NINE NEW GRADUATES
13th Nov - 25th Jan 2015

Yorkshire Post
Saturday Nov 8th 2014

HOME GROWN: Rising stars at Salts Mill
THESE hand enamelled copper bowls, £120 each, are by new graduate Georgia Rose West. They are part of the Youth Movement New Graduate Show at Kath Libbert Jewellery Gallery, which starts on November 14.
The gallery at Salts Mill has staged the event for the past 15 years. Kath visits all the graduate shows and selects makers she believes show talent.
This year, she also chose work by Rosie Deegan who was inspired by a set of cabinet makers tools given to Sir Terence Conran as an 80th birthday gift. Hers are part a political statement about gender stereotypes and part decoration.
Using traditional jewellery making techniques, she crafted tools from glass, wood and precious metals and stones.
Kath Libbert Gallery is at Salts Mill, Saltaire and is open Monday to Friday, 10am-5.30pm. Weekends 10am-6pm.

Yorkshire Post
Friday Nov 14th 2014

CUTTING EDGE ART
A gallery assistant holds a saw from the collection 'For a Man of Substance' by Rosie Deegan. It is part of Youth Movement! Nine New Graduates, an exhibition at Kath Libbert Jewellery Gallery in Salts Mill, Saltaire, which opened yesterday.

PICTURE: JONATHAN GAWTHORPE

Antiques Trade Gazette
Nov 1st 2014

The love letters between her grandparents have been put to an unusual purpose by jeweller Rebecca Smith, a graduate of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee.
She is one of nine new graduates who have a selling show, Youth Movement: Nine New Graduates, at Kath Libbert's Jewellery Gallery at Salts Mill, a former textile mill, near Bradford, which runs from November 13 to January 25, 2015.
Rebecca has used the famiiy letters to create one-off brooches, earrings and necklaces, using the original handwriting to repeat the emotions contained in the lines, plus old photographs.
Shown here and priced at £160 are the Darling Margaret silver pressed oval earrings with yellow tassels, although these can come in a myriad of hues. The laser writing is etched onto white enamel.
Visitors to the show can have their own jewellery created by Rebecca from personal pieces.
Kath has owned this contemporary jewellery gallery since 1996. She started from a table top at the Corn Exchange, while working as an NHS psychologist, The Times lifestyle magazine, Luxx, recently described the gallery thus: "For clients who want jewels that push boundaries. . . the antidote to the high street". Which has certainly brought more customers up the motorways.

CRAFTS
THE MAGAZINE FOR CONTMPORARY CRAFT
January/February 2015
TALENT SPOT
Tools of the tirade
Rosie Deegan
The jeweller talks tools and gender politics with Teleri Lloyd-Jones. Photography by Julian Anderson

It was Terence Conran's toolbox that got Rosie Deegan thinking. She first saw it in the pages of this very magazine. The Ultimate Cabinet Maker's Toolbox, as it is titled, was presented by furniture-maker Benchmark to one of its founders Terence Conran, to celebrate the designer's 8oth birthday. It is a beautiful thing, made from walnut and sycamore, containing chisels, planes, hammers, scrapers and screwdrivers. Now a product made by Benchmark, it's yours for an eye-watering £12,000.

Deegan was puzzled why such a thing exists - who could afford a toolbox at that price, and what might they make with it? Investigating online, she found a website offering 'Christmas Gift Ideas for a Man of Substance'with the following blurb: 'This toolbox makes you reminisce about all those days when your special man potters around the house in his faded denims fixing everything you broke.' She reads this out loud to me as we sit in her Nottingham studio, then looks up openmouthed and says: 'That is such a joke.'

Indignant and intrigued, she headed to Benchmark's showroom in Kintbury to see the real thing up close. 'There's no way anybody would use these tools because of the money you need to spend on it, so where is the value? They're no longer functional.' Deegan began to see the toolbox not as an object of agency but instead a container of symbols, an empty gesture for 'a man of substance'.

'They've been given this life and it's so sad that they're never going to do what they were made to do. If their new purpose is just to be displayed, to give you masculinity, I wouldn't want to be a tool like that. I'd much rather be a tool that was used and made beautiful things.'

So Deegan began working on her own set of tools, a series she produced in her final year at Nottingham Trent University: an intricately perforated saw, a glass hammer, some glass set squares. Each piece is a dialogue between beauty and agency, a seductive but purposely useless object.

Her belief in a tool's right-to-use is perhaps influenced by her upbringing, since her father is a harpsichord maker (the pattern cut into the saw's blade is in fact lifted from one of her father's instruments). The young Deegan grew up around workshops and tools, and as a teenager became interested in silversmithing. 'I found this woman out in a little village, ate lots of cake and gave her a couple of quid to see what they're doing for a couple of hours,' she says, in her deadpan, matter-of-fact tone.

Along the way she began making dioramas and set designs, so she headed to Nottingham Trent to study for a BA in Design for TV. She threw herself headfirst into model-making, wanting to spend the whole time getting her hands dirty, but unfortunately this was only one small part of the degree and her tutors guided her impulses onto the Decorative Arts BA as a better fit.

Her new surroundings offered her the chance to try her hand at different materials and techniques. Having settled into metalwork - and realising she might not get the chance again - Deegan began working with glass. Her final collection of Impotent Tools combines wood, metalwork and cast glass, and it was the glass that was the final piece of the puzzle, a seemingly contradictory material for a tool, delicate and fragile.

Since graduating, Deegan has shown her collection with Mint during the London Design Festival and it's currently in Kath Libbert's selection of new graduates, Youth Movement! It's going well, but they're not paying the bills - in fact, Deegan's not even sure they're for sale ('If I had lots of money at the moment, I would never sell them'). While Impotent Tools is where her heart is, she runs a jewellery label called Eloise Makes and is part of The Hive, the university's business support programme.

With its name taken from an old pet mouse, Eloise Makes offers simple silver jewellery inspired by animals for sale in various local shops and galleries. Deegan is pragmatic about the two distinct parts of her practice: 'That's my business, and I don't mind letting the ear hooks not be hand-made to make it a viable product that someone would buy. But I'm not going back on those,' she says adamantly, gesturing to her tools.

She spent hours cutting out the pattern from the brass sheet that became the blade of her saw. I ask if she thought about laser-cutting it instead. 'I don't like using machines. I just think it's cheating,' she says. 'This work is not going to go to that. None of it will be mass-produced... I think that process is important. The things that are important take time: they mean more, they've taken up more of your life. Making it by hand, it's got more personality. It's not being made by something that doesn't have feelings.'

'Youth Movement! Nine New Graduates' is at Kath Libbert Jewellery, Salts Mill, Saltaire, Bradford BDi8 3!, until 25 January 2015.
www.impotenttoots.co.uk
www.kathlibbertjewellery. co. uk

Picture Captions:
Above: HammerHead, found objects, glass, ebony, 2013
Right: Hand Saw, found objects, glass, silver, handpierced brass, ebony, 2014

findings
Spring 2015

Youth Movement!
Nine New Graduates
Lindsay Hill, Jaki Coffey, Rosie Deegan, Beth Spowart, Rebecca E Smith, Karen E Donovan, Prudence Horrocks, Natalie Lee, Georgia Rose West
An exhibition at Kath Libbert Jewellery Gallery, Salt’s Mill – reviewed by Sarah O’Hana

Kath Libbert never fails to catch the attention of her public with her exhibitions but a special focus has always been placed on new talent, which she makes a point of finding at each turn of the academic year.

Youth Movement! is no exception and it was impressive to see how individual concepts were brought to life through technical capacity and a clear love of materials. In this way Karen E Donovan takes us to the highlands of Scotland where elements of indigenous plants are picked out using subtle colours in titanium. This is someone who understands the material beyond its scientific properties, and loving it through the senses, explaining “…a noise it makes when I brush my hands across it, and a smell it creates when I pierce…” Her Chain No 2 necklace sits like a cascade of springy leaves, delicate as ice on a frosty morning.

Equally evocative is the work of Rebecca E Smith, whose discovery of 300 love letters sent during WWII from her Grandfather to her Grandmother provoked a series of pieces in celebration of the hand-written. She brings an elegant note in enamel and copper to nostalgic memories of endurance and separation. She adds: “When we write a letter we think ahead and there is a great preciousness in what we write before putting ink to paper.” It contrasts well with the immediacy of Jaki Coffey’s work, whose bright yellow skip aesthetic is a lot of fun and very engaging. Anyone with a weakness for skips, and the treasure that might be found there, will find her brooches irresistible.

Exploring kinetics and new ways of setting stones is Lindsay Hill’s territory. Her Flawless ring is intriguing. Through strong geometric elements she frees the stone to move along its tracks in a cage twice its size. Another irresistible piece to play with, it demonstrates ingenuity, as does the work of Beth Spowart, in the use of additive manufacturing and new materials. The group is complimented by the more informal, linear work of Prudence Horrocks and Natalie Lee, whose Wired Wearables bring an impulsive, improvised tempo to the scene through her command of large-scale work. This rhythm is picked up by the lively, spotted bowls of Georgia Rose West, who achieves her objective to incite warmth through her work.

On the wall hangs a striking installation of tools by Rosie Deegan: ‘For a Man of Substance’ - Impotent Tools. This powerful visual statement, my favourite, delivers messages of gender stereotypes and criticism towards the original inspiration, an exclusive toolbox by furniture maker, Benchmark, made useless, in her opinion, by its outrageous price. In response ‘Deegan began to see the toolbox not as an object of agency but instead a container of symbols, an empty gesture for ‘man of substance.’ Her glass interventions and masterful decoration entirely succeed whilst also establishing the tool as art.

A great display of new talent and inspiration is shown at Kath Libbert’s gallery. I look forward to next year’s!

Sarah O’Hana
Senior Lecturer
University of Lincoln

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