Hilary Brown

The work I am currently making is the result of my experiments with very thin sheet silver – the manipulation of it and fixing it to shape with the minimum amount of intervention. It is the distillation of many ideas and influences. Crumpled, creased and rolled paper; ancient Roman, Egyptian and Minoan jewellery; ethnic jewellery; found objects such as stones, shells, bones – spontaneously picked up and threaded onto rough string or twisted plant fibre. 

Looking back to the work I was producing over 30 years ago I see that familiar themes keep emerging. This early work used thin sheet acrylic but my concerns were still with reduction of thickness, erosion, lightness and simplicity of form and ethnic influences.

At the moment, the jewellery I produce is silver – sometimes gold plated, sometimes blackened with oxidising chemical.