The last two weeks have been a bit of a whirl, what with the opening my collaborative exhibition "A Waste Land" at the…

Kicked off from the end of the last post by jumping on a train to Glasgow to go and hear the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra perform three symphonies by Gloria Coates. I've been enamoured of Coates' work since reading an article about her in The Wire…

What a week!



Kicking it all off was the annual Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Awards in the gilded splendour of…

Spring has just about got to Birmingham this week and on Wednesday night it was a pleasant - almost warm - walk to the IKON gallery for the private view of the new show of work by two…

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…

No blog post last weekend as I didn't get home from being in the Netherlands until late on Sunday night.

The…

The ACJ annual exhibition for 2015, "Sleight of Hand" opened last Thursday at…

Gordon Millar, organiser of the "Scot Street Style" events.



What a whirlwind of a week!

It all kicked off on Saturday night with a visit to…

Since my last post, I've been on the south coast of England, variously in London, Folkestone and Brighton. What should have been a very relaxing weekend proved to be anything but, albeit in a good way. Very…

After the travels and entertaining of the summer, I am back to a very autumnal Glasgow and my new students. As the dust settles on the new term, it has been good to be able to grab some time in the workshop to actually make…

As usual, I've relocated to the South Coast for the summer and have been doing very little to do with work. Since my last post, I've had my friend and fellow-jeweller,…

What a week! Not only have we been finishing off with the students for the year - and sometimes for ever, really - but I've been doing my best to help Karen Dicken to get the "Handmade By Machines" exhibition and…

I've been on holiday and on either side of that holiday, I was exceptionally busy, so it is only tonight that I have managed to get some time to put together a blog post about what has been going on. I can barely believe that it is nearly the end of October and it seems like only yesterday that it was the start of the month and the Craft Scotland conference.…

Last night was the opening of Jo Garner's amazing conception for a jewellery exhibition, "Bring Back The Dead" which only runs until Sunday night in the Whitespace Gallery in Edinburgh so…

Just returned from my five days in Istanbul where my first solo show was held in the Ayse Taki Galerisi as a result of the kindness and generosity of both the gallery owner, Ayse, and my friend and colleague Umut Demirguc Thurman who worked incredibly hard to make the show a phenomenal…

Well, not quite, but I did have to travel on a bus - which is nearly a handcart - the trains being cancelled due to a landslip.

Hull is an odd place. For the place in the UK with the highest rates of unemployment and some of the lowest property prices, it feels like a prosperous city. It is clean, it is busy, there are plenty of galleries and cafés. Adding to the oddness is the fact that it is in Yorkshire but while the buildings are completely as you would expect in that great county…

Just back to a cloudy, damp, icy cold day in Glasgow, having boarded the plane from San Francisco at 18 degrees C and brilliant sun. The air there was clear, here it is fugged with tobacco smoke. Everyone looks miserable. I look miserable. I have to get to work before 4pm for a meeting with the college Prinicpal at which he told us about financial cuts to the education sector. Not a great return from what was an amazing four days on the East Coast of the USA...

I am not really sure…

One of my students, Inness Thomson, though only part of the way through his course, has just opened his first small show at Scotland Art.Com, a gallery in the centre of glasgow. As you can understand, he is justifiably proud:

I especially like his silver and…

Time to allow myself the luxury of a weekend in Edinburgh with nothing to do but see some friends and go to the opening of Stephen Bottomley's first retrospective.

I always sleep very well in Edinburgh: I stay with friends and the room in which I sleep overlooks a graveyard! Much needed as the changing clocks, seasons and the travel to and from the US has made my sleeping patterns somewhat messy.

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I'll get to the robots in a moment. First of all, my class at the SCC... There isn't much to say about the class at the SCC as we weren't really making projects, more exploring techniques through making samples and finding ways of problem-solving for processes which the people in the class used. As such, I have no photographs of work to show. What I do have is a photograph of all the people involved:

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