So, we all know - I assume my readers to be fellow Liberal Elite snowflakes, of course - that Trump is a nightmare.



Unfortunately, I was 'triggered' this week, even within my 'safe space' of bed. Frankly, it is my own fault: I've been watching the fantastic Ridley Scott version of Philip K. Dick's "The…

Not having posted for four weeks, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd dropped off the face of the earth, but I was just having an extended Christmas holiday and settling back into work again. I didn't feel inclined to do a retrospective of the year gone by and I've a horrible feeling that next Christmas I may not feel like doing a retrospective then. In short, I'm somewhat lacking in global optimism just now.



That as may be, things here are going along as normal.



Back to…

So, Christmas and new year approach and, like most right-thinking people (Left-thinking, I mean!), I won't be sad to put this miserable 2016 to bed. Still, it is also the time of year when people wear silly hats and bad jumpers…

Michael Gove is one of the new Illiberal Elite who are forever moaning about the Liberal Elite who, I figure, sound very much like me. There is something clammy and unwholesome, something fungal about Gove's glossy face and…

That was a week so jammed with things to do that I'm still reeling. It all started on Tuesday evening when I had three different, sequential events to go to, first of these being one of the School of Jewellery's intermittent lecture…

A fairly quiet week this last week but with some notable events, including the opening of the inaugural exhibition at the Vittoria Street Gallery. This is a new enterprise in the School of Jewellery to bring a…

Not much to report this week, except that I've been to a couple of excellent concerts. The first up was "Trajet" at St. Phillip's Cathedral in the city centre, a piece for solo 'cello which was written from seismic recordings taken of filled-in…

In a week dominated by Trump and other fascist excesses, this terrible marketing puff for - believe it or not - flats in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham struck me as desperately appropriate. On another week, I might have mused on…

Lots of talk and not much jewellery for me this week!



At the School of Jewellery, we have an extensive programme of Artists-in-Residence (AiR) who work with the students on each course while extending their own practice. Every single year of each course has an AiR allocated to them - which is a luxury, indeed. This week saw us being introduced to them properly as they each gave us a bit of a talk about their hopes and direction for the year.…

A very quiet week for me this week, punctuated by a visit from Marcy of the British Art Medal Society to discuss next year's student medal competition, doing my tax return and getting locked out of the School early one morning (due to…

What a week!

Quite apart from the preparations for the new students starting next week (and the previous ones returning, of course), I've spent a lot of time in the workshops - on Tuesday evening as much to avoid violent thunderstorms as anything else - making up work for the Made In The Middle show, work which shows a completely new way of working for me, eschewing applied - illustrative - narrative for a more 'improvised' narrative of material, being braver about allowing the…

On holiday and in Brighton!

Last week was a bit of a rush as I had to complete both a piece for the Craftspace "Made in the Middle" show but also the piece for Boris Bally's "Imagine" show, as previously mentioned,…

This last week has been taken up by exploring a fairly new material with the pleasingly forthright Ronda Coryell, a delightful Amercian woman who is an expert in the use…

As Britain crashes into economic disaster and global irrelevance and we swing ever-more towards a state of fascism, I've been burying my head in the sand and thinking about rather less grim things, like working on my piece for Boris Bally's show, about which I wrote a week or so back.



This week was also fairly tough in that we had been…

While it is absolutely not the case that everyone who voted to leave the EU is a racist - far from it, I would think - the language of the 'campaign' to leave certainly was racist. Who can forget Farage's appalling poster which shows Syrian refugees leaving their country:…

It really seems incredible that this is the end of my first academic year at the School of Jewellery. So much has happened!

Over the last week, we've…

Not much to report this week, so I'll digress on the new garden in Birmingham, for where I have been struggling to find that most proasic of vegetables (fruits, I suppose): rhubarb. I have always thought I hated rhubarb but one day a few months back, my colleague, Claire Price, brought in a jar of jam for us to eat at one of our regular staff breakfasts. I tucked in without giving it much thought and marvelled at the balance of sour and sweet, at the hint of orange, at the amazing scent. It…