, used and treasured. Karen’s Earth Collection started its development in 2016, when she started to explore adding oxides into the clay body to create different surface qualities. This method enabled the colours to be an intrinsic part of the making process, without having to mask the natural texture of the material. The Earth Collection examine the concept of the earth crying out. The openings inspired by caves and cervices in the landscape of South Wales are made to appear to be shouting or singing.
Katie Lowe
Katie is a contemporary maker in the field of slip casting ceramics. With a focus on simplicity and the beauty within colour, material and form; Katie aims to create a range of artworks combining subtle gradients, miniature vessels and other complimenting materials. From small decorative pieces to large scale installations she strives to create a strong visual impact through clean lines, bold forms and colour gradients. The process of colouring slip and creating subtle gradients is what she finds most exciting; enjoying the technical process behind creating each colour and how different experiments can give different and new results. She is inspired by many aspects of nature; gradients within the sea and sky, textures in marine life and natural composition throughout global landscapes.
Sarah Jane Brown
Sarah’s decorative objects and wall hung works upcycles wood off-cuts, metal and newspaper. Her delicate small sculptures start with a driftwood base and onto this she adds small scenes inspired by nature, animals, gardens and allotments. Her Catching Dreams collection of wall pieces are structured around wooden hoops and within them are interesting little scenes to capture the imagination. Each piece of driftwood is selected for its particular shape and feel and the unpredictability of her material means that each piece is unique but clearly recognisable as her work.
