After a four-week hiatus to let me relax and take some time to regain my strength and focus, I am back at work again. The holiday itself was uneventful, taking in the Jewellery Quarter Open Studios at the beginning…

Craftivism!

A portmanteau word meaning "activism through craft". I don't think it has made the dictionary yet - though it has made…

It's that time of year again when the jewellery graduates gather up their work from the year and present it to the public. I'll start off with the show-stoppers from Horology.



Our BA Horology…

A short hiatus in posts recently which is not that there's been nothing going on, more that it hasn't been anything major and I've actually been too busy to get time together to write. SO a longer post with a lot of…

I had a wonderful time in Istanbul when I visited in 2013. Now, four years later, it seems that I may never be able to return again. The liberal, secular country created by Atatürk is succumbing to the power-plays of the fascist Erdoğan,…

One Dezeen reader has serious envy for one of the 24 projects shortlisted in a competition to find London's best house extensions. …

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.…

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…

Yes, indeed. It may only be early September but I've been clearing the falling leaves from the garden, planting out my winter leeks and sowing land cress, radicchio and lettuce for winter salads, as well as poring over the seed catalogues which dropped through the door over the last week. (I'm not really sure why I get printed catalogues by post as I order my seeds and plants from the same companies online!)



This week I've been mostly working on the pieces for "Made in the Middle"…

Today I made a visit to deepest Wales on a spur-of-the-moment response to a Tweet by one of my favourite artists, Brian Eno.…

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:…

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…

I've not posted for a while, for which I apologise. It isn't that there has been nothing happening or that I've been too busy: more that when I've had a spare moment or two, I've not felt like making a post.

SO this will be a bit of a longer post than usual as I've been in Brighton again, visited Farnham, and loads of other things besides. I also completely forgot that there should have been two other things of note in the last post: I gave my talk on New Technology as part of the…

Not much to report this week. I think that everything seems to quieten down for this dark period between new year and spring. I've mostly been working on the house and getting the students through their first…

Back in Birmingham again and I've been doing a lot of work at my new house, including planning to remove this horrible wallpaper...

It seems that it is not possible to buy a house without finding a hideous wallpaper somewhere in…

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,…