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.…

How could I forget?

In my last post, I completely forgot to note that I'd also taken a trip to the New Ashgate Gallery in Farnham for the opening of the ACJ "Choice!" show there on the Friday night. This is the 2016 edition of the annual show of work by members and we were…

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"…

A shortish post, despite a busy week with the (almost) full compliment of staff back at the School of Jewellery and preparing for the new intake of students. I can't quite believe that it is a whole year since I started there. What a whirlwind!

I have written before of my friend, Carrie Fertig (…

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.…

Back to work today and straight into preparations for the coming year, both academically - for the new and continuing students - and in terms of my own work.

The holiday was relaxing and fairly uneventful. On the back of my political fury of the last few months, I had been planning to go to Brighton's "Pride" event, something I've shunned since the early 1990s when the event ceased to be political and became no more than a corporate, money-spinning festival of…

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…

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:…