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…

Another busy week with no chance to wind down from the post-conference activities. Not so much to report - finishing off a lot of work before the holidays:

Some for…

Last week I was in London at 34 degrees, speaking at the Goldsmiths Centre as part of the ACJ's touring "20:20 Visions" exhibition, celebrating 20 famous jewellers who have been members of the ACJ as well as 20 current members who are active…

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…

Make no mistake, I am furious with the disgusting power-obsessed homunculus who occupies the tenuous and devalued position of "Prime Minister" in the UK after last Thursday's general election.



Theresa May is a puppet of the heaps of billionaire ordure who control the media in this tinpot island and she is also so spectacularly lacking in empathy and so desperate to stay in power - despite a resounding trouncing in the election - that she is prepared to do deals with a group - the…

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,…

I was in Brighton last weekend, hence this two-week post.

Kicking things off was the ever-lovely John Grayson, the…

Last week kicked off to a glorious start with the Goldsmiths' Company Craft and Design Awards, held in the opulent surroundings of Goldsmiths' Hall in…

This lurid display is another of the short projects run by the BA class, this time to introduce them to various technologies, including turning, press-forming, spining, sand-casting, thread-cutting, riveting, laser-cutting, and finishing. Yes,…

There is a lot of sellotape in this post.



This week saw Birmingham host Spring Fair, the largest jewellery and giftware fair in the UK. Quite aside from being the largest collection of utter tat I have ever witnessed in one place, the jewellery and watch section of the fair is always interesting and over the years, I've made a few visits here. This time around, we decided to take our entire cohort…

Hayley Jones

A bumper two-week post…

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…

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.…