Sirens
In the depths of January this year the metal prices, which had crept higher and higher through 2025, surged. Overnight many of my favourite pieces were priced into oblivion as Silver’s new price point was around 4 times what it had been just months before. Cornwall, where I live, was also reeling from the after effects of one of the most powerful and devastating storms I have ever experienced. Several of the windows in my studio had been blown out and wind and rain howled through my space. I had worked for 12 weeks with only 3 days off and then hosted Christmas, which is also my son’s birthday, holding all of my work, all of school, all of the holiday period in my head throughout. I was unable to simply fall into my New Year groove of planning new pieces and deciding which galleries to work with and which events to apply for- sketching out my year- as it felt unworkable and insurmountable.
Weirdly, I had applied on a whim in December to be part of an exhibition with the Cornwall ACJ group the premise of which was to make pieces of jewellery outside of our usual remit using materials that were both repurposed and not ones we usually worked with. Called ‘Reframed’ the Jewellery would be recontextualised via all of the pieces being displayed in frames and hung on walls as an exhibition. I couldn’t remember the last time I had allowed myself time to make work purely for exhibition rather than for sale, however tangential a route. My making changes constantly as I work with new materials and techniques- I need to work on new things for my own curiosity and interest-but I am always loosely in the premise of creating pieces that could eventually be worn and enjoyed. Having children has exacerbated this as my work hours have been urgent and compressed for the past 15 years as the 3 of them have progressed through the short days of Nursery and Primary- and the 13 weeks of school holidays. I support my family in a meaningful way from my work and this entails an endlessly delicate balance between time spent experimenting and the meeting of deadlines, deliveries and financial realities.
Somehow the destroyed studio, with the eerily flapping polythene windows, and the astronomical metal prices that prohibited buying bullion gave me the space I needed to get lost in making for the sake of making-and it was a beautiful thing. I wanted to work with decorative glass pieces of ornamental light fittings that I had found at a house clearance in France in the summer. They were shaped in the classic, resonant diamond facet and leant themselves to all sorts. I mixed them with antique card decks, threads, Rosary beads, Chinese money, maps, Crab claws, corroded wire which- as most makers do- I happened to have scattered around my studio. I incorporated some of the evocative financial words that had been part of a project in 2009 with the innovation hub at Falmouth University and hadn’t been used in final pieces. It was a drawing together of scraps and fragments in what was honestly a bit of a shattered time.
I have always believed in the therapeutic process of making- and have held onto this across many years of it simultaneously being my full-time job with the routines and stressors of any working week. I gave myself time to work on these pieces to no end other than to do it, working with the theme of ‘Chandelier Drop’- a term for both long, fancy Chandelier earrings and also the idea of the Chandelier Drop as a crash of the gilded veneer revealing the ugliness beneath. I collaged in Greenland as the idiot threatened to colonise it, I added ‘Futures’ and ‘Venture’ as the metal prices continued to soar- small scale makers simply a bit of collateral in global resource battles, as so many of the smaller things in this world always are. I worked and reworked my 3 super long pairs of earrings, and yes, what I eventually made was a bit ridiculous but I did feel better. As I had focused on this piece I had also been processing and designing a way forward with my usual work- I can’t help it, I think about it all the time. I had reset enough to find a route towards new pieces for the coming year- bringing in materials and elements that I’d thought about through the month of making freely and without an endgame.
The point in early January where I’d felt unable to gather myself and rustle up another round of resilience had also penetrated my thought/work process through that dark month. I felt myself being unable to enact my (chronically self-employed) family’s narrative of toughness and strength, a creative wiliness against the odds, a picking up and dusting off and getting back in the fray to manage and provide. I have begun to bump up against this more frequently over the past five years and question both the virtue of being endlessly strong and my ability to do it anymore. I had found myself at the start of the month simply unable to get up and start work with a whole new plan and had needed to work my way in circuitously, with a sense of directionless uncertainty.
This led to a pull towards the idea of personal mythologies- the stories that families, friend groups, industries weave around themselves- and how we carry them until we can’t. My family can have a specific narrative of hyper-resilience as the optimal mode of being. I began working with very old illustrations of Sirens, before they morphed into the sweetness of mermaids. They had claws and wings- sometimes bird tails sometimes fish tails. They were frequently glaring out of the pictures and generally had large fish slung angrily over their shoulders. The freedom I had felt in January working with Chandelier glass I carried forward into experimenting with Brass and Bronze and its beautiful patination. I wanted to convey the essential toughness of these female archetypes in a period when I was (more even than usual) over the Patriarchy and its doings.
Still filled with a desire to have an outlet for experimental work mixing a great many different materials I applied to exhibit as part of Romanian Jewellery week with Precious Collective. I was able to enjoy another bout of making random pieces on the back of this- eventually sending three linked bracelets to the exhibition tying them to the idea of the submerged lands of Dogger land where strands of my family purportedly hail from. Our Doggerlander ancestry is a shared narrative of hardiness between us and like Sirens our strength has been necessary, ferocious and strong-relentlessly able to keep on coming up with the goods. The patination and corrosion are the gradual collapse into tiredness, the land sinking beneath the waves, until only the fish women can populate it.
It’s been an interesting year for me as a Maker (and a woman, and a parent- but that’s another story). I needed to gently fall into the void that opened around my work in January rather than get up and get to work. For one of the 1st times ever I was unable to come up with a plan, or to think and act my way through this. I’m so grateful that I was able to find my back in without meaning to or knowing that that was what I was doing as I poured my uncertainty and sadness about the world into building these pieces. Ive learnt that relentless strength can’t carry me through at the same time as acknowledging what a core belief this has been as I really hadn’t realised everything I had wrapped up in this. I have loved ideas emerging as shadowy lines, wrong turns, sudden Oh! moments. I am endlessly grateful to this year for teaching me another route into work, and also how important it is to just make time to immerse oneself in making objects that hold the layers of meaning that we don’t understand yet, but will in time.
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