Fourth year BA (Hons) Jewellery and Silversmithing student Isabel Coles has won a prestigious gold award at the Goldsmiths Craftsmanship and Design Awards.
The prize was awarded for her response to a design brief from the Goldsmiths’ Craft and Design Council, titled Make Your Mark: From Porridge to Pudding – Silver.
The challenge was set in partnership with the London Assay Office, and inspired by one of the earliest items in the Goldsmiths’ Company Collection to bear the London Hallmark, a silver spoon produced around 1425. At that time, a single silver spoon would have been a much-treasured possession that its owner would have carried on their person and used as a principal tool for eating, along with a knife and their bare hands. Records show that they were gifted at christenings, passed down in wills, and given as gifts. They were important items, personal to their owner, and used for every meal, from porridge to pudding.
The brief encouraged entrants to design a silver spoon for the modern world as a beautiful, personal, portable item that could be used for every meal. It was to be practical, comfortable to hold, and display the full UK hallmark in a position and size complimentary to the design.
Isabel’s design was titled ‘Spoon from my Garden’. She explained: “My spoon design was inspired by the silver spoons dug up from my garden, distorted and ruined by the passing of time.
“My childhood home is an old brewery that is hundreds of years old. Across the years when we’d work on the garden we would stumble across all sorts of treasures such as a variety of broken old spoons.
“My current project ‘Under the Microscope’ is about mosses and fungi whereby I have used the ancient technique of granulation to visualise their forms and details. Granulation is characterised by the application of granules to a substrate of the same precious metal through metallic bonding processes without the addition of soldering alloys.
“The design of my spoon was a nod to my current work, tying the origins of lost silver spoons from my garden to the organic ancient charm of mosses. I wanted to emphasise the found nature of my spoon through having an organic growth of moss encompassing the hallmark which is spread along the handle, slowly growing down to the bowl of the spoon.”
Programme Director for Jewellery and Silversmithing Jennifer Gray said: “The Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council Awards are unofficially known in the industry as the jewellery and silversmithing Oscars, celebrating the highest standards of current-day design and making in our discipline.
“These awards welcome entries from across the professional industry which makes Isabel's Gold Award all the more significant as this recognition comes ahead of her graduation in June this year."
The Goldsmiths Craftsmanship and Design Awards
The annual awards embrace every aspect of the skill set of British jewellery, goldsmithing, silversmithing and allied trades. Submissions are judged by experienced practitioners, through a process of peer inspection and scrutiny. The awards are also tied to annual exhibitions which showcase entrants’ work at Goldsmiths' Hall and The Goldsmiths' Centre in London.
Isabel's prize was awarded in the 2D design category.
