I’ve been collecting visual information since I last posted here. Lately, I find myself drawn to the winter landscape of my home in North Carolina–it’s quiet and stark, everything is  “dead,” for lack of a better word…but everything is so beautiful! The dim and golden light, the gorgeous palate of brown, white, and gray, the movement of trees and grasses in the wind…

I drove to New York to visit friends and family for Christmas. It’s a long drive, providing 14 hours of thinking time. I noticed these same things as I drove through Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and then New York and couldn’t help but think about them. This is when I knew they were going to influence my enameling and be the starting point for my new work. I took lots of new pictures and sorted through files of images from the past on my computer, gathering together my favorites for this specific project. I have posted several images here and started a set on Flickr for all of them to be together and for you see, if you like. I have also posted some images of things I made during a wonderful enameling class with Helen Carnac. I see a similar thought pattern in these pieces, too.

Thanks so much for reading.

Amy Tavern

featured in our first Heat Exchange exhibition in 2012.

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My name is Helen Carnac and I am an artist based in London.

I trained in metal in the late 80’s, early 90’s at a University in London and have lived and worked in London since. I started enamelling then and have continued ever since, but really felt that I had found the right material when I met Elizabeth (Turrell), she was running a masterclass at a University that I worked at and I was lucky enough to join in. I have always loved drawing and scratching on metal and so liquid process enamel was a great material to combine these things.

Over the past year I have worked in Berlin for 4 months as a Professor and ran a project about long design thinking processes. It revolved around walking, talking, looking and making. We are making a book about it at the moment and so if it is published soon I will tell you more about it here.

This is where I began a body of work for an exhibition that Elizabeth and Beate curated called Drawing, Permanence and Place. I am really fascinated in how walking is so akin to making for me and so I wanted to include sketches and marks made while exploring, and words and thoughts and found objects that I found along the way.

These are some words from my essay for the catalogue..

‘My work considers and is consumed by paths, lines, marks and time…in no particular order they run alongside and across each other. My practice is grounded in the environment and I develop projects using design methodologies that are rooted in an acute awareness of physical location, place and working practices…

I am concerned with relationships between humans and nature through observing short-term day-to-day impacts and longer term temporally evolved traces of co-existence. In practice this may involve watching for and identifying small change. I make observations through walking known routes over and over again, by understanding unknown place through journeying and collecting or by observing material change through using empirical and experimental methodologies in developing my work. I seek to track traces and patterns and to develop more metaphorical understandings’

Helen Carnac

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By way of introduction – and as we are just entering a brand new year – I though I would write about some of my main projects of 2011 and what 2012 holds for me.

Between 2007 and 2011 I was employed full time working on a research fellowship with the rather unwieldy title of Innovation in Vitreous Enamel Surface for Jewellery. The project had both a practical and a theoretical strand and investigated the place of enamel within contemporary jewellery practice. Although the project was completed in September 2010 one of the research outcomes, a major international enamel jewellery exhibition, gained a life beyond the period of the post and was one of my major preoccupations during 2011. The organization of this project coincided with my first year as an independent artist so curating the show whilst trying to build up my jewellery business has been a challenge. The exhibition Substance and Substance – International Contemporary Enamel Jewellery – which includes a number of the Heat Exchange artists – is now in its final few weeks at Ruthin Craft Centre in Wales.

2011 was also the year in which I moved into a new studio space (photos coming soon). This is the first time I have had a studio outside my home in about 15 years so it has been a bit of a slow start and making the break from the little studio at the back of the house that overlooks my garden has been difficult. I plan to keep this room as my enamelling studio for the time being and see if this proves to be a practical arrangement.

The first few months of 2012 will be spent developing new work, not only for Heat Exchange but also for a major enamel show at Galerie Handwerk in Munich in March. Both these projects are very exciting and I am hoping that between them they will give me an opportunity to build on the technical research I undertook during my fellowship – I’ll keep you posted.

A happy new year to you all.

Jessica Turrell          Bristol, UK

Jessica Turrell

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