Bloomin' jewels, the blossoming of the floral in contemporary jewellery

I was invited to take part in an group exhibition exploring floral imagery in contemporary jewellery. The exhibition was titled "Blooming' Jewels" and was curated by Corinne Julius and Contemporary Applied Arts. \n \nI developed a new body of work based around the use of nature as inspiration in jewellery. I have been studying 19th and early 20th Century European "en tremblant" jewellery that use different mechanical methods of creating movement in pieces. This research included a handling session at the Museum of London as well as access to the Cheapside Hoard in January 2017. These historical pieces depict nature and the way it moves and I am keen to use these as a starting point to create work that reinvents narrative floral jewellery and in particular investigates the different methods of creating movement. The narrative of nature across different cultures and periods of history is also part of my research for this body of work. My interest is in the Victorian language of flowers and how Asian cultures use floral narrative in their cultural heritage. The pieces created for the exhibition depicted the Chinese flowers for the 4 seasons. \n \nParticipating Makers \nZoe Arnold, Flora Bhattachary, Kelvin J Birk, Jonathan Boyd, Donna Brennan, Sonia Cheadle, Gill Galloway-Whitehead, Anna Gordon, Dorothy Hogg, Andrew Lamb, Kathie Murphy, Lina Peterson, Wendy Ramshaw, Kayo Saito, Romilly Saumarez Smith, Hans Stofer, Rie Taniguchi, Christopher Thompson Royds, Maud Traon, Silvia Weidenbach, Rebecca Wilkes and Xenia Walschikow \n \nAs guest curator Corinne Julius notes “We have selected jewellers across the gamut of contemporary making. The results are not what most people will think of as ‘pretty flower pieces’. They are unexpected and in some cases quite challenging, but then contemporary jewellery is wearable art. As far as we are aware, there has not been an exhibition on botanical motifs in contemporary jewellery in the UK.” \n“Makers have had the opportunity of handling historical works,” says Corinne Julius “and I am really thrilled to see their see new versions of the Victorian en tremblant; jewellery that moves in response to the wearer’s body. They were a way for Victorian womanhood to express their feelings without words as they trembled and shimmered in line with the wearer’s emotions. It was and remains a very interactive form of jewellery.” The show will also include a small loan display of historical floral pieces.