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Rings

13th January - 23rd June 2018

 

Every year we select jewellers to display with us whose rings offer a unique alternative to what you might find out on the high street.  Stunning engagement and wedding rings, rings to mark special occasions or just a ring to wear every day; there’s something for everyone to enjoy. 

 

Anna K Baldwin

Anna works mainly in silver, gold, and semi-precious stones creating beautiful, contemporary, wearable jewellery pieces.  Her designs have an organic, tactile feel, often incorporating hammering and shaping techniques to create a sense of movement.  Anna gains inspiration from many different sources including light, texture and natural and fluid forms.   Anna takes care to 'road-test' all of her designs herself, so that she can be sure others will enjoy wearing them too.  Based in Buckinghamshire, Anna started silversmithing at a college evening class, initially just as a recreational activity, then setting up her own tiny workshop and developing her own collections.   

 

Emily Thatcher

Emily is driven by the individuality of nature, gathering natural gem stones and creating unique pieces of jewellery, that in turn express the individualty of the wearer.  Her work is informed by electron microscope images of the world around us.  Fascinated by the asymmetry and organic flow observed here, she translates these forms and textures into sculptural, wearable art objects. The work is handcrafted; the metal forged to create tapering, smooth lines. The weight of the metal and asymmetry of design are exploited to create perfect balance.  Emily selects gemstones for their unique beauty, natural inclusions and rich colour.  She creates bespoke settings that enhance all aspects of each stone used in rings, earrings & neckpieces.  She trained at Sir John Cass College London, graduating with a BA Hons in Silversmithing, Jewellery & Allied Crafts.

 

Elizabeth Chamberlain

Elizabeth’s jewellery is inspired by organic texture and form. Using traditional jewellery making techniques, she maintains a unique, personal touch to each piece.  Elizabeth works with silver, gold, semi-precious beads and precious gemstones.  The jewellery is inspired by organic texture and form. She graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a BA Hons in Three Dimensional Design specialising in jewellery. After this, she completed a Bachelor of Design course, graduating in 2006. 

 

Marion Lebouteiller

Marion is a French jeweller who lives and works in Hampshire, England.  She trained in the traditional Arts and Crafts Ecole Boulle in Paris.  Marion draws her inspiration from her surroundings but also from the Japanese culture and the “Wabi-Sabi” philosophy; the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.  Today, her background as a sculptor in a bronze foundry deeply influences her approach to contemporary art jewellery.  She has been experimenting with a sculptor’s wax she heats up then twists and stretches to create stunning pieces later to be cast in silver or recycled gold. The result highlights the unpredictable nature of the warm wax as well as the spontaneity of her gesture and movement while letting the material express itself to its full potential. The perfect high polish of the inside of her rings creates a beautiful contrast with the matte finish on the outside of the rings and makes them very comfortable to wear.  All her creations are handmade, either one-offs or small series, using recycled or Fairmined metals wherever possible, as she is very much into the idea (and the actions) of living on this planet with a minimum impact on the environment and on the life of mining labourers.

 

Bibba London

In recent years of Bibba London’s practice as a jeweller, metal and stones have been a source of her endless fascination and exploration.  At present, her work is very much inspired by the beauty, cleverness and versatility of Nature.  Natalia Majewska, who creates the pieces under the name of Bibba London, reaches out for rough or ‘imperfect’ stones as a reminder that they are derived from nature.  By contrasting sparkling and rough, organic and smooth, she is reflecting on these transformative journeys and unimaginably long chains of hands these materials pass through from mines to a finished piece in a gallery. Work for this exhibition showcases pieces under the transformative element of fire, which fuses and reticulates the metal, combined with unexpected beauty of galvanised forms.  The rings have been individually made in hand-fused silver, which has been electroformed in copper, palladium coated and partially gold 18ctplated combined with a variety of sumptuous semi-precious stones. 

 

Phoebe Simpson

Phoebe Simpson is a London based jewellery designer and maker.  After studying Textiles at the University of Brighton, Phoebe went on to work at Heatherwick Studio, before launching her business in 2016.  Driven by quality and craftsmanship Phoebe experiments with traditional techniques to produce unique contemporary pieces in recycled sterling silver and gold.  Phoebe Simpson Jewellery is built on the principles of sustainable design; producing short runs of quality products that have longevity encouraging people to re-think their relationship with their belongings, to buy less and buy better.  Her practice is a medley of curiosity, exploration of process and a love of making.

 

Kate Phipps

For as long as Kate can remember she has loved jewellery and is passionate about creating jewellery that people love to wear. Kate makes jewellery using precious metals, pearls and semi-precious beads, using a blend of modern technologies and traditional jewellery making techniques. For example, she uses stone setting and traditional metal fabrication techniques to apply textures to metal, create three-dimensional forms and cut shapes.  The manual approach is enhanced through technology where she creates laser-cut acrylic shapes for press forming metal into new forms. CAD software allows her to develop more complex designs and experiment with design ideas, creating and 3D-printed prototypes before making pieces in metal.   Kate’s pieces are wearable, contemporary and elegant. 

 

Emily Nixon

Having studied fine art textiles at Goldsmith’s College Emily spent a postgraduate year at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art in Poland, where she was preoccupied by tapestry, sculpture and conceptual art.  In the 1990’s Emily became a curator, firstly at her own contemporary art gallery in Edinburgh and then as the Director of Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall.  She started to make her own work again in 2000 which soon developed into smaller scale pieces that might be worn as jewellery.  Living in West Cornwall has shaped the work she makes.  The sculptural forms and textures of the coastline are a constant fascination where she loves the fabric-like twists and folds of seaweed, the diversity in the contours of pebbles and the weathered character of flotsam she sees washed up along the shore.  This dichotomy of the precious and the organic (special stones encircled by sea worn fragments of silver) characterises so much of her inspiration.  At the heart of Emily’s work remains the sculpture and tapestry of her early practice.  Constant experimentation, playfulness and continual development of ideas alongside a mindfulness of the relationship of each piece with the wearer, drives her creative process and output.

 

Joanne Tinley

Joanne makes textured gold and silver jewellery for people who love being close to nature.  For her, the natural world isn’t just something to look at, but to be felt; the rough bark of a tree, the comforting softness of richly coloured wool and the deliciously smooth surface of a river-polished pebble are all textures she builds into her jewellery.  Joanne combines traditional techniques with modern with the unique textures on her silver created both with computer-added design and with hammers, some of which are older than her.  Her jewellery is crafted to last lifetimes, designed with care to be cherished and passed down the generations, yet intended to be worn every day.  A gift of love, a precious reminder of the birth of a child, an 18th birthday treasure, or a simply a treat for yourself to celebrate how unique you are.  Joanne’s favourite technique is Keum Boo, a Korean technique that permanently bonds 24k gold to fine silver.

 

Amy Stringer

Amy was born in the South but grew up in Leeds, West Yorkshire which is where she developed her love for the countryside.  Her split heritage has played a major part in her development as a designer and her personal battle with “am I Northern or Southern?” It took her until her 20’s to realise it really didn’t matter.  Having lived in and loved both the North and South Amy began to explore her love for architecture.  The subtle differences in the buildings of each city she visited, throughout the country, and the difference between the inner hearts of cities and the countryside outskirts.  Amy moved to Sheffield in 2012 and completed a degree in Jewellery and Metalwork.  She immediately fell in love with Sheffield’s inner city combination of architecture and green space, the combination she had always subconsciously been looking for, and the fact that 20 minutes out of the city centre you could be in the stunning Peak District.  It was from this city that came her cement obsessed collections.

 

Jenny Gilbert

Jennifer graduated from the University for the Creative Arts Rochester in 2011 with a 1st class degree in Contemporary Jewellery.  She enjoys working with the traditional materials sterling silver and pearls.  She uses them in modern designs and often oxidises the silver, which gives it a beautiful matt dark grey/black finish that compliments the delicate white of the pearls.  Ethical materials are used wherever possible in Jennifer’s work including recycled silver and recycled packaging.  Forms found in nature inspire her and she likes to simplify these forms to create contemporary and minimal pieces of jewellery.  Jennifer works intuitively with her materials and her ideas begin in sketchbooks which take on a life of their own when developed in metal.  Her designs were created around the idea of using the traditional pearl in contemporary jewellery design.  Jennifer takes forms found in nature and reduces them to their most basic components to create simple geometric forms.

 

 

 

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