Over the past few years I have been finding the lure of brooches a little too much to resist. When talking about this within the context of working as Interim Deputy Curator - Contemporary at the Goldsmiths’ Company for the last year (from April 2019), I realised that this was something of a (all be it small) collection and that maybe I should record it in some way. A friend and fellow curator, who is also a digital whizz so thinks of these things, suggested I get back to my blog and that this would be a great subject. This also just happened to dovetail very nicely with a recent commission to write a blog piece on my collecting for the Goldsmiths’ Company’s Goldsmiths’ Stories blog (which will be up soon). So here I am and going forward I’ll be blogging a brooch on a regular basis.

I have to date collected some 25 pieces, all from different makers (not necessarily jewellers) and comprising various materials and styles. I rarely go out without one attached to my jacket or coat and get a great deal of pleasure in doing so. I can’t really explain why particularly, but it can be a nice conversation starter. I will cover various themes over this series (aside from the pieces themselves and what has attracted me to each one) including: the wearing of jewellery by men, what we call these items of adornment, the sorts of garments we wear them on, and commissioning.

I rediscovered the two brooches below from the early 1990s several years ago when tidying a drawer. I’d bought them whilst artist in residence at Ruthin Craft Centre and had completely forgotten about them. I stared to wear humBug again from time to time (by the wonderfully creative jeweller Timothy Carson). It re-kindled my interest in sporting a piece of jewellery in this way and I think I became generally more aware of what people were, and weren’t wearing, particularly as I had by this time become an independent curator and was immersing myself in the arts world again after several years in the textiles and fashion industries.

In my next post I’ll discuss the first brooch I acquired in this new ‘age of enlightenment’ (as far as I was concerned).

Thank you for reading.