Introduction

Introduction Science, Curiosity and Craft Susan Holland Curator DCCI National Design & Craft Gallery

This exhibition captures a vital time in studio metalsmithing and patination. Longtime leaders who have wholly altered the terrain continue to push boundaries of their materials, as the mid-career metalsmiths whom they trained forge new directions, and new generations of makers bring fresh approaches to the conversation.

Metal colouration techniques have been built on experimentation, in the meeting of science, curiosity and craft. Processes, developed in a time when chemicals could be accessed freely, have more recently been supplanted by non-toxic and natural applications – including, in this exhibition, the use of seaweed and bread. Early trailblazers and their generous sharing of knowledge in formal education, as well as peer support, have been crucial to the development of this lively discipline. Experimentation has continued unbounded, as evidenced here in complex forms, challenging techniques, innovative use of industrial processes and even the melding of media (such as the combination of metal and glass in the Material Dialogues collaboration). What Colour is Metal? confronts us with a direct question: what do we understand of metal and its innate properties? In European culture the value of precious metal traditionally correlates with its fineness. While makers have long been experimental, innovating with patination and colour application, only since 2019 have changes in the Irish Hallmarking Act allowed the marking of mixed metals in Ireland. This has extended the creative possibilities for makers, allowing them to combine base and precious metals more freely. While this may be a divergence for European makers, in Japanese practice the combination of metals and the application of compounds to alter metal colour is a tradition spanning many centuries, as Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill explores in his text.

In Ireland we have a long history of ambitious silversmithing and innovation in metal construction, from ancient torcs and brooches to ecclesiastical objects and chalices. Skilled work in precious metals continues, with Kilkenny as home to more fine jewellers per capita than anywhere else in Europe. Yet the processes of colouration of metals, while practised by a few to exceptional standards, is not a wide phenomenon. This exhibition celebrates international best practice and simultaneously has the educational intention of sharing techniques, inspiring innovation and spurring on the next generation of experimental metalsmiths.

Curators Sara Roberts and Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill: are both passionate advocates of innovative metal practice and craft education. They have committed years to the realisation of this project, which builds on Sara’s 1993 exhibition The Chemistry Set, produced by Crafts Council UK and The Southern Arts Touring Exhibition Service. Nearly thirty years later this exhibition takes a fresh look at colouration in metal as it stands in the 2020s, bringing together exceptional works by master metalsmiths from ten countries and three continents, to demonstrate the vitality, diversity and complexity of this discipline.

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What Colour is Metal? Sara Roberts Exhibition Curator

Despite the fixity of metallic colours in language – in describing coppery or silver hair, for instance – we readily comprehend that colour in metal is not fixed, that bronze sculpture may appear blackened, that the silvery coins in our pocket will tarnish, that the copper roof of the church has long been a strong verdigris green.

Changes in the colour of metal signify use, age, heritage; they also betray methods of construction, as metals frequently change colour when heated to be manipulated or bonded. In contemporary silversmithing and jewellery practice, artists working in metal use the full palette of these possibilities, and they exploit their cultural and narrative connotations. Colour is achieved through how metal reacts with other chemicals or heat, or a combination of the two; colour is revealed as a property of the metal itself; the surface of aluminium is infused with pure colour or image, and enamel glazes are applied to prepared textured metal surfaces, with varying degrees of transparency and opacity.

In the early 1990s I witnessed an edgy new practice within studio silversmithing by a generation of artists who confidently used colour, rejecting the demands of the traditional market.1 I also saw the creative uses of coloured metal in applications ranging from jewellery to architecture. In the exhibition The Chemistry Set (1993),2 for Crafts Council and The Southern Arts Touring Exhibition Service, I identified this rich seam of innovative application as the effect on British studio practice of the 1982 publication The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals by Michael Rowe and Richard Hughes.3 Described by Martina Margetts as ‘a paradigm of the transformation of the aesthetics and creative possibilities in the last quarter of the twentieth century,’4 this ‘recipe book’ made technical information on colours in metal easily accessible at a time of reappraisal of ‘the precious’. It led to a surge in the application of colour in metal: in jewellery, vessels and interior design, and more widely in architectural practice and in mid-scale applications such as furniture and interior surfaces.

The earlier survey can now be consolidated and updated, as practitioners continue to research and expand the application of patination and a range of colour in metal across the creative arts, and across continents. Some of the exhibitors from that exhibition have made further innovations, in combining digital processes with their hardwon techniques: like Rebecca de Quin, who has adopted drawing software to achieve her fluid three-dimensional forms from sheet metal; and Jane Adam, who pioneered the use of anodised dyed aluminium to decorative effect in her jewellery ranges, and has now developed large-scale public art commissions as well as jewellery through digital photo manipulation techniques and outsourced printing. We profile more recent innovators in approaches to colour in metal, such as Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill, silversmith and co-curator of this project, who has capitalised on his recent research into historic Japanese patination and industrial friction-stir welding to update traditional mokume-gane techniques and render them achievable at mass-production scale for the luxury market. Current practice affords the opportunity to expand the definition of ‘coloured metal’ beyond patination techniques achieved through chemical application and heat, to include specific approaches to enamel. Traditionally used as a glassy surface colouration treatment, enamel has been reinvented by Jessica Turrell, Kaori Juzu and Christine Graf

1 This was prevalent in the British tradition of hallmarking, which at the time favoured ‘clean’ unadulterated surfaces and did not permit the mixing of metals within the same works.

The British Assay Office allowed the marking of mixed metals from 6 April 2007; previously the 1973 Hallmarking Act prevented the hallmarking of items made of a mixture of precious and base metals, and regulations for mixed precious-metal items were very restricting. 2 The Chemistry Set: Coloured and Patinated Metals in Contemporary Craft (1993), [exhibition] Crafts Council/The Southern Arts Touring Exhibition Service: Winchester, curated by

Sara Roberts. 3 The Colouring Bronzing and Patination of Metals (1982), Richard Hughes and Michael Rowe, Thames and Hudson: London.