Christine Milroy, BA(Hons) Silversmithing & Jewellery, The Glasgow School of Art, 2020
Goldsmith’s Precious Metal Grant Winner, 2020
Goldsmith’s Precious Metal Grant Skills Swap 2020
Creating the effects of cobbled streets, miniature harbours, sheltered by cliffs, and historic fishing villages in the form of jewellery pieces, may seem ambitious. However, the processes involved in the practice of jewellery designing and making compress such impressions, allowing for the representation of natural aesthetics, of subtle shapes and colour palettes in small details. This collection evolved from my travels through some of Scotland’s historic coastal villages; unique places that combine traditional domestic architecture with a timeless, almost ‘Wabi Sabi’, attitude to seafront imagery, where lobster creels, fishing nets and tiny boats, lie alongside startlingly white-washed walls, below crow-stepped gables. Photographs, sketches and digital drawings were made from these appearances, in an intuitive response to each environment, to form the basis of a series of jewellery objects evocative of time and place, with the structures, colours and shapes of a distinctive Scottish landscape, captured on an intimate scale.