Robin Shelton

Bio

Robin is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly through the medium of jewellery. Since graduating from Loughborough College of Art and Design with a first class honours degree in Three Dimensional Design in 1995, his career has encompassed making, teaching, exhibiting (nationally and in Europe) and writing two traditionally-published non-fiction books. His jewellery practice invariably involves the juxtaposition of humble, found objects in dialogue with components – sometimes using ‘precious’ materials – inviting dialogues around perceptions of value, price and worth. He won the Royal Society of (British) Sculptors’ student medal competition in 1994 and received the At Work Gallery award for best recycled jewellery at the Cluster Contemporary Jewellery Fair in December 2024.
 

Statement

As a young boy on shimmering summer holidays, Robin would hoard smooth shards of driftwood; take them home to remind him of the scorching, simple times when life inevitably became cold and complicated. He has scoured his environment – beach, street, countryside – for similar comforting idols ever since, and hoards them still.
 
Over time – sometimes a few glimpsed seconds, many others over years – they form associations between themselves which he tries to mediate and manifest through one-off pieces of art jewellery; using traditional techniques in unusual and unexpected ways. By appropriate and judicious intervention in each component of a piece, constructed harmonies are reached; sometimes poetic, often playful.
 
The materials used to facilitate these three-dimensional conversations are varied, depending on their formal and functional requirements; marine-grade steel cable industrial rubber tubing, found fragments of rope and chain conjoin a variety of metals, woods and sometimes bone; carved, shaped, bent, forged to will in order to echo or enhance the casual allure of the found – itself modified as a gesture of compromise towards the made, breaking traditional hierarchies.
 
Consistently and intentionally blurring and stretching the interstices between form and function, made and found, precious and base, implicit and explicit, object and context, his desire is for his work to encourage others to do the same – to question, to find excitement and engagement in the everyday and to hold tight the reminders of warmer times when the world turns cold.

CV      

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