Di-alogue: Technologies for thinking & making

Helen Dilkes
The idea for this exhibition was to explore “technologies for thinking” in the fullest sense of the phrase. I am interested in the different and sometimes overlapping ways that you and I use technologies for thinking and making. I say my process is improvisatory, and I think you might relate to this. I have this very small idea that shifts something, or I am drawing on the computer, I think you do too, and something will shift in a way that then emerges as an aspect of the next piece. In this way, each piece comes out of the one before. Titles of my pieces might allude to Rhino 3D commands–rotate, explode, array, suggesting we look beyond object to process.


Rhino 3D drawings: boundary curves, rotate/array lines and ellipses, generate and explode surfaces.


Rhino 3D drawings: slicing self-intersecting surfaces, horizontal orienting for fusion deposition printing.


Helen Dilkes. Necklace: Speculating… 8 self-intersecting surfaces, tinkly squares, 2026. Polylactic acid PLA, aluminium (computer heat sink), zinc. 50 x 22 x 10 cm. Photograph: Fred Kroh.


My artist statements reflect the overarching idea. The specificity of each small innovation speaks of process and my thinking in geometry.
Research, I think, is what it's all about.


Rachael Colley
Yes, I think you're right. I’m interested in exploring embodied technologies, the broader sensory experience of both the viewer and the wearer of the jewellery. It’s intriguing to consider to what extent the viewer/wearer may feel comfortable wearing the work or not, or any other ways they may wish to engage with it. I aim to document performative actions. For me, that's where we I can have more of a conversation around embodied experience, bringing in technologies of thinking. I use quick sensory drawing techniques as a part of my practice, exploring somatic ways of being and thinking, reflecting on and communicating my experiences around food and eating.


Drawings: graphite on paper, 3D ‘sketch’ in welded stainless steel. 


Rhino layout for neckpiece design.


Rachael Colley. Neckpiece: MelonColley, 2025. Denatured melon peel, graphite and natural ink coatings, sintered aluminium, welded stainless steel. 33 x 26.5 x 7.1cm. Photograph: Chelsea Abbott.


Like you say, I tend to draw through 3D 'sketches' or using the computer (Rhino 3D) to help me draw accurate forms. If I don't use it, I just can't seem to get the 3D forms quite right. I can't see it. I use laser technologies to fabricate the works, both sintering and welding. Where I've been based, in Birmingham and Sheffield, there is a history and heritage around jewellery and metalwork. Metal material innovation in Sheffield has developed over many hundreds of years, innovations in stainless steel, for example.


Helen Dilkes
For me, technologies for thinking include philosophies and geometries. In your work, they emerge through embodied methods. That distinction creates a productive dialogue between our practices. There may also be points of connection if we understand technology in its more familiar sense–the digital, but for this project I am not referring only to the digital. I am deliberately playing with the word technology to open broader meanings.

When I was doing my PhD in the Post Graduate Gold and Silversmithing studios, in the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, with supervisors in Gold and Silversmithing, and Architecture, it was a real privilege to have access to all the gear that the institution had to offer in those spheres. It gave me the capacity to really explore, to research–scale-up, do performative work, for example, using all technologies available. I see your work going in certain directions too while you’re studying and researching. Beyond study, the question is how to continue that intense involvement with ideas, materials, and tools. The key for me is collaboration, though not in the obvious sense.


Rachael Colley
We're both artists in that sense, seeking out the collaborative connections, and our practices aim to ask questions. I’m currently a practice-led doctorial researcher at Loughborough University in the UK, thinking through materials and making.


Helen Dilkes
I think there’s been a real shift towards the artistic and being able to call oneself an artist in this sphere. Our practices encompass a multitude of methods across discipline boundaries. I like to say I'm an artist in the best sense of that word, or an artist jeweller, or artist jeweller researcher. As an artist, I also craft, make in a multitude of ways, and I design. I think artists have a strong sense of pursuing the particular–a concept, an idea, and crossing boundaries.


Rachael Colley
I'm really struck by what you're saying. It made me think about my experience and that, as an artist, I'm interested in crossing perceived discipline boundaries and in communicating something of my own bodily experience to others. Brooches are quite interesting to me- rather fiddly things, particularly with my reduced hand dexterity. The brooch pins on the brooches I’ve made for our exhibition are deliberately a bit awkward and unstable, swivelling and clumsily not functioning in a purposeful way. I enjoy the discord in the action, of the exploration of the action of the attachment and insecure wearing as the artwork.


Rachael Colley. Brooch: MelonColley, 2025. Denatured melon peel, graphite coating, sintered aluminium, welded stainless steel. 4.5 x 8.8 x 2.5 cm. Photograph: Chelsea Abbott.


Helen Dilkes
I hear what you're saying. My own experience across different spheres helped during my studies. It allowed me to situate my research within a broader socio-cultural context, rather than only within art. That broader grounding helped me understand why and how I was making the work, and how I might write in relation to it, or alongside it. It also helped me become more artistic in my thinking and practice. I was able to borrow ideas from social theory–Brian Massumi and Bruno Latour, for example, because they felt directly relevant to the work and to the context from which we come. My ideas are encapsulated in my small book Fluidifying… Object to event, self-published in 2024, and outlined in more detail in my PhD dissertation, Non-Euclidean transformations… Multiplicity in a contemporary art jewellery practice, 2017.


Rachael Colley
I would love to hear more about that! For me, the context for jewellery as an art form is so interesting because of its direct relation to the body, as well as its perceived preciousness and value. The broader sensory experience of the wearer, the somewhat fleshy physicality of the wearable object, its tactility, scent, reactivity, weight, the sensation of how it makes you feel, of what it evokes, what it awakens.


Helen Dilkes
I suppose I'm ambivalent about the classic idea of jewellery. I'm ambivalent about labels generally. In a way, I think anything can be jewellery, and on many occasions, I say my works ‘speculate on wearability’. Because of the way I think about my work, I emphasise the idea of process. I feel there is no pressure there for me to call it something or give it a label.


Rachael Colley
Yeah, I think so too.


Helen Dilkes
A motivation for highlighting our dialogue is to express the wish to have more artistic dialogue generally. I invited you to join me for the Radiant Pavilion exhibition early this year, 2026, and was thrilled that you said yes. I very much appreciate the collaboration with you towards this idea of dialogue, and thinking through making. We have been following each other’s work since we met at a conference at Birmingham School of Art in 2014, and this cross-planetary dialogue is personally very valuable, and wonderful.


Rachael Colley
Thanks so much Helen, I couldn't agree more!


Exhibition details:
Di-alogue: Technologies for thinking/making, Melbourne Contemporary Jewellery and Object Biennial, 23 October – 1 November, 2026, Curate Space, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia


Further reading:
- Dilkes, H. PhD dissertation, Non-Euclidean transformations: Multiplicity in a contemporary art jewellery practice, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, 2017.
- Dilkes, H. Fluidifying… Object to event, published Melbourne Australia, 2024.
- Ingold, T. Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, Routledge, New York, 2013.
- Kristeva, J and Celine, LF. Powers of horror: an essay on abjection, Columbia UUP, 1982.
- Latour, B. An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns, Harvard University Pr,ess, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013. 
- Massumi, B. Parables of the virtual: movement, affect, sensation, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2002.
- Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of perception, Routledge, London, 2002.
- Polanyi M. The Tacit Dimension, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1966.


 

About the author

Helen Dilkes' technologies for thinking are philosophies and geometries as they intertwine around ideas of temporal/spatial. Her pieces explore ideas of slicing time in multiple ways. Digital technologies facilitate drawing and actualising 3D components. The internal aluminium alloy parts of digital technology machines are reclaimed, reworked for 2D components. Technologies are then process, tool, and actual material.

Photo by: Fred Kroh



Rachael Colley's approach explores biological technologies of somatic awareness, connecting her bodily experience of the autoimmune disease systemic sclerosis (SSc) and externalising this through making. Her MelonColley series uses discarded melon peel to highlight the melancholy experiences of chronic health sufferers. The body’s precarity is exposed in the crafting of fragile food waste, referencing the atrophy of internal skins caused by SSc.

Photo by: Chelsea Abbott