I literally picked jewellery and silversmithing by pulling straws. At the time, I had sod all clue what I wanted to do with myself. 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, but I learned even more when I left, through YouTube and through 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.

As a contemporary jewellery artist in the UK, I build work that sits between jewellery, object, relic, and artefact, and I push it until it feels grown rather than finished.

It tackles big things: loss, resistance, damage, and the body. But I don’t want it to feel heavy, and I don’t want this place to feel serious either, because there’s enough of that in the world already. So I’m not adding a jewellery website to the pile.

Consider yourself invited in.

— CC

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