Hiya, I’m CC, a mostly Metalwork Artist in the UK.

Mostly, because I’ll have a go at anything. I’m from the South Welsh valleys, which explains most of that.

I literally picked jewellery and silversmithing by pulling straws. At the time I had sod all clue what I wanted to do with myself, and back then you were told success came with a piece of paper from an overpriced education and uninterested tutors. But I knew I’d grown up happy to get filthy, building things, playing with fire and knives, so it turns out that’s most of the job.

I studied in London. I learned some things there, not much after first year. I learned far more once I left, through YouTube, experimentation, and the freedom of only answering to myself. So what I make now is what I was always trying to get to.

I never had the patience for performing fine, and I’ve got even less for people who perform care. The ones who swing in with full confidence, get every fact wrong, and still can’t find the door gracefully on the way out. I’ve met enough of them, online and off, to know that the loudest performance of caring, knowing, belonging usually has the least substance behind it. I watched enough people trade in who they actually were for something safer, smaller, more acceptable to the room. The work is a direct response to that. It doesn’t perform either.

Because of that, the work sits somewhere between jewellery, object, relic, and artefact. Forms build up in layers and push well past polish into something scarred, overgrown, swollen, and strange. I draw on biology, armour, damage, and material excess: tumours, husks, scar tissue, and defensive growth. Structures harden under stress, and I treat colour as structural rather than decorative, because it does not soften the work; it intensifies it. Bright, sickly, bruised, overripe. I make everything by hand through processes that leave evidence behind on purpose, and I push it until it feels grown rather than finished.

By hand means by hand: mould-making, casting, electroforming, wax carving, torch-fired enamel, patina, and enough surface work to make new metal look a couple hundred years old, or like it’s been through an acid trip.

The making doesn’t stop at the bench. I’m mid-way through gutting a Welsh stone terrace: cement render stripped back to the original stone, lime mortar mixed and pointed by hand, walls in colours an estate agent would call horrific for a first-time buyer with no imagination. Coral, black, lime green, a plum and ochre bedroom with a wallpapered ceiling. Nearly all of it done with my own hands, and only outsourced when I haven’t got the pricey equipment to do it myself. The house gets treated the same way the work does: built in layers, corrected as I go.

Paying someone to do a thing I already know, or could learn, feels like theft. My father’s voice sits in the back of my head permanently: the rich have the luxury of knowing nothing because they pay everyone else to do it, and call that luxury. We are poor, we have no such delusion. Handing money over because you’re skilless is a receipt for incompetence. You want it, you learn it, you do it, and if you get it wrong you do it again until it’s right. Unfashionable in the tech gen, I know. A miserable sermon, I know. But I’ve never once managed to disprove it.

I’m also an over-refiner. I’ll go back into a piece I swore was finished because a new idea won’t stay in my head, and once one piece changes, the rest of the collection has to catch up. These days I hold myself to a two-revision rule, or nothing would ever leave the bench.

Off the bench, I people-watch. It’s practically a Welsh birthright. At heart I’m a golden oldie behind the net curtain with salted popcorn, watching the street like it’s telly. Give me a window seat in a café and I’ll take it every time. Museums get the same treatment: I go for the objects and stay for the people circling them. I like places with regulars best, where you get to build a sense of someone over weeks. Everyone gives off something whether they mean to or not.

Nothing is for sale right now. When that changes there will be an update. Until then, have a snoop around.