Like a Rolling Stone

Artist list

Stephen Bottomley, Susan Cross, Maria Rosa Franzin, Jessamy Kelly, Gigi Mariani, Rhona McCallum, Jo Pudelko, Jessica Turrell, Gabi Veit, Cristina Zani

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone…
-Bob Dylan 1965

2016 was the Year of Italian Innovation, Architecture & Design and marked a collaboration between the Italian Cultural Institute (ICI) Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and The University of Edinburgh. Stephen Bottomley, the then Head of Department of Jewellery and Silversmithing at ECA, was approached by ICI with a view to organising a series of events focusing on and celebrating gemmology and contemporary jewellery with events taking place between them.
 
Stephen Bottomley + Susan Cross invited three Italian Jewellery artists: Maria Rosa Franzin, Gigi Mariani and Gabi Vietalong side seven UK artists to explore themes of relocation, transplantation, camouflage, identity and materiality through mixed media work in their jewellery, using geology and geophysics and fieldwork in North Berwick, an area frequently visited by the Geologist James Hutton, as a backdrop to the political themes surrounding population displacement.
 
In the year following the Edinburgh workshop, the project has been developed in the artists home countries and exhibitions planned in Munich and Edinburgh over 2018 with support from the School of Jewellery, Birmingham City University.
 
A full colour catalogue with essays by Rebecca Crowther and Roberta Bernabei is on sale with the exhibition. Profits go to the charity ‘Help the Refugees’.