Bird skeleton in glass dome

I recently made a new piece of anatomical/curiosity art. This is a bird skeleton made entirely of silver, housed in a glass dome with a mahogany base. I have to say I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out. My work at university was based on skeletons, but I was working in steel. It's very different to work with - the joining especially. The steel skeletons were mostly spot welded, with some gas welding. When I left university and had to work without the glorious workshops, I realised I had to work out new ways of making things. The problem with making complex things out of silver is that unless you're very, very careful when you heat the metal, you risk re-melting the joins you've just done and undoing all your painstaking work. I think the number of skeletons I'd made while at university helped, though, because I had an idea of what order I had to do certain things in. Clearly all the time I've spent fiddling around with little bits of wire and scratching my head while looking at drawings has helped!

I think my next anatomical project is going to be a little more difficult, possibly based on a horse. Bird skeletons are my comfort zone, in a way. I started my skeleton making with them, and whenever I have to work out new ways of doing something, it's to them that I return. So I'm going to force myself out of my comfort zone and do something that may go horribly wrong - which is why I think my experiments are going to be in copper. It's heartbreaking melting something which you've spent hours on, but melting something out of a material which has a relatively high intrinsic value is just a little more galling. I'm looking forward to the challenge, though!

Anatomical Heart Card

I love this pop-up heart card by tracychong on etsy. Anatomy art is going through a bit of a resurgance at the moment. There's even a blog devoted to it! The thing I especially like about this card is the simplicity of the design. A heart is a complex thing, but this is very simple - and yet it's still perfectly obvious what it is. If someone sent me this, it'd be one I kept!

Craft - Art's ugly stepsister

I always feel sorry for craft. It's a bit of a dirty word - people think of craft shows as being twee. There's so much more to it than that. Craft is art. It's much more than merely making something. There's design in it and there's a huge knowledge base. I've studied jewellery and metalwork for two years in evening courses and for three years as a university degree. I think I know almost nothing. There are people who can make the most amazing things with apparently little effort - blacksmiths are a good example. One of my university tutors, Julian Coode, is incredibly talented and knowledgable about blacksmithing. He can pick up a bar of steel and turn it, very quickly, into something beautiful. He makes it look effortless. But here's the thing: it's not. Blacksmithing is difficult. People who make it look easy are extremely good at what they do and that takes years of learning and practice. Apprenticeship schemes for blacksmithing can take 5 years. Traditionally they could have lasted even longer.
Blacksmithing isn't the only craft that takes years to learn. They all do, really. Every material is different. There are always new ways to approach making - you can invent your own way of working. That's what the fun of craft is. It's so flexible! It's poorly defined - and that's part of the joy of it. You can make your own boundaries and there is always something new to learn.

You can take short courses with Julian in Farnham, Surrey. Details are here. He's an excellent tutor - very patient, understanding, good at communicating and absolutely lovely. It's partly because of him that some of my jewellery contains elements of blacksmithing!

Modernist Crafts

It's not the most likely sounding subject. When most people think of Modernism, they think of machined objects made using industrial processes, not handcrafted things. But the Bauhaus was a school of arts and crafts. The students studied many different making techniques, such as metalwork, cabinet-making, weaving and pottery, not just design. Of course, the most famous pieces of Modernist design are still mass produced, like the famous Marcel Breuer chair, but there are many pieces which have been forgotten. Marianne Brandt is quite well known, although that's a rather subjective term, as most people probably haven't heard of her. She was at the Bauhaus from 1923-29, and in fact ran the metalworking workshop for a year of that time. She was also a photographer, sculptor and designer of other things, but it's her metalwork that I think is particularly successful. Her tea infuser is a wonderful piece of design. It is well proportioned, practical and just a pleasure to look at. I like the rivets that hold the ebony handle to the silver body: not being afraid to show how something is made is a Modernist trait (it's also something the Arts and Crafts Movement is famous for - one of the many ways in which the two movements are similar). The original teapot would have been handmade, but I doubt the reproductions are. But that's not a problem to me: the Modernists liked mass production, as long as the original design was good. And this one is.

An explanation of some of my recent work

I think skeletons are beautiful. I like bones for many reasons and a large part of that is because they are the most lasting part of a creature. I find it fascinating that some bones have lasted for millions of years as fossils and that so much can be understood about a creature from what has happened to its bones. I like skulls especially. They're so elegant, with such graceful lines. For the last few years I've been spending a lot of my spare time drawing skeletons from photographs, in museums and from the small collection I have. Part of this interest is linked in with my love of cabinets of curiosities. Museums grew out of these collections, and it's usually the museums which have been less tampered with that I find more interesting. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a cornucopia of strange and wonderful things that a reasonably eccentric man collected. I want my house to be like that, a goldmine of unlikely things gathered together. Some of my cirrent jewellery relfects that. I know people don't necessarily want a huge museum cabinet of oddities, but they might want to show their love of unusual things, like skeletons, with what they wear. So I'm providing a way of collecting things that's a bit more portable.

Diamonds, diamonds, diamonds

I have to admit something here. I don't like diamonds and never have. If someone gave me jewellery with diamonds in, I'd look at them oddly and know they didn't really know me very well. I don't like their flashiness, the way size is so important or the adoring cult that's grown up around them. Diamonds weren't particularly valued before the 19th century. The jewellers of the middle ages and Renaissance loved coloured stones: rubies, sapphires, emerald, garnets, amethysts. The ring on the right here is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It's made of carved gold with a somewhat misshapen sapphire, and I think it's a thousand times nicer than anything you can buy from a high street jewellery shop. It's individual, made with care and the imperfections in the stone make it unique. The problem with diamonds is that the ideal diamond is colourless, flawless and perfectly cut. Perfection is slightly creepy, I've always thought. It's like the Stepford Wives - so perfect you think something must be wrong.

Diamonds are very tough, it's true. They rate a 10 on the 1-10 Mohs Scale and are therefore unlikely to be damaged if you bang your ring against something. But corundum (if it's red it's a ruby and any other colour is a sapphire, as long as it's transparent) rates a 9, which is hard enough even for rough everyday wear. To give you some idea of how tough that is, hardened steel is 7-8.

The reason diamonds are so highly regarded now is mostly the work of an extremely good marketing campaign. De Beers, started by Cecil Rhodes (never the most likeable of characters), made a deal in the Victorian era to supply diamonds in limited quantities so as to keep the price unnaturally high. They also came up with the line "a diamond is forever", one of the most successful (and corny) gimmicks there has been. They created an image of a stone and had enough money to make sure that it stuck. It's commonly thought that an engagement ring should have a diamond and that to be properly worthy of the girl in question it should cost a month's salary. I'm not sure where that idea came from, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were another piece of marketing from the diamond companies. It's a ridiculous idea that a romantic gesture must have a proportional cost. You can get a beautiful and unique handmade ring for less than that. Just go to your local galleries, or to Etsy, and see what is available.

Because of the idea that bigger is better when it comes to diamonds, it's become a snide way of showing off to flash your ring and talk about how many carats it is or the clarity rating. It's sad that that's the way a relationship is judged, by the size of the rock on her hand.

The single most horrible thing about diamonds is the way they have been used, over and over again, to fund wars. If you like diamonds and you have a conscience, please, please make sure you know where your stones have come from. Thanks to the Kimberley Process, there are far fewer conflict diamonds being traded now. It's only a few percent. Just make sure that the sparkler you want isn't one of them.

I can perfectly accept that some people may disagree with how I see diamonds. I think they're tacky and boring. The sparkle doesn't interest me, because usually that's all there is to see on a diamond ring. There's little thought given to proportion or elegance in the design. I'm sure there are good designers using diamonds out there, but I so rarely see diamonds used well. It'd be nice to be proven wrong.

Kevin Coates, a Renaissance Man

Kevin Coates is an extraordinary man. He's a jewellery and silversmith, a musician and a mathematician. He seems to have no end of talents, but not that many people seem to have heard of him. I first saw his work in Edinburgh in 2000. The exhibition was called "Fragments: Pages Stolen from a Book of Time". It was jewellery, each piece incorporating a found object (ranging from a Venetian pin to a fragment of pottery to a stone arrowhead), mounted on panels of slate that had been decorated. I loved his work instantly and haven't stopped hoping that one day I will be able to create something half as beautiful as his work. A book which follows his career so far, The Hidden Alchemy, was published in 2008. In it there are photos of almost everything he's ever made. The sheer quantity of items is staggering. How has he managed to create so much as well as having had time to write a book and made a CD? Harper's and Queens has called him "Britain's Leonardo". They're not far wrong.