New exhibitions bring bling to South Yorkshire

I AM HERE, a Crafts Council Touring Exhibition of contemporary jewellery is at The Civic Gallery until June 4.

The collection features 98 pieces of studio jewellery by the most significant European makers from the last five decades.

Starting with pieces from the most radical era of making in the 1970’s, I AM HERE tells a story of jewellery through the work held in the collections of  Crafts Council, mima, Galerie Marzee, Gallery S O and Pangolin London.  

The exhibition includes work by Susanna Heron, one of the first jewellers to use Perspex in the early 1970s, a film of an arm piece made of ice by Naomi Filmer, a new piece from Tatty Devine's most recent collection, and a bejewelled fur-coated emperor penguin brooch by Dutch jeweller Felieke van der Leest.

The exhibition’s title comes from an essay by the anthropologist Ted Polhemus in which he says: “Lost in an increasingly undifferentiated, homogenised global universe we urgently need visual adjectives which proclaim ‘I am here’.”

The essay was commissioned for the catalogue of the 2007 Jerwood Applied Arts Prize - the last Crafts Council exhibition to showcase the work of contemporary jewellers.

Meanwhile, on the Civic’s Panorama, the new Composition jewellery collection by Nicola Rawlings of Seed Designs will be on display.

The collection, which draws influence from recognisable shapes that when connected explores movement and structure using simple horizontal and vertical lines.

In Rawling's A Seed Grows exhibition, she incorporates elements of ceramic stoneware, rubber and vibrant elastics to create bold contemporary statement pieces designed for the everyday and the extraordinary.

The pieces will be on display until June 4.

Both exhibitions are free.

I AM HERE is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm and the Nicola Rawlings display is open during box office hours.