Monthly Archives: November 2011

Australia, Heat Exchange 1

a place to think

It is wonderful to be in touch with you all as we work toward this exhibition.

I am Kirsten Haydon and I have been working with enamel since 1997. I have always found myself to be intrigued by its mysterious and magic qualities, the expected and the unexpected.

Debbie Sheezel, a wonderful enamellist who taught herself the process of enamelling over forty years ago, first introduced me to enamel at RMIT University. Debbie shared her passion, enthusiasm and knowledge of the material and inspired many students to explore its potential.

I now teach enamelling at RMIT University and I have been lecturing there since 2002. I find that I discover more as the students succeed with their visions.

My own research is in the area of Antarctic landscapes and when I am not teaching or with my family I find myself thinking and remembering my experiences of this landscape.

Kirsten Haydon

Heat Exchange 1, United Kingdom

the new recruit..

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Hello fellow exchangers,

Fashionably late to the party, but great to be here!

Enamelling in Bristol, 2006

My name is Stephen Bottomley and I live and work in Scotland. I teach at Edinburgh College of Art www.eca.ac.uk in the Jewellery and Silversmithing department and enamelling is an important part of my practice.

 

First introduced to enamel back in 1988 at Farnham College by Jane Short, I was immediately fascinated by the material and process and have increasingly integrated it into my work over the past two decades. I began to approach enamel with less ‘awe’ and more ‘bravery’ through teaching it at art school a few years later. Teaching is always a two-way experience and my enamel came to be influenced by many of the highly skilled ceramicists I worked with on the multi-disciplinary course in Hastings I worked at for 13 years.

Time spent working in Bristol with Elizabeth and artists visiting her and Jessica between 2006-10 was an incredibly valuable time. Sharing god practice and ideas was so very important then, so I suppose this is a chance to try it in a different media on line now.

A couple of moves up the UK since then I am now living happily in Edinburgh and enjoying the challenge of a busy department, the inspiring company of inquisitive students and the company of fellow makers (like Elizabeth and Jessica Turrel and last year Mellissa) who visit us and share their skill and knowledge so generously. Together we all work and play and along the way build a culture to contribute to contemporary enamel and this very special art form.

 

Last week I travelled to Ruthin, in Wales to see the ‘Surface and Substance’  exhibition devised and organised by Jessica Turrell. It is a real gem of a show! I’ll post some images and text next.

I am really looking forward to being part of the Heat Exchange and have already learnt interesting things from the blogs I have read so far and about your special interests.

Flame on!

Stephen Bottomley

Stephen Bottomley trained at the Royal College of Art (1999-2001) having also studied at West Surrey College of Art and Design and the University of Brighton, with a key period working within Rhode Island School of Designs’ metal programme (USA 1998). Stephen established his first studio in 1990 in Brighton with a Prince’s Trust Grant, exhibiting his work regularly in exhibitions and at outlets like Electrum Gallery and Dazzle. He started regular associate lecturing work around the South East coast in 1992. After twelve years lecturing and leading several courses at Hasting College of Art, with the University of Brighton, he relocated to Sheffield in 2004. Between 2004-2007 Stephen divides his time between his jewellery studio and his close involvement with both academic life and the jewellery industry, being both course leader for Metalwork and Jewellery at Sheffield Hallam University and also the fourth Chairman of the ‘Association for Contemporary Jewellery’ (ACJ). Between 2007 and afour year project researching the patterns and textiles at the Fortuny Museum, Venice and a solo shows in Venice and back at Hove Museum and Art gallery in 2008, he relocated to Scotland taking the post of Head of Jewellery and Silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art (eca). In 2011 eca become part of the world class University of Edinburgh. Jewellery is represented by the Crafts Council and held in collections by the British Museum, Royal College of Art and the South East Arts Crafts.

Heat Exchange 1

Hi from Bremen, Germany

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Hi, my name is Astrid. I work and live in Bremen, Germany. I have studied jewellery design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Pforzheim’. I graduated 2003. Since then I am working on my own. I am doing a lot of jewellery without the enamel.Yet, I am very excited about the project, because it challanges me to try some new work in enamel which I had in my mind for some time.

Astrid Keller

featured in our first Heat Exchange exhibition in 2012.

Heat Exchange 1

an exploratory approach to enamel on iron…

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hello fellow heat exchangers,

my name is Cath and I recently completed an MA at UWE where I met Elizabeth Turrell. Her enthusiasm for enamel led me to experiment on steel as a drawing substrate and consequently I became fascinated in applying enamel to found objects.

I am currently researching coal-industries within Wales, exploring a means of translating and recoding history to relate a duality between terrible working conditions in a coal-pit with the solidarity of social communities. I am motivated by a sense of mortality positioned in the moment, the power of ordinary objects to convey a sense of humanity, and notions of morality within shifting, ideological perspectives.

In making cast-iron replicas of utilitarian mining-artefacts I hope to simultaneously create an illusion of authenticity with sculptural solidity – like a paperweight, to hold firm or make resilient a snap-shot of history. Through a remnant object I want to capture the implication  of what was there seen through what remains. The heavy material acts as a metaphor for weight of subject matter, giving the impression of permanence to a forgotten industry.

Through my experimentation with enamel I have had some partial success using decals to apply documentary photographs to the 3d cast objects. But I have also discovered infinite technical problems resulting from the porous nature of iron and defects in the material I have access to: my inability to solve these problems has resulted in an interest to take advantage of them: I hope to use this Heat Exchange opportunity to develop a more exploratory approach to enamel on iron, to embrace the learning possibilities of a dialogue exchange.

I am so excited to participate and very nervous about my limited time. This opportunity is particularly significant to me because it holds my focus on enamel processes and demonstrates my need to create a new studio environment. I look forward to hearing how everyone’s response to Heat Exchange unfolds…

Catherine Fairgrieve

Catherine works across discipline boundaries, excited by the potential of combining traditional processes with new technologies. She is an artist and educator, and lives in Wales.

Germany, Heat Exchange 1

Characterized Vessels

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Hi! my name is Young-I Kim and I live in Hildesheim. I am orginal from South Korea but I live since 2002 in Germany. I studied metaldesign at the HAWK Hildesheim and graduated 2009.

My work’s title is “Characterized Vessels”.
In this work I have made vessels with which I show the characters of people.
I have chosen people whom I care for and who are dear to me.
It was important for me that I do not only lay emphasis on these persons’ outward appearances but their habits, peculiarities, manners of speaking and expressions as well as their facial expressions and postures, from which a person’s character can be more immediately inferred. These considerations have helped me to distinguish between the different character profiles. In order to give still more sense and meaning to the whole, I have used colour by means of enamelling technique.

Young-I Kim

Young-I Kim was born in South Korea. She lives and works in Germany.

Heat Exchange 1, United Kingdom

MA Degree Show Work

Hello fellow exchangers!  My name is Kirsty and I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with an MA in 2010.  I am interested in the contrast between the indeterminate results of patina and the controlled process of workmanship.  My work focuses on transient beauty and impermanence; combining shards of decay with contemporary structure.  Here are some images of my degree show work:

An organised messIntrigued by the effects of time and decay, especially places and objects that have fallen into a state of disrepair I explore this condition of neglect in enamel, playing with both control and unpredictability. The resulting work is unpredictable and unexpected; a product of a process deliberately out of my control. Undetermined paintings of rust-coloured patterns, created by nature and left to chance, are trapped within liner frameworks. By isolating sections of a surface, much like the viewfinder of a camera, or the framing and judgement of the photographer, the viewer is compelled to focus on the unusual natural beauty framed within.

This collection of jewellery focuses on the beauty of surface decay and the resulting work appears as a series of snapshots of surfaces frozen in time.

Kirsty Sumerling

featured in our first Heat Exchange exhibition in 2012.

Heat Exchange 1

The exchange begins…

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Colony brooch

 

Vase fragment

 

Cluster pendant

Hi fellow heat-exchangers! (and visitors to and followers of the project!)

Katrina Tyler here writing from my home-based studio in Melbourne, Victoria.

I’m so excited to be a part of the Heat Exchange project as I’m passionate about enamel and looking forward to getting well underway with making, getting to know more about each aritsts practice, and exchanging ideas, methods and directions with works incorporating enamel.

Documenting and developing my work in this open, collaborative manner online is new to me, and I’m curious and to see how it affects my practice and the direction of all of our work over the coming months.

Since graduating from my MFA at RMIT at the end of 2010, I have set up a home-based studio. With this shift away from a communal studio environment, my making process has tended towards the insular and solitary. The opportunity to collaborate online, and share experiences of a process I love is one I will embrace!

The works I have in mind as a starting point for Heat Exchange will be small scale sculptural objects. My use of enamel in recent times has been bold accents of a single colour, applied with the wet-packing technique. I want to experiment with enamels that can be painted on and explore a few more techniques in my work.

Look forward to reading more about everyone’s work and processes soon.

Ciao for now and happy making!

x Katrina

Katrina Tyler

featured in our first Heat Exchange exhibition in 2012.

Australia, Heat Exchange 1

My recent works … Naoko

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Hello heat-exchangers!

I am Naoko, from Melbourne, Australia. I am currently doing a residency at RMIT University in Melbourne, learning from Dr. Kirsten Haydon.

I came to Australia from Japan 7 years ago and my experiences and findings in between two cultures has been the catalyst of my creativity.

I am thrilled to be a part of the exhibition, and looking forward to seeing everyone’s creative journey!

Here is a shot of my studio…

and me.

Naoko Inuzuka

featured in our first Heat Exchange exhibition in 2012.

Heat Exchange 1

and now to work…

4 Comments
The Beauty of Innuendo 1, Barbara Ryman, 2005. Sugar fired vitreous enamel on copper, with pierced Sterling Silver centre piece.

I made a big move earlier this year so I am enjoying a new adventure. I love my new house and area but of course along with that goes huge amounts of dissruption. The initial task was to find a builder to transform a double garage into my studio. There was quite a wait between finding a nice builder then actually getting the work done. Next came painting and finally the pleasure of bringing in all my ‘stuff’ and settling it into a comfortable working arrangement. I love it when my workshop is just right, that is, when I reach for something it’s right there under my hand. I have always found the activity of arranging and re-arranging extremely useful for getting started. Sometimes I get frustrated that I can’t go straight into the work but I have learned to trust this fiddling around as a vital part of getting in the zone for work.

I feel as though I ‘wear’ my studio. It becomes a space that is separate to normal life, a creative haven, and it has it’s own time zone and sometimes no time at all.

The timing of the building work was such that I had seven bench days to make a special piece of work for the Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor exhibition in Gallery Artisan, Queensland Australia (see Melissa Cameron’s entry on 1st November for more detail). I had to work amongst a big pile of rubble, but I was so happy being able to do my first piece in my new studio. My work was about Grace Cossington Smith, a painter who in fact lived a few streets away from where I grew up. I have always admired her work. She used a colourful palette and a textural layering of vibrating colours onto the canvas. I tried to reflect those aspects in my brooch. The textural firing of the enamel is a technique I explored in a year of post graduate study. The image at the top of my page is a table object from that period.

Cossington, Barbara Ryman, 2011. Underfired Vitreous enamel, sterling Silver Brooch

I have now layed out all my recent work that was interrupted by the move. Of course I am still completey out of kilter with my work routine and creative processes but as I lay out work and enamels and colour samples, I circle all these delicious items and I feel a little shiver of anticipation of what’s to come.

Barbara Ryman

featured in our first Heat Exchange exhibition in 2012.

Australia, Heat Exchange 1

a little light reading…

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I’ve been reading up on René Descartes, the philosopher/mathematician. The guy who had a whole coordinate system named after him, as he provided the link between algebra and geometry on which the later Cartesian system was based. (The name he took, in Latin publications, was Cartesius)

I can’t say that I was much of a fan of him when I was first studying maths, but I have become more interested over time, mostly through the practical applications of his works that I use constantly in Cad drawing software. At the corner of the screen in which I work (the AutoCad image above,) there is always an x,y axis to remind me that I’m working in Cartesian space.

I’m reading his text Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. My work has mined the cross as a motif before, so I’ve turned to the master for some inspiration, sparked off by the axis (and the AutoCad crosshairs don’t hurt) that I see so often.

 

 

Melissa Cameron

Melissa is a jewellery artist from Australia living in Seattle in the US. Her works can be found in the National Gallery of Australia as well as the Cheongju City Collection in South Korea. Her enamel works typically display subtle enamel incursions amidst precise laser cut stainless steel layers.