I am now back in Sydney and am partially recovered from my visit to Adelaide, other than a cough and the sniffles. I seem to get ill every time I go there these days! But at least this time I didn’t see a repeat of the Being Rushed to Hospital and Put on a Drip event of last Christmas. The place is deadly, I tell you!

Fortunately I felt up to spending some time at my bench over the weekend and completed a respectable batch of jewellery to send to two shops on consignment, along with a little bit of work for my Etsy shop and a mound of components to help see me through to Christmas.

When I’m doing that sort of making I find my mind always wanders – often to somewhere quite interesting.

On the weekend I kept thinking about the fact that at Adelaide airport while standing in a (ridiculously long) queue there was a woman in front of me who I’m almost positive was wearing one of my pieces of jewellery. It was a very simple sterling silver chain made up of round, hammer-beaten loops – exactly the same as a chain I used to make and sell a few years ago and it even featured the same sort of clasp.

The thing that particularly stood out about this chain – and made me wonder if it was one of mine – was the fact that even from half a metre away it looked handmade.

This is a more recent incarnation of the same sort of chain that the woman in Adelaide was wearing – it has bigger loops and a rougher finish. And it’s mine! I wear this piece of jewellery far more often than any other piece I own.

So as I worked on the weekend I started to ponder the nature of handmade objects – and the fact that more and more I like my work to look like it’s handmade rather than something perfect and polished.

Once upon a time perfection would have been the aim of every jewellery maker – just to be able to polish a piece of metal so that you could see your reflection in it must have been breathtakingly impressive, let alone to be able to form it into something useful or wearable – and seamlessly so.

These days it’s relatively trivial for mass manufacturers to make perfectly polished, seamless work – it’s just not that special anymore. Purchased lengths of chain, for instance, always look perfect – and they always look, to my eye at least, very much manufactured.

Anyone who’s done it will know that chain making by hand – of even the simplest chains – is a particularly laborious task. It’s a real labour of love. That alone makes a handmade chain very special to my mind.

I now embrace the idea that anyone who sees a chain that I’ve made can probably tell straight away that it’s been handmade – and this is now the case with a large amount of my jewellery. I used to try to avoid this and aimed for perfect finishes and invisible solder joins, but now for much (although not all) of my work I actually emphasise some of these ‘flaws’ and draw attention to the fact that I’ve handmade each piece.

These days you can see many of my solder joins, there are marks from my hammer (I love using my old and very much non-polished hammer for the marks it makes!), I often like to leave a roughly sanded finish, there might be the odd file mark, I handmake my ear wires without a jig and each one is very slightly different, etc..

I was wondering whether people who buy my work notice this – I even wondered if some might think I’m being slack!

Or perhaps there are those who really do enjoy it along the lines of the Japanese wabi sabi notion that imperfection is at the heart of beauty, something I really have consciously started to embrace more in my work in the last couple of years.

Of course wabi sabi is also about impermanence – I struggle a bit with that aspect, I confess – I want my objects to live on forever! And metal is a very permanent-seeming thing – until it’s melted down, of course.

So those were my weekend ponderings as I slaved away on my work!

I’ve worked extremely hard today – and it’s almost 5am and I’m still going! Plus I’m going away tomorrow and I’ve only made the vaguest start on packing, which is a bit of a worry.

So I’ll cut to the chase. Today I’ve been very surprised by having one of my pieces (a pair of Japanese etch earrings) featured on the home page of Etsy.com! ‘X’ marks the spot, as you’ll see in the image below.

As I’ve also spent the day working very hard on finishing a number of new pieces and photographing them, I’ve been madly uploading a few of them to my shop while people are (with any luck!) actually paying attention.

Below are some of the images and links to the items in my shop (which have some alternative images). I hope you like them!

Forget-me-not necklace on yellow silk

Butterfly wing pendant on green silk

Face pendant – Marilyn Monroe – on black silk

And now … bed. Or something.

… or is that morning?

Yes, as the rain has been falling relentlessly all night and into the early hours of the morning, I have finally managed to spend some time at my bench and have some new pieces well and truly underway.

As you can see from the photo of my bench I broke rather a lot of saw blades – I felt like I was a first year student just starting out! However, to be fair to myself, the blades I was using are particularly fine ones and the piercing work was particularly fiddly.

I’ve also made a start on some etching work which is now laying in my kitchen waiting for the asphaltum to dry.

So tomorrow I expect to be finishing these pieces off and with any luck getting some images taken to put some new work onto simonewalsh.etsy.com. Keep your eyes peeled!

Recently a discussion (or two) in the Etsy.com forums momentarily strayed into the murky territory of the old art vs craft debate. There was also a discussion around the promotion of ‘high end’ jewellery – which to my mind when approaching jewellery from a contemporary craft perspective means collectable, conceptual, modern jewellery, but to others discussing the issue it simply meant ‘expensive’ or perhaps ‘heirloom quality’, which is a more traditional and simply different perspective to my own.

I’ve been thinking about it a bit since then – particularly as some of those who had something to say on the issue perceived it in such a different way to me, but also as I have also encountered some work by an incredible artist and craftsperson (Peter Callisen) which demonstrates some of the issues.

Some of those who commented on the art vs craft issue seemed to think that ‘craft’ is making that requires minimal skill or special knowledge to do, while ‘art’ (in relation to the making of objects at least) is something that requires more skill or knowledge. That’s very much at odds with how I’d make a distinction – if I were even to make one, which is a very difficult question in itself.

I would regard myself primarily as a craftsperson – albeit a contemporary version of one – even when I’m making pieces which are very much in the realm of sculpture and which I would describe as art objects. I make stuff, I’m a maker – there is a focus in my practice on me making things. To my mind, making things makes someone a craftsperson – a person who crafts. And I’m perfectly happy to be one of those people.

An artist I think is someone who focusses more on the conceptual side. And I think craftspeople and artists are often one and the same, depending on how they’re working and what they’re working on. A painter can be seen as a craftsperson as much as a metalsmith can.

For instance, there’s the incredible Ricky Swallow, an Australian who creates breathtakingly beautiful and well-made work in wood. He’s most definitely creating works of art because his work is highly conceptual in nature and is made to be seen in a gallery space, but he’s also absolutely a craftsperson – and an amazingly talented one at that. The photographed work is entitled Everything is Nothing.

And there’s the artist I came across in my virtual travels last night, paper artist Peter Callisen. He again is a wonderful example of both. If you have a look at his Mirage staircase (scroll down a bit on that page) made entirely from paper you will see what I think is an incredibly clever artist at work – who also happens to be an excellent craftsperson. The image below is of Når alt kommer til alt.

As for craft being somehow less valuable and less valued than art, I really do believe that’s utter rubbish. Personally I love the Japanese approach where there is no real distinction and works of craft are very highly valued indeed. Of course there is a value placed on skill and degree of difficulty in making things, but even given that there’s no reason why a person who sews amazing things should be valued less than a metalsmith, or a metalsmith less than a painter.

Maybe the differences in opinion I’ve seen in the Etsy discussion forums about this issue are more cultural than anything else – the people whose views surprised me are primarily American jewellery makers – and I gather contemporary jewellery is quite different in the US to what it is in Australia (and Europe too) – and maybe my views are fairly alien to them too!

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As for my own work, well I definitely do veer into creating works of art – conceptual pieces intended to be seen in a gallery space. Some are wearable pieces of jewellery, some look like they should be wearable but aren’t, others are very much sculptural – all of the non-wearables I’d describe simply as ‘objects’ – which also seems to be a fairly Australian and perhaps European way of thinking about them.

However, the jewellery I produce for sale is different in nature – there may sometimes still be some sort of conceptual basis or alternatively the designs may be entirely aesthetically driven – but they are intended to be worn and to adorn. To me they are pieces of craft – no matter how much skill or otherwise they require, no matter how valuable or otherwise the materials are.

So there’s my 2 cents on a very long-standing debate!

I’ve put a couple of new pieces into my simonewalsh.etsy.com shop tonight (or should we say this morning …).

You if you peek at my shop you will find my sterling silver cherry blossom choker, this one on a single strand of red silk. There is also another blossom choker, this one has tiny blossoms suspended from a sterling silver choker. I was clearly blossoming!!

In other news I have again been elected (unopposed!) as Newsletter Editor for the Jewellers & Metalsmiths Group of Australia – NSW. I think this is the third year now, which is mildly scary. It’s a voluntary job, but one I quite enjoy doing – even though I often struggle to find the time for the work and wonder how else it could be used!

It also means I have a position on the Co-ordinating Committee which is interesting and means I’m involved in all sorts of decisions and discussions around contemporary jewellery happenings in New South Wales and Australia.

The next issue of the newsletter, Filings, is due out in November. If you’ve got any news, opportunities, event details or articles of relevance to contemporary jewellers and metalsmiths which you’d like considered for inclusion, please let me know.

I had a call from the nice people at Griffith Regional Art Gallery today – which is in rural New South Wales for those of you who aren’t local. I’d submitted a couple of pieces for consideration for the National Contemporary Jewellery Award the Gallery hosts every couple of years and which opens in a few days.

They called to let me know that both have been accepted and will be part of the exhibition, which is great. I very much doubt I’ll win an award, but I’ll be in the ‘non-precious materials’ category with the other entrants, so we’ll see.

The two pieces I made are quite a diversion from a lot of the exhibition work I do – and were created in a really organic way without a really clear concept in mind. I wanted to create something with fairly dense pattern given my current mild obsession with it, but I had no idea what. Somehow I came to the conclusion that cutting patterns out of relatively thick tracing paper was the way ahead – a material I love as it’s so contemporary and crisp looking. I have always wanted to do something interesting with it.

So I spent a weekend with a cutting board and a scalpel and a Victorian-looking ironwork pattern I really like, not really knowing where I was heading – I’d been working so hard on this enormous web upgrade I’m in the middle of that I just needed to do something totally different, soothing and repetative.

Eventually I ended up with a number of square cut out panels and decided upon a choker with the pieces stitched together with silk thread at the corners and strands of silk to close it together. And that’s what I ended up with – as you can see.

However, after this exercise, all over my floor were interesting little cut out shapes of tracing paper – the negative spaces I’d removed for the choker. I ended up using some attached to the silk of the choker and then decided I would make a piece from these negative shapes and threaded them onto very very fine nylon threads to form another simple choker.

So the first piece is called Tracings (positive), the other Tracings (negative). Click on the images above to see larger versions.

Neither of these pieces are particularly easy to wear, but that’s not really the idea – a lot of my exhibition work alludes to being wearable but isn’t really. They’re much more about a play with materials and pattern and repetition.

The exhibition is on from 7 to 30 September 2006 with the judging taking place on the first day. I’ll let you know if I win anything!

I had a long and clearly over-ambitious list for today … which at midnight has very little I can cross out. It’s not that I’ve not been working – I’ve worked non-stop since getting up. But my day has been devoured by little odd jobs, dealing with my Towering In Tray of Doom, writing up a report for the jewellery group AGM I’m going to tomorrow, dealing with some long-overdue emails, tidying up a few pieces of jewellery for some orders and then packaging up several items which will be winging their way to their purchasers tomorrow.

Oh – I managed to do the dishes too, which was a bit of an achievement!

And that’s it. At least I did manage a tiny bit of jewellery making, but nowhere near as much as I’d hoped. And, yes, those etched pieces of silver for my Istanbul box are still just laying on my bench. Perhaps I will get some done during the week, although it’s going to be incredibly busy (as usual).

However, I’m pleased to report that I did manage to put up the final lot of new photographs in my Etsy.com jewellery shop last night (let’s not mention how late it was when I finished), so take a peek.

I ended up using a lot of black backgrounds – making the most of a lovely piece of very soft suede I’ve got which gives a really matte background. It does make the work stand out much better than other backgrounds I’ve tried, but it also makes for lots of … black … and white. So I might play with some more backgrounds again later on and use some colour.

Let me know what you think! Visit my shop to see all of the gory details.

I have spent most of today playing with my new camera. It took quite some time for me to dig out the vague memories of my bits of study in photography and to get the hang of this particular camera. Eventually I hit upon some settings that seemed to be doing an okay job and proceeded to spend hours (and hours!) leaning in awkward positions over my tripod to take almost 300 photographs of my work.

I am now laying on the couch in lots of pain as a result – suffering for the sake of art, as usual!

Of course there aren’t 300 usable shots – a large chunk have been trashed and the remainder edited for use. And some I’ll use for now but know they still need to be done again when I can mange it. Here is an image of my blossom chain as taken today.

A lot of people really struggle to photograph their own craft/art well – and jewellery and metal is particularly difficult because of the reflections you get. However, I think I’m slowly getting there.

The best piece of advice I can give anyone wishing to photograph jewellery or other small objects is to set up a light tent of some description in a well lit place. I have invested in a fold-up cube made of opaque white fabric – it has a panel with a slit in it for the camera lens to poke through. This works very well to diffuse the light outside the cube and removes a lot of the unwanted reflections.

From there it’s a matter of playing to get the right lighting – whether you sit whatever sort of light tent you’ve got (even a cone of thick tracing paper does a fairly good job) outside in the full sunlight or if you’ve got some basic photography lighting, as I do (very very basic!). Getting the light right makes a world of difference – and experimenting is very important.

However, so does the camera. Here are a couple of test photos I took with my existing snapshot camera and my brand new SLR. Both have been edited in exactly the same way with the same compression to be put online and both were taken in exactly the same conditions … and the difference in detail is pretty amazing, really (you’ll probably need to click on the images to really see the difference).

So the moral of the story is: light tent, lots of good light outside the light tent and – if you can afford it (or, like me, can suspend disbelief for long enough) – a digital SLR camera. Oh – and lots and lots of practice. I need to be taking note of this myself, of course!