Beverley Price

Bio

Beverley Price is a contemporary jeweller, enameller, and metal artist based in Jerusalem, with a studio at the Jerusalem House of Quality, a centre hosting thirty selected artists. Originally trained as a Speech and Hearing Therapist, she retrained as a jeweller and enameller from 1989, studying at the Jerusalem Technology Centre (Bucharin Quarter), followed by training in London (Sir John Cass / London Metropolitan University, 1990–1993) and apprenticeship in Hatton Garden (Ringmounts Jewellers, Greville Street).

She completed a Postgraduate Fine Arts degree with distinction at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2000–2001), and is currently completing an MA in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, with research focusing on Nazi dental gold.

Price works across contemporary jewellery, large-scale adornment, enamel on objects both large and small, installations, sculpture, and the restoration of metal objets d’art. Her practice incorporates all materials, including two commissioned works each using 500 grams of gold.

From 1995 to 2022, based in South Africa, she developed a hybrid jewellery aesthetic  bridging Western contemporary practice with indigenous traditions. Her work addressed pre-colonial Southern African jewellery histories and their erasure under Apartheid, integrating contemporary jewellery within mainstream fine arts discourse.

She invented the concepts of Photemes, Aumemes, and Cumemes—jewellery units of visual information—as well as a method for round-forging fine precious metal and developed a personalised enamelling technique. She met Nelson Mandela and created a commissioned work on his life, trained five previously disadvantaged women for her South African jewellery project, and initiated Urgent Adornment creativity workshops for jewellers. Her work has been widely exhibited and published internationally.
 

Statement

The human body is the critical dynamic plinth which distinguishes Jewellery from other forms of fine art. The wearer activates and vivifies the work.

My return to South Africa for twenty-seven years (1995–2023) after Apartheid ended, and living for three years in rural South Africa among the Zulu cultural group, formed part of my corrective experience, having grown up white under Apartheid.

My current practice reflects an awareness of human finitude as I bring long-term projects to completion. I have returned to my passion for enamelling and for restoring Judaica ceremonial objects and enamels, while actively integrating my practice within the Israeli contemporary metalsmithing community.

I am particularly attentive to the works that may emerge from my ongoing research into Nazi dental gold.
 

CV      

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