Just launched my first solo exhibition, REFORMATIONS, showing art and poetry to wear. It is installed in the chained Elizabethan Old Library at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, where I’ve set myself up as an artist in residence for six months to respond to the building and its collections. I started off by making a wearable version of the library building itself, to think about relations between embodied learning and shared memories… #artjewelery #texttowear #poetrytowear #arttowear #experimentalpoetry #bookhistory #bookworks #jewelleryhistory @trinityhallcamb@nycjewelryweek
M E T A M O R P H O S I S
On exhibition in 'A Word After A Word'
at the Baltimore Jewelry Center, US, 18 February-26 March.
This neckpiece frames original printed letters that were once part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and reconfigures them to spell ‘metamorphosis’ (literally ‘change of shape’), a word that reflects on their extraordinary material lifecycle.
These letters began as flax plants before taking a long journey to become paper. During the renaissance, paper was made from pulped linen rag, much of which came from worn-out clothing. The substance of these letters has therefore already been spun into thread, woven into garments and worn close to the skin of unknown people from five hundred years ago.
The transfiguration of these flax fibres into linen paper gave them a new life as part of the precious commodity of early printed books. The status of these prized objects is reflected in the lavish embellishment of the woodcut letters that are decorated with cherubs, plants and fantastical animals. The technology of movable type meant that these letter forms would themselves have been used over and over again to print different texts.
Sometime during the nineteenth century, these letters were cut from their pages and added to an archive of early letter forms, a collection that was recently divided up and sold at auction. #baltimorejewelrycenter #artjewelryforum #thejewelerylibrary #jackiegemcreative #artjewellery #artjewelry #arttowear #textjewelry #textjewellery
CRASSH’s Global Conversations competition anthology has just launched, taking some of my poems out into the world for the first time. (Link in CRASSH bio). #20yearscrassh🎉 #universityofcambridge #poetry #visualpoems #vispo #asemic #asemicwriting #asemicart #wordart #wordartist #asemicpoetry #practicebasedresearch @crasshlive@cambridgeuniversity@faber_academy
