More thoughts from the ACJ conference ...

A further thought after my last post: someone - I think Sofia Bjorkman (of the Platina Gallery in Stockholm) - suggested that working with materials you don't like is a really good exercise. Your resistance to re-imagining and transforming them is reduced, which can only be a good thing. After my experience in the Robert Ebendorf workshop I can believe that, and it's something I will return to.

This reminds me of a talk by Maria Militsi, a jeweller who works with found objects and who often bases her work on pieces that are broken or damaged. She makes replacement pieces for the missing elements and these pieces are wearable. It's a really imaginative approach to jewellery design.You can see an image of Maria's work here.

Another thought from Sofia was that jewellery in the spectrum of visual art, is the equivalent of poetry in writing. Very apt. The remit for jewellery is very specific, and I can see the parallels between different forms of poetry and different pieces of jewellery.

I guess the aim of a good conference should be to get you thinking about things in different ways, and as you can tell this one did! Thanks ACJ!

New jewellery talent

Spent the first three days of this week at the Association for Contemporary Jewellery's conference 'Crossings'. It was very stimulating, but whilst I digest that I just wanted to post about a great new jeweller Hollie Paxton who's work was exhibited at the conference.

I saw Hollie's beautiful jewellery at New Designers a couple of weeks ago, and it was a real pleasure to come across it again. Hollie replicates fragments of discarded packaging in precious metals. It's so skilfully done that her chewing gum wrappers, coffee stirrers, and bottle tops really look like the real thing. Actually they're carefully crafted in precious metals and enamels. Quite stunning, wonderfully quirky: definitely another one to watch.

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