We are told that diamond sales are plummeting and that even rap stars are pressed to stretch to real bling. With gold at a new peak, both jewellers and buyers of jewellery are squeezed. For one substantial group of jewellers, however, this is not all bad news.
Artist-jewellers are not a new subgroup – pioneer modernists such as Picasso, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico and even Alberto Giacometti all made excursions into this miniature realm. Since the 1950s, however, there has been a growing movement of artist-jewellers, from across Europe, into the US, Japan and Australia, whose primary means of creative expression is jewellery, and whose concern is far less the intrinsic value of their materials and far more what they can do and say with them.
