Since Covid I have been slowly working on a new exhibition, working title: F&F (found and fabricated).
Like all travellers, I pick up a stone off the beach, a cone from the forest, something special to the place, to take with me. We use these keepsakes to remind us where we have been. My work transforms found detritus, items washed up on the beach or found during my travels; into objects which have some solidity and are possibly useful and/or pleasurable to the eye.
Over the last two years these have coalesced into a group of ‘forage brooches’, whose commonality is a circular shape contained by an anodised copper back. As time has passed I realised that this works is about migration: that objects, awaiting a new life, can arrive at their new home as an assemblage of belongings, a collage of linkages.
Which led me to decide to give the brooches a context and a stage. The brooches are no longer individual jewellery pieces but are complemented by shape and form and ‘friends’. Together they become part of a piece of wall art – where items can be removed and worn, exchanged in and out, or enjoyed as a whole. The images below are work in progress – some of the brooches, technical detail, and compositional experiments.
