Lessons on growth through jewellery…
Hatton Garden for a first-generation jeweller does contain walls. Barriers to growth, but not necessarily where you might think. I am in a very particular section of the jewellery industry - art school educated and from a single-parent family. I gained a grant and extra support as a child of a single parents family in order to study at degree level in wood, metal, and plastic, and specialised in metal. Then a degree was funded not taxed so access to arts education was expanding not reducing.
Time was spent with materials, discovering your own research-based processes. I drew constantly. The aim I always had once I discovered metal was to be a jewellery designer and run my own business. That route is quite frankly one of the hardest into the jewellery trade, and to navigate my way through from the place I started was quite miraculous.
Today, someone from my background would not study this route and pay £50,000 in student loans. So I am rare in today's jewellery industry. The designer works with all the sections of the trades - pulling the design together - my access to these trades was from a designers experience. If I had accessed jewellery trade through an apprenticeships my journey would have lead to employment with a trade. In my journey as a designer, the barriers are the lack of innovation - the taking a chance on growth, mixing things up - getting your talent and tenacity seen by those that matter is simply hard. Amanda at the Forge is breaking down barriers in order to boost the growth that the jewellery industry needs; it needs that cocktail mix of all aspects of our trade to boost the growth. Growth happens when there is a rich mixture - its like chemistry.
The trade is traditional and a long tradition has to be set in its ways to survive and any change needs to be navigated so that it increases the passing on of skills through the generations and doesn’t wipe out what really needs too be passed on in an small over sight. So yes, there are barriers to growth in the jewellery trade for sure, but would I be here if that was the trade's entire relationship with growth?
I would not have built collections that were sold in Barneys New York or appeared in Italian Vogue if the interpersonal growth was not engraved in the jewellery trade. Skills are the lifeblood of this industry, and if any young, really passionate person from any community shows that passion - the kindness, the lessons, the support is there in all the associated trades. So there is a hunger for growth in the jewellery trade. There are barriers which are structural, but the joy that is the interpersonal; the way the young who show passion are supported by each interaction with the casters, platers, polishers, setters, engravers - is one of the best and most precious examples of how to achieve growth.
How to create this joy of passing on skills at a societal level is where thers is room for growth - for my own art educator role - it's how to enable the learning and teaching to start at 4 - 11 rather than 16 in many of the apprenticeships in the trade.
If structures in the trade can bend to young children - learn about growth from the young - then these patterns will be modelled throughout the trade. If the jewellery trade is so passionate about passing skills on where are the youngest children? Is that not the root of any trades long term survival?
What my professional practice as a jewellery designer has shown me is the power of duplication and systems to create growth and build sensitive and effective design systems at the jewellery bench. The processes of building metal into collections over many years means you can feel the growth in the process and system. Once that system is running you trust that the growth will take over and the design levels will rocket upwards. This is how I design, jewellery or children’s primary art curriculums.
Once it is set up and running, it creates growth and those in that system they feel their own agency being expressed rather than a curriculum imposing. Technical skills transference can happen alongside personal expression. Betty Edwards' technical drawing skills taught 6 times a year - then applied to volcanoes and - yes, you have the technical skill, the duplication, pass this on, but you have personal expression and growth within a community of practice. If children who have this kind of education meet the jewellery industry, the old skills will be respected and translated in a process of genuine growth.
