Introducing Six New Designers in For Summer…

June – October

Mizuki Takahashi

Mizuki is an award winning contemporary jewellery artist, living and working in Worcestershire having graduated from Hereford College of Arts.

Practicing in mark-making and playing with paper gives Mizuki simple yet delicate design ideas in her jewellery making. Enamelling is Mizuki’s most recent fascination in her practice, she creates unique mark-making patterns on delicate enamelled copper surfaces using the sgraffito (scratching) technique. Every line she draws is individual and is changed by the firing time in the kiln, giving different results in each project. Oxidised black silver fastenings for each enamelled element are carefully designed and handmade by Mizuki, the black lines cast like shadow lines parallel with the scratched enamel marks.

All of Mizuki’s jewellery creations are unique and one-off pieces. Once a piece is made or during its process of making, it feeds her inspiration to get and grow new ideas for the next project.

Cristina Zani

Cristina completed an MFA in Jewellery at Edinburgh College of Art in June 2012.

In 2011 she was awarded a bursary that enabled her to study jewellery in Seoul for four months. Her present work is influenced by the Korean urban landscape and explores the contrast between modern buildings and ancient temples and palaces of South Korea. She combines natural and painted wood with precious and non-precious metals.

Cristina lives in Edinburgh where her studio is currently based.

Rachel Butlin

Rachel Butlin seeks to challenge the concepts of contemporary interactive and wearable jewellery producing a range of high end , mixed material wearable pieces. She loves to challenge the way in which people perceive a piece, by creating small scale sculpture that can be worn on the body, in a way chosen by the wearer. Carefully considering material combination and placement, her work often explores bespoke materials, evoking curiosity between the piece and the wearer themselves. Intrigued by Japanese culture and tradition, the art of placement and cultural colour palettes remain central in designs. Rachel’s inspiration is drawn from Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, which focuses on harmony, colour use, rhythm and elegantly simple design. She is also fascinated by Japanese traditional architecture, unique characteristics bringing together natural materials and colours, with dark and bright contrasts. This is reflected in her playful and detailed approach to design and the making process. She gathers materials in a collection, waiting to explore them through combination and placement, in a 3D drawing process. Drawing with materials is an essential part of her practice, with linear forms, featuring strongly alongside geometric shapes and spaces. These ideas and themes are explore through bold strikes of colour and simple lines, bought together to create statement brooches, rings and neckpieces.

Emmeline Hastings

With a background in sculpture, award-winning artist Emmeline Hastings demonstrates a unique approach to jewellery.

Emmeline combines unexpected and contrasting materials in her Bristol studio. She uses her personally developed techniques of hand carving perspex acrylic and embedding it with metallic elements to create striking, beautiful and contemporary wearable sculpture.

Her pieces capture fleeting moments; something glimpsed and remembered. Her ephemeral jewels reveal rough crystalline forms, surfaces dotted bristling with glittering metallic elements that shift and change in colour and perspective. Working in perspex acrylic, her pieces are light and wearable with mysterious patterns of gold and silver seemingly organic to the form.

“All of my work shares an ephemeral quality while being eminently wearable. I create mysterious miniature landscapes through a unique visual language. I hope to make associations with varying natural phenomenon through this individual making process.”

Holly Suzanna Clifford

Holly creates art jewellery; crafting pieces of delicate and detailed wearable art, celebrating the curious attraction we have to plants, places and the natural world.

Encompassing ideas from outside the realm of jewellery, her work draws from illustration, great painters such as Monet and Klimt, and also from old dioramic books. Working in a mixture of copper, silver & resins, Holly combines traditional skills with modern making techniques, to develop innovative and unusual collections of work. Drawing and painting are integral parts of her creative process, so much so that she has developed exciting ways to incorporate them into some of her final collections.

Holly studied in the heart of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter at the School of Jewellery, on the BA Jewellery Design & Related Products course. She now continues to produce beautiful works from her garden workshop in the Cotswolds.

Emma Strathdee

Emma is graduating from Silvermithing & Jewellery at The Glasgow School of Art. She Looks at Anxiety Disorder and the chaotic human thought process and explores that in her work using a combination of precious metals, fabrics, and steel binding wire. Through research Emma found that anxiety is something a lot of artists and crafts people deal with and something she dealt with herself during her time at art school. Initially Emma looked at the physical symptoms of Anxiety – mainly the clenched fist, and then explored her ideas through photography, tracing and drawing before using the thin steel wire to bring her drawings to life; she also prints on fabric to include the textures of the hand. There is a contrast between heaviness and lightness, and light and dark in the work which was essential to her chosen theme.