Caroline Broadhead

Bio

Caroline Broadhead (b.1950) trained at the Central School of Art and Design in London, graduating in 1972. From the start, she broke away from the conventions of fine jewellery.

Over the decades that followed, her practice expanded well beyond jewellery to encompass textiles, clothing, dance collaborations, and site-specific installations in historic buildings.

Caroline Broadhead's honours include the Jerwood Prize for Applied Arts: Textiles (1997), the Textiles International Open (2004), and the Goldsmiths' Craft & Design Council Lifetime Achievement Award (2017). She has held major retrospectives at CODA Museum in the Netherlands (2018) and at the Lethaby Gallery in London (2019), the latter marking the first time the space had been devoted entirely to a single artist, and accompanied by a monograph published by Arnoldsche Art Publishers. In 2023, she served as curator of SCHMUCK, one of the leading international exhibitions dedicated to contemporary jewellery. In 2025, the artist was a finalist for the Loewe Craft Prize.

For nearly ten years, Caroline Broadhead served as Jewellery and Textiles Programme Director and BA Jewellery Design Course Leader at Central Saint Martins, retiring in 2018. She now holds the title of Professor Emerita and continues to teach on the course, alongside guest lectures at institutions in the UK and abroad.
 

Statement

For more than fifty years, I have been concerned with objects that come into contact with and interact with the body.  Recurrent themes are the boundaries of an individual or object; be that between surface and interior, presence and absence, public and private, or the definition of a sense of territory and personal space. The work has also explored outer extents of the body as seen through light, shadows, reflections and movement. Larger scale and collaborative working with ideas about space and boundaries between people develop atmospheres that elicit subjective, emotional responses.
/ source: https://carolinebroadhead.com/about