Naomi Clarke: School of Jewellery. Birmingham City University. Selected Graduate 2018

Naomi returned to education as a mature student, bringing extensive experience as an auctioneer, and with an interest in the provenance of historical artefacts.  She developed a fascinating – and unique – methodology: unpacking jewellery boxes and co-producing, with their owners, visual maps of their contents and associated stories; creating collections that reflect but also subtly disrupt these stories; and, finally, using her experience as auctioneer to cast the shadow of time on these pieces and examine how they might be regarded from a moment in the future, once stripped of the personal associations that make them so meaningful to the stories’ originators.  The layered enquiry that Naomi has crafted gets to the heart of the complex role that jewellery plays in familial, institutional and civic collections.
/ Sian Hindle, Course Leader, MA Jewellery and Related Products.