During the London Craft Week, Sotheby's Quartet unveiled a special selling exhibition honouring British goldsmiths in Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee year. A fascinating collection of pieces by some of the most exciting talents in London's jewellery industry today - Christopher Thompson-Royds, Lucie Gledhill, Castro Smith, and Sian Evans, is being presented.
Sian Evans, Lucie Gledhill, Castro Smith, and Christopher Thompson-Royds are among the most promising young goldsmiths. Each stunning piece of jewellery is crafted by hand in the artists' London workshops. Perfect workmanship unites the quartet. As such, they exhibit their magnificent work in the Bing Gallery at Sotheby's as a group known as 'Quartet.'
All works at the 'Quartet: Goldsmiths In London Now' exhibition are for sale. The exhibition is at the Bing Gallery at Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, and will be going on till 22 May and 28 May – 30 June.
Castro Smith: Reinventing the Seal
Smith, who originates from Blaydon in the North East of England, is modest to a fault and credits both his engraving and the unique design of his rings to chance. He spent four or five years there studying conventional goldsmithing and engraving techniques, and it was there that he made the fateful tool slip that led to his characteristic design, in which the seal engraving spills out of its usual area and cascades down the ring's shank.
Sian Evans: Jewels from the Earth
Sian Evans skillfully pulls an ethereal beauty from pebbles that, to the untrained, appear totally ordinary in a spacious, light-filled studio in a concrete London Fields building. When hand-carved, smoothed and polished into light, silky textures and tactile forms, however, they look like agate with amazing, delicate banding patterns within. Similar ideas run through her Meta collection, although it's possibly even more complex. She crafted silver sculptures of rings, replete with sculpted diamonds, before casting them in Delft clay, an age-old method.
Christopher Thompson Royds: Designing with Daisies
Forging delicate petals, leaves, and blades of grass from gold may appear to be the hardest and most demanding of chores for a jeweller – and Christopher Thompson Royds' works undoubtedly demonstrate extraordinary expertise. The artist and goldsmith are driven by a desire for simplicity — simple designs and a recollection of earlier times.
The result is a series of delicate metal sculptures with the natural, organic flow of actual leaf but polished, studied surfaces that capture the essence of flowers without going overboard with detail.
Lucie Gledhill: Making Chains Great Again
Chain is an often-overlooked component of the jewellery repertory, seeming to the outsider as nothing more than a place to hang a pendant, a vehicle for holding charms, or a link between more essential parts. But chain-making is Lucie Gledhill's main event, and her work elevates this hard craft to levels of beauty and delicacy that no machine could ever match.
Gledhill discovered chain-making during her Masters at the Royal College of Art when she combined an interest in repetitive meditative making processes with the discovery of a fob chain belonging to her great grandfather.
Sotheby's has been the world's largest, most reputable, most dynamic marketplace for art and luxury since 1744. They enable a global community of collectors and connoisseurs to find, buy, sell, and consign great art and rare things. Their unrivalled worldwide network of professionals covering 40 countries and 44 divisions, including Contemporary Art, Modern and Impressionist Art, Old Masters, Chinese Works of Art, jewellery, watches, wine and spirits, and interiors, among many others, backs up their reputation for trust and authenticity.
Moreover, Sotheby’s organise over 600 auctions each year and provide a cross-category selection of things accessible for quick purchase via both digital and physical shopping experiences, as well as private sales, all guided by their forward-thinking attitude and innovation.
There are a bunch of different exhibitions and different things that are on auction. Every couple of weeks, they change the exhibition when they auction everything off. So it is quite a unique opportunity to see pieces from all over the world, which are mostly private collections. Then these are going to be split off and sent all over the world by various museums and private collectors.
It's really rare to see a lot of those things together in a collection - it kind of felt a bit like a secret museum. A beautiful treasure-filled museum.
