Yes, it’s finally on its way to the exhibition venue after much hard work. Since I last wrote about the piece I think I’ve entirely redone the finish about three times. And finally the last time was successful enough that I could coax myself to leave it alone.

The difficulty was in trying to leave the exterior with a dull, muted and worn-looking finish, while making the interior bright and shiny – which was made all the more difficult by the fact that the only openings for the box are through the small cut out windows, which don’t exactly facilitate doing any work with hand tools or even my fingers!

However, with the aid of much glad wrap, electrical tape, my trusty homemade tumbler (thanks Dad!) and a bucketload of patience, it was finally done. And today it was packed up and posted off to Metalab in Surry Hills, Sydney – after a few final photographs to try to capture the end result.

There’s no absolute guarantee that my piece will be included in the show at this point, but I’m fairly hopeful it will be.

If you’re in Sydney, the show – Expeditions – opens on the evening of 2 November 2006 (6-8pm) at Metalab, 10b Fitzroy Place, Surry Hills. It closes on 25 November, with Metalab being open from 11am to 6pm Tuesday to Saturday. You can also attend a ‘high tea’ on 4 November.

Well, after many trials and tribulations that I won’t bore you with here (as much as I am tempted so you can feel my pain!) … I think my exhibition piece for the Expeditions show may possibly be finished. Maybe perhaps sort of kind of …

After a lot of difficulty I’ve pretty much managed to get the finish I wanted, which is very shiny and bright on the inside and very muted on the outside. And, yes, there is much wonk as promised! It’s misshapen, it’s pitted, you can see some of the joins, it even has a teensy fracture in one of the windows … and it really does remind me of Istanbul!

And, yes, it was incredibly difficult to photograph, so I apologise for the images, but hopefully you get the idea. If you’d like to see a few more of them have a look at my Flickr photos.

However, I had a flash of further inspiration this evening and am probably going to take it to a plating place to ask about having it plated gold on the inside. I’m really not sure it’s possible at all, but you never know. And if it is possible then I think it will look just perfect.

It’s been a very long evening of slaving away over a hot bench (literally!) after several days of doing much of the same. And I’m exhausted.

I’ve been working on various bits and pieces, but the thing devouring most of my time has been an exhibition piece which I’m going to submit to a show called Expeditions to be held in Sydney in November. The exhibition will be entirely jewellery and holloware.

My piece is a response to my own expedition to Istanbul earlier this year and will be a small, non-functional box.

Above are the panels of the box all etched and ready to be scored, folded and soldered. These highly decorative etched areas will actually be on the inside of the box, with the outside being very plain and muted.

I’m sure anyone reading who has made metal boxes before will know that this isn’t the ideal starting point for make one! However, I didn’t want to invest in a large piece of (very expensive!) silver, only to not use large chunks of it. Of course they would get used at some stage, but it was too much to outlay in one go.

However, this turned out to be a happy (non) accident – particularly because I had also skimped a bit more and bought metal which is really a bit on the thin side for making a box of this size.

As I started making it I knew I was going to have to be really careful to stop it going wonky … but then it suddenly dawned on me that so much of Istanbul absolutely isn’t about crisp, clean lines and perfection. In contrast to some of the spectacular mosques and interiors of Ottoman-era buildings, much of the city crumbles in a really elegant way, with things tacked together and new parts of buildings simply built over the remnants of old ones – there are some buildings that look like they’re literally going to fall down at any moment.

So I decided to embrace the wonk (which is a highly technical metalsmithing term, I assure you!) – and to even push it further.

The result – which is currently sitting in a bath of pickle – is one deliciously misshapen box! Which was a complete and utter nightmare to solder, I can assure you. But now it’s close to finished I’m very pleased with it – and it captures Istanbul for me far better than my original intention would have.

Once it’s done I will try to take a decent photograph of it to share with you – which will be tricky as much of the detail is on the inside of the box and is glimpsed through the windows, but I will do my best.

By the way, if you’re interested, I’ve put some of my favourite photographs of Istanbul up on Flickr, which will give you much more of a sense of what I experienced in the city – and perhaps why I seem to be developing urges to travel in the Middle East proper. I suddenly find myself desperately wanting to go to places like Iran and Yemen. Yep, really picked my timing to get interested in travelling to such places.

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 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!

My dear friend James went off travelling the world (again!) and after trekking through south-east Asia, India, Pakistan and Iran he landed in Istanbul. He fell head over heels in love with the city and has set up home there for the foreseeable future. I’d always wanted to visit the city and James being there seemed like a great excuse to do so, given that I was on the way to London anyway.

I found the city very intriguing and took a lot away in terms of thoughts about art and design – particularly relating to use of dense pattern and colour. I also developed a bit of an obsession with windows in the city and took many photos of them.

The outcome of this is that I’ve started work on a holloware object reflecting my Istanbul-related inspirations which I hope will form part of an exhibition called Expeditions which will open in October and is being run by my metal supplier, A&E Metals. To help motivate me with my work, I’ll tell you a bit about it.

The piece will be a small non-functional box which I plan to be sealed closed. Each panel of the box will have a small window cut out of it, based on the many photographs I took of windows in Istanbul. The interior of the cube will be etched with dense Turkish patterns which I plan to enamel in bright colours. The exterior will be plain silver, probably with a muted finish.

The idea will be that the windows allow light in so that you can see aspects of the highly decorative interior, but it will be difficult to see it all, reflecting the way I felt about Istanbul as being a fairly mysterious and partly impenetrable place.

At this stage I’ve done the etching of the patterns and they look good. But other than that the box is all in pieces and there is a lot of work to be done! I hope to make a start on it this weekend and will share my progress as I work.