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In the English language we have lost many words pertaining to the landscape
and the natural world; our way of describing our surroundings us has become
generic and homogenous as our language has shifted and evolved.
However, in British minority languages and in specific regional vernacular,
this is not the case.

The ability to name features in the landscape with precision and detail afford
the opportunity to experience natural phenomena with a greater degree of
nuance, and connect us to nature in a more profound way.

This idea was the starting point for the Comashruth brooch. Drawings were
produced by responding instinctively and intuitively to a large glossary
of Gaelic words describing the specific characteristics of rivers.

The brooch itself is made up of three different gauges of hammered wire
which undulate and are graded from thin, to thicker, to thin again,
mimicking the way the current of a river might pick up pace before
becoming languid further downstream.

The scale is small inviting closer inspection, just as the Gaelic words
pertaining to rivers encourage and enable speakers to engage with and
notice characteristics which may otherwise go unseen and
underapprecaited.

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Brooch specs (in silver)

Waves

1800mm 0.3 round wire
800mm 0.4 round wire
200 mm 0.5 round wire

Frame & catch

60mm 0.3 round wire (for tube)
8mm 2.0 round wire (rivet heads)
20mm 0.7 round wire (rivets)
95mm 1.0 square wire (frame
5mm 1.0 round wire (catch)

Weight inc. pin- 4.27g
Weight exc. pin 4.00g

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape

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Eight years ago, in the coastal township of Shawbost on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, I was given an extraordinary document. It was entitled "Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary", and it listed Gaelic words and phrases for aspects of the tawny moorland that fills Lewis's interior. Reading the glossary, I was amazed by the compressive elegance of its lexis, and its capacity for fine discrimination: a caochan, for instance, is "a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden from sight", while a feadan is "a small stream running from a moorland loch", and a fèith is "a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer". Other terms were striking for their visual poetry: rionnach maoim means "the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day"; èit refers to "the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn", and teine biorach is "the flame or will-o'-the-wisp that runs on top of heather when the moor burns during the summer".

The "Peat Glossary" set my head a-whirr with wonder-words. It ran to several pages and more than 120 terms - and as that modest "Some" in its title acknowledged, it was incomplete. "There's so much language to be added to it," one of its compilers, Anne Campbell, told me. "It represents only three villages' worth of words. I have a friend from South Uist who said her grandmother would add dozens to it. Every village in the upper islands would have its different phrases to contribute." I thought of Norman MacCaig's great Hebridean poem "By the Graveyard, Luskentyre", where he imagines creating a dictionary out of the language of Donnie, a lobster fisherman from the Isle of Harris. It would be an impossible book, MacCaig concluded:

A volume thick as the height of the Clisham,

A volume big as the whole of Harris,

A volume beyond the wit of scholars.

The same summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. As I had been entranced by the language preserved in the prose‑poem of the "Peat Glossary", so I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry.

❦

I have long been fascinated by the relations of language and landscape - by the power of strong style and single words to shape our senses of place. And it has become a habit, while travelling in Britain and Ireland, to note down place words as I encounter them: terms for particular aspects of terrain, elements, light and creaturely life, or resonant place names. I've scribbled these words in the backs of notebooks, or jotted them down on scraps of paper. Usually, I've gleaned them singly from conversations, maps or books. Now and then I've hit buried treasure in the form of vernacular word-lists or remarkable people - troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages, like the Lewisian "Peat Glossary".

Not long after returning from Lewis, and spurred on by the Oxford deletions, I resolved to put my word-collecting on a more active footing, and to build up my own glossaries of place words. It seemed to me then that although we have fabulous compendia of flora, fauna and insects ( Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica and Mark Cocker's Birds Britannica chief among them), we lack a Terra Britannica, as it were: a gathering of terms for the land and its weathers - terms used by crofters, fishermen, farmers, sailors, scientists, miners, climbers, soldiers, shepherds, poets, walkers and unrecorded others for whom particularised ways of describing place have been vital to everyday practice and perception. It seemed, too, that it might be worth assembling some of this terrifically fine-grained vocabulary - and releasing it back into imaginative circulation, as a way to rewild our language. I wanted to answer Norman MacCaig's entreaty in his Luskentyre poem: "Scholars, I plead with you, / Where are your dictionaries of the wind ... ?"

In the seven years after first reading the "Peat Glossary", I sought out the users, keepers and makers of place words. In the Norfolk Fens - introduced by the photographer Justin Partyka - I met Eric Wortley, a 98-year-old farmer who had worked his family farm throughout his long life, who had been twice to the East Anglian coast, once to Norwich and never to London, and whose speech was thick with Fenland dialect terms. I came to know the cartographer, artist and writer Tim Robinson, who has spent 40 years documenting the terrain of the west of Ireland: a region where, as he puts it, "the landscape ... speaks Irish". Robinson's belief in the importance of "the language we breathe" as part of "our frontage onto the natural world" has been inspiring to me, as has his commitment to recording subtleties of usage and history in Irish place names, before they are lost forever: Scrios Buaile na bhFeadog, "the open tract of the pasture of the lapwings"; Eiscir, "a ridge of glacial deposits marking the course of a river that flowed under the ice of the last glaciation".

❦

I turned also to the archive, seeking place words as they were preserved in glossaries and dictionaries, gathered on the web, or embedded in the literature of earlier decades and centuries. WS Graham wrote in a 1977 poem of "Floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary", but I find lexicons to be more tropical jungle than tundra, gloriously ornate in their tendrilled outgrowths and complex root systems. I met, too, with great generosity from correspondents around the UK, who were ready to share "their" place words. Over the years, and especially over the last two years, thousands of place terms reached me. They came by letter, email and telephone, scribbled on postcards or yellowed prewar foolscap, transcribed from cassette recordings of Suffolk longshoremen made half a century ago, or taken from hand-sketched maps of Highland hill country and island coastlines. I began to comprehend something of the awesome range and vigour of place words as they have existed in the numerous languages and dialects of these islands.

Some of the terms I collected mingle oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognisable in that they name something conceivable, if not instantly locatable. Ammil is a Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs and grass blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a whole landscape to glitter. It is thought to derive from the Old English ammel, meaning "enamel", and is an exquisitely exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen, but never before named. Shetlandic has a word, pirr, meaning "a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat's paw on the water". On Exmoor, zwer is the onomatopoeic term for "the sound made by a covey of partridges taking flight". Smeuse is an English dialect noun for "the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal"; now I know the word smeuse, I notice these signs of creaturely commute more often.

I became fascinated by those scalpel-sharp words that are untranslatable without remainder. The need for precise discrimination of this kind has occurred most often where landscape is the venue of work. The Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman Stefánsson writes of fishermen speaking "coddish" far out into the North Atlantic; the miners working the Great Northern Coalfield in England's north-east developed a sub-dialect known as "Pitmatical" or "yakka", so dense it proved incomprehensible to Victorian parliamentary commissioners seeking to improve conditions in the mines in the 1840s. The name "Pitmatical" was originally chosen to echo "mathematical", and thereby emphasise the skill and precision of the colliers. Such super-specific argots are born of hard, long labour on land and at sea. The terms they contain allow us glimpses through other eyes, permit brief access to distant lifeworlds and habits of perception. In another of his Hebridean poems, MacCaig commended the "seagull voice" of his Gaelic Aunt Julia, so rooted in the terrain of Harris that she came to think with and speak in its birds and climate.

I also relished synonyms - especially those that bring new energy to familiar entities. The variant English terms for icicle - aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell and daggler (Hampshire), cancervell (Exmoor), ickle (Yorkshire), tankle (Durham) and shuckle (Cumbria) - form a tinkling poem of their own. In Northamptonshire and East Anglia "to thaw" is to ungive. The beauty of this variant surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift - an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.

Many of the glossary words are, like ungive, memorably vivid. They function as topograms - tiny landscape poems, folded up inside verbs and nouns. I think of the Northamptonshire dialect verb to crizzle, for instance, a verb for the freezing of water that evokes the sound of a natural activity too slow for human hearing to detect ("And the white frost 'gins crizzle pond and brook", wrote John Clare in 1821). When Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't have a word for a natural phenomenon, he would simply - wonderfully - make one up: shivelight, for "the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood", or goldfoil for a sky lit by lightning in "zigzag dints and creasings". Hopkins, like Clare, sought to forge a language that could register the participatory dramas of our relations with nature and landscape.

Not all place words are poetic or innocent, of course. Our familiar word forest designates not only a wooded region, but also an area of land set aside for hunting - as those who have walked through the treeless "forests" of Fisherfield and Corrour in Scotland will know. Forest - like many wood-words - is complicatedly tangled up in political histories of access and landownership. We inhabit a post-pastoral terrain, full of modification and compromise, and for this reason my glossaries began to fill up with "unnatural" language: terms from coastal sea defences ( pillbox, bulwark, rock-armour), or soft estate, the Highways Agency term for those natural habitats that have developed along the verges of motorways and trunk roads.

❦

Some of the words I collected are ripely rude. These islands, I now know, have scores of terms for animal dung, most of which double up nicely as insults, from crottle (a foresters' term for "hare excrement") to doofers (Scots for "horse shit"), to the expressive ujller (Shetlandic for the "unctuous filth that runs from a dunghill") and turdstool (West Country for "a very substantial cowpat"). A dialect name for the kestrel - alongside such felicities as windhover and bell-hawk - is wind-fucker. Once learned, never forgotten; it is hard now not to see in the pose of the hovering kestrel a certain lustful quiver. I've often been reminded of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's genius catalogue of nonce words, The Meaning of Liff (1983), in which British place names are used as nouns for the "hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no words exist". Thus " Kimmeridge (n): The light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing"; or " Glassel (n): A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which is now a lump of rock, but which children nevertheless insist on filling their suitcases with after a holiday". When I mentioned to my young son that there was no word for the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream, he suggested currentbum. Well, yes.

I organised my growing word-hoard into nine glossaries, divided according to terrain-type: Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands. The words came from dozens of languages, dialects, sub-dialects and specialist vocabularies: from Unst to the Lizard, from Pembrokeshire to Norfolk; from Norn and Old English, Anglo-Romani, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric, and numerous regional versions of English, through to Jérriais, the dialect of Norman still spoken on the island of Jersey.

I quickly realised that they couldn't and shouldn't aspire to completion. They contained only a debatable fraction of an impossible whole. There is no single mountain language, but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language, but a fractal of coastal languages; no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages. So I decided to imagine them not as archives but as wunderkammers, celebrating the visions these words opened in the mind, and their tastes on the tongue.

❦

I am wary of the dangers of fetishising dialect and archaism - all that mollocking and sukebinding Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Wary, too, of advocating a tyranny of the nominal - a taxonomic need to point and name, with the intent of citing and owning - when in fact I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not knowing. There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a distant echo. Nature will not name itself. Granite doesn't self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. When I see a moon-bow or a sundog, I usually just say "Wow!" or "Hey!" Sometimes on a mountain, I look out across scree and corrie, srón and lairig - and say nothing at all. But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words.

Yet it is clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape. A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior Dictionary - the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual - are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood in terms of large generic units ("field", "hill", "valley", "wood"). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in 1903, meaning "indifferent to the distinction between things".

This impoverishment has occurred even in languages that have historically paid close attention to place, such as Irish or Gaelic. Even the landscape lexis of the Outer Hebrides is currently being lost. Gaelic itself is slowly withering: the number of native speakers in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd is now around 58,000. Of those who do still speak Gaelic, many are understandably less interested in the intricacies of toponymy. In Ireland, a similar situation exists: Tim Robinson notes how with each generation, more "of the place names are forgotten or becoming incomprehensible".

Why should this loss matter? You can't even use crizzle as a Scrabble word: there aren't two "z"s in the bag (unless, of course, you use a blank). It matters because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry - a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth - "people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know." Or as Cocker punchily puts it, "If acorn goes from the lexicon, the game is up for nature in England."

There is, suddenly, a surging sense of the importance of preserving and plenishing a diverse language for landscape. In January, a campaign for OUP to reinstate the culled "nature words" was launched, drawing support from Margaret Atwood and Michael Morpurgo: OUP has responded positively and thoughtfully. Robinson has written recently of the need for what he calls "geophany", meaning a language "fit for the secular celebration of place". This spring the photographer Dominick Tyler is publishing Uncommon Ground, which pairs 100 place words with 100 photographs of the phenomena to which the words refer, from arête ("a sharp-edged mountain ridge, often between two glacier-carved corries") to zawn (a Cornish term for a "wave-smashed chasm in a cliff"). Mabey's forthcoming The Cabaret of Plants argues for "a new language" with which to accommodate the "selfhood" of plants: "metaphor and analogy may be the best we can do, but they will have to be toughened by an acceptance that the plant world is a parallel life system to our own, intimately connected with it, but still existentially different". George Monbiot is launching a project seeking new framings for the protection of the nature, "prompted by the miserable, uninspiring state of the language of conservation" and policy-making: "'Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead."

Landmarks, the book that has arisen from my own years of word work, is a celebration and defence of land language. Its fascination is with the mutual relations of place, word and spirit: how we landmark, and how we are landmarked in turn. Each of the nine glossaries is matched with a chapter exploring the work of those writers who have used words exactly and exactingly when describing specific places. "The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there," observed JA Baker in The Peregrine (1967), a book that brilliantly shows how such seeing might occur in language, written as it is in prose that has "the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree". The terrain about which Baker wrote with such committing force was the coastal Essex of saltings, spinneys, sea walls and mudflats. Compelled by the high gold horizons of this old countryside, even as it was undergoing the assault of big-field farming in the 1950s and 1960s, Baker developed a new style with which to evoke its odd magnificence. His sentences are full of neologisms: the adjectives he torqued into verbs ("The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedgerows"), and the verbs he incites to misbehaviour ("Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse").

I have long been drawn to the work of writers who - in Emerson's phrase - seek to "pierce rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things". Baker is one such writer, Robinson another, Nan Shepherd a third. Shepherd was a word-hoarder, and her slim masterpiece The Living Mountain carries a long glossary of Scots terms, which abounds with walking words ( spangin', for "walking vigorously") and weather words: smoored, for "smothered in snow", and the unforgettable roarie bummlers, meaning "fast-moving storm clouds". Roger Deakin, while writing his modern classics Waterlog and Wildwood, gathered wood words and water words. John Muir relished the technical language of botany ( bract, bole, pistillate) but also delighted in his own coinages.

For all of these writers, to use language well is to use it particularly: precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention. "I want my writing to bring people not just to think of 'trees' as they mostly do now," wrote Deakin in a notebook, "but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree". Muir, spending his first summer working as a shepherd among the pines of the Sierra Nevada in California, reflected in his journal that "Every tree calls for special admiration. I have been making many sketches and regret that I cannot draw every needle."

Strange events occurred in the course of the years and journeys I spent writing Landmarks - convergences that pressed at the limits of coincidence, and tended to the eerie. They included the discovery of a "tunnel of swords and axes" in Cumbria, guided by a Finnish folk tale; an encounter with a peregrine in south Cambridge on the day I went to look through Baker's telescopes and binoculars; the experience of walking into the pages of Shepherd's The Living Mountain in the Cairngorms; and the widening ripples of a forgotten place word, found in a folder in Suffolk, left behind by a man who had died. Strangest of all these strangenesses, though, was the revelation in the week I finished the book, that its originating dream of a glossary of landscape-language so vast it might encompass the world had, almost, come true.

That revelation came as a letter sent by a scholar of languages living in Qatar, and reading the letter made me feel as if I had stepped into a story by Borges or Calvino. For the last 15 years, he explained, he had been working on a global glossary of landscape terms. His name was Abdal Hamid Fitzwilliam-Hall, he had been born in Cyrenaica, now eastern Libya, had grown up among the kopjes and veldt of what was then Southern Rhodesia, and it was while studying Arabic, and walking the black lava fields ( harrah) and granite domes ( hadbah) of the Hejaz mountains in western Saudia Arabia, that he decided to begin gathering place words from the Arabic dialects, before they were swept away forever. But his task soon began to grip him with the force of an obsession, and he moved into neighbouring Semitic and African-Eurasian languages, then to the Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Nordic and Slavic language families, and then backwards in time to the first Sumerian cuneiform records of c3100 BCE.

The entries for individual words grew, some to several pages in length, as a meshwork of cross-reference thrived between languages and usages. Topographically, he ranged from mountain tops to city forms. Linguistically, he worked through more than 140 languages, from Afrikaans to Zande. His hope, he said, was to show "that the land is layered in language as surely as the rocks are layered beneath its surface". The work had become, he told me, so complex in its structures and so infinitely extendable in its concerns that he did not envisage completing it, only bringing it to a point of abandonment that might also be a point of publication. "The project has," he said almost embarrassedly, "something of the fabulous about it."

Later, he emailed me as an attachment the section of the glossary covering those words beginning with the letter "b". "I hope the file size can be accommodated," he wrote. I double-clicked it. The document opened in Word, and I watched the page count tick up as my computer ascertained the extent of the text. The count hit 100 pages, then 200, then 300 ... it settled at last on 343 pages. All those pages in 11-point font, just for "b". Then I read the note preceding the first entry (" bā (Akkadian, jungbabylonisch lex.): water "): "This glossary is a work in progress. At the present time ... it is some 3,500 pages long and contains around 50,000 separate terms or headwords." I sat back in my seat, amazed and haunted by this extraordinary scholar, out there in the desert, gathering and patterning a work of words that might keep us from slipping off into abstract space.

So Landmarks began with the "Peat Glossary", and it ended with Abdal's world-spanning magnum opus. In between, I have realised that although place words are being lost, they are also being created. As I travelled I met new terms as well as salvaging old ones: a painter in the Western Isles who used landskein to refer to the braid of blue horizon lines on a hazy day; a five-year-old girl who concocted honeyfur to describe the soft seeds of grasses pinched between fingertips. We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time and inclination. This is why Landmarks moves over its course from the peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic, through to the fresh-minted terms and stories of young children at play on the outskirts of a Cambridgeshire town. And this is why I decided to leave blank the final glossary of the book - there to hold the place-words that have yet to be coined.

is published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 March.

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The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape

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For decades the leading nature writer has been collecting unusual words for landscapes and natural phenomena - from aquabob to zawn. It's a lexicon we need to cherish in an age when a junior dictionary finds room for 'broadband' but has no place for 'bluebell'

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https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/print-edition/2022/march/2533/feature/jewellery-and-watches-nuggets-of-truth-from-the-kildonan-gold-rush/

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The Kildonan Gold Rush was a short-lived affair.

A solitary nugget of gold weighing about 10 pennyweights was found in the River Helmsdale in 1818 and a ring made for the landowner, the 1st Duke of Sutherland (1758-1833).

However, it was the discovery of gold in the local burns half a century later by Robert Nelson Gilchrist, a native of Kildonan who had spent 17 years in the goldfields of Australia, that caused a brief explosion of interest. At a time when tales of striking it rich in California or New South Wales were strong in the memory, the possibility of panning for nuggets in the rivers of Scotland was a good news story. The Illustrated London News ran a substantial feature in May 1869.

More than 600 adventurers made their way to the Highlands in 1869, each of them paying George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, the 3rd Duke of Sutherland, £1 a month and a cut of the profits for the permission to pan a small claim.

Some were the crofters who had been evicted from Sutherland land during the Highland Clearances and forced to eke out a living fishing for herring.

Two temporary settlements were established: a makeshift shanty town on the edge of the Kildonan Burn that went by the name Baile an Or (Town of Gold), the other the Carn na Buth (Hill of the Tents) on the edge of the Suisgill Burn.

Small pickings

In truth, alluvial deposits in Kildonan were relatively small. So too the seam of grains found in the bedrock. Before the year was out, the price of gold had fallen and the duke was receiving complaints from his tenant farmers and salmon fishermen about the local disruption.

He was also concerned that the deer-stalking season would be compromised and so refused to grant any more licences. Prospecting came to an abrupt end on December 31, 1869.

Jewellery made from Kildonan gold is rare indeed. The ring made for the Sutherlands in 1818 remains with the family, while a handful of other pieces reside in local museums.

Accordingly, there was huge interest in a Victorian gold locket fashioned with four small gold nuggets and inscribed Kildonan that came for sale at Chorley's (27% buyer's premium inc VAT) in Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire, on January 25.

A note with the lot read: Locket made of gold from the Duke of Sutherland's Mine at Kildonan (near Dunrobin) Sutherlandshire. Given to Louisa Blanche Howard (Mrs Cecil Foljambe) July 1869 by Charlotte Duchess of Norfolk [1788-1870] who was daughter of the 1st Duke of Sutherland and Elizabeth Countess of Sutherland.

The provenance was verified by the consignor. It came for sale with an estimate of £600-800 from the family of the Earls of Liverpool and by descent from Louisa Blanche Howard (1842-71) who had married Cecil Foljambe, the 1st Earl in 1869. There was some institutional interest in this piece, but it sold to a Scottish private buyer well above hopes at £10,000.

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Nuggets of truth from the Kildonan Gold Rush

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The Kildonan Gold Rush was a short-lived affair. A solitary nugget of gold weighing about 10 pennyweights was found in the River Helmsdale in 1818 and a ring made for the landowner, the 1st Duke of Sutherland (1758-1833).

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Nan Shepherd's writing on the Cairngorms & the source of the Avon

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Nan Shepherd's writing on the Cairngorms & the source of the Avon

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/20/living-mountain-nan-shepherd-review

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How close I came to overlooking this book. From a heap of neglected and not-so-neglected works resurrected by Canongate, I chose this because it looked like the runt of the litter. And what kind of a serious writer calls herself "Nan"? But there was an anonymous quote from this very newspaper on the back: "The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain." A large claim, I thought. We'll see about that.

After about three pages, I began to see why those words had been written. After about 11 pages, by the time she had described seeing a view from high up a mountain, I was giddy with something halfway between delight and vertigo, and wondering whether calling it "the finest book ever written on" etc was not in itself somehow mealy mouthed and inadequate praise.

I will quote the bit that made me realise what I was strongly suspecting - that I was reading a work of the highest calibre: "In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the world is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of the landscape bristles - though 'bristles' is a word of too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the Earth must see itself."

If you have a beating heart, you will have inadvertently paused to take in the simple majesty of that last sentence. Page after page, line after line, contains something as arresting as that, as plain and bracing as the water of a mountain stream. (About which she writes amazingly, too.) When she is not doing that, she is making magic before your eyes with the English language. One reads something extraordinary, and then, in language only slightly less extraordinary, she shows you how she did it: "In the darkness one may touch fires from the Earth itself." Eh? Then: "Sparks fly round one's feet as the nails strike rock, and sometimes, if one disturbs black ooze in passing, there leap in it minute pricks of phosphorescent light."

From which detail you may deduce that this was written, or experienced, at a time when hob-nailed climbing boots were the norm. (I am tempted to buy or make a pair of my own to experience this phenomenon for myself.) The manuscript was completed in 1944, she showed it to a friend, who although loving it wondered whether it might not need a map and some photographs. And added that it might be difficult to find a publisher.

Shepherd sent it off once, received a polite letter of rejection, and then left it in a drawer until 1977, when Aberdeen University Press printed a small edition. And there it might have been forgotten, but Robert Macfarlane was introduced to it by "a former friend" (as he rather darkly puts it). "I read it, and was changed," he says in his first-rate introduction (I can think of no higher praise than to say it stands up to Shepherd's prose).

If you read it, you too will feel changed. This is sublime, in the 18th-century sense, when landscapes like these were terrifying. And she achieves it in language that is almost incantatory, like a spell: "... birdsfoot trefoil, tormentil, blaeberry, the tiny genista, alpine lady's mantle ..." runs one short list of the local flora, and it was only on rereading that I realised I had never heard of one of these flowers before, or could tell what they looked like.

But while reading it, they are - because of the power of the surrounding writing - fleetingly visible. Does that sound like nonsense? I hope not. (And I will fight anyone who says this book is nonsense. It's common sense, cubed.)

To intrude a note of coarseness, £10 might seem a lot for a book barely over 100 pages long. But it's not: it's over 1,000 pages long, because you are going to read it at least 10 times - and find something different in it each time. It's like Shepherd's landscape, constantly renewed: "However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them."

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The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd - review

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Nan Shepherd's prose is as bracing as water from a mountain stream. By Nicholas Lezard

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br9bIOz4_8A

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Music And The Creative Path (Interview with Hayden Thorpe)

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Considering curves

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I found that annealing the braided wire before folding led to the piece becoming too flat, with not enough bounce/ movement. Pinning and heating after folding & before making adjustments worked better.

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Silver sample

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Concertina folding

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Hammered, braided, wavy wire. Getting consecutively thicker

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Nesting wire

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3- Density, Cynthia Cousens. 1996.

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NMS- Fritz Maierhofer. Tin, gold. 1985.

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NMS

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NMS

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NMS- Jean Muir. 'Curved organic forms complement the Great Barrier Reef theme of the Australian Bicentennial Collection'. 1988

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NMS- Hull of Viking longboat

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NMS- Andy Goldsworthy 'River' 1998. Clay from Drumlanrig, Dumfriesshire

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NMS

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NMS

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NMS

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NMS

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NMS- Plaited wire ribbon

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NMS

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NMS

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NMS- chainmail

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NMS- Hat made from hair-moss

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NMS wicker baskets reconstruction

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https://www.susancrossjewellery.com/gallery

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Gallery | Susan Cross : Jewellery : Edinburgh

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The gallery focuses on selected works from my portfolio and has been organised by decade in date order.

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# data[].attributes.body
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O118131/ring-nele-e-r/

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Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections

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In the early post-war years jewellery began to be accepted as an art form or 'wearable art', expressing the character of the wearer as much as that of the designer. In liberating themselves from the conventions of traditional jewellery, designers looked back to the modernist principles of the Bauhaus and to earlier avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism, Cubism and Constructivism. This allowed them to create unique designs, often with a sculptural quality. Jewels of this period are often abstract in design and asymmetrical.

E. R. Nele (Renée) was born in 1932 and studied in Berlin, Paris and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London where she was a friend and contemporary of Gerda Flöckinger. She participated in the International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, curated by Graham Hughes at the Goldsmiths Company in 1961. She then moved to the Berliner Akademie and subsequently to the Paris workshop of Lacourière. She is a sculptor and graphic designer, but also made jewellery. Her best known work is 'Die Rampe', a sculpture commemorating the Holocaust.

Categories

Object type

Materials and techniques

Brief description

Ring with a gold wire bezel and hoop with applied pellets, by E R Nele, Germany, 1957-60.

Physical description

Ring with a gold wire bezel and hoop with applied pellets

Dimensions

Height: 3.2cm

Width: 2.9cm

Depth: 2.7cm

Object history

A second edition of a ring shown at the International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery in 1961

Summary

In the early post-war years jewellery began to be accepted as an art form or 'wearable art', expressing the character of the wearer as much as that of the designer. In liberating themselves from the conventions of traditional jewellery, designers looked back to the modernist principles of the Bauhaus and to earlier avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism, Cubism and Constructivism. This allowed them to create unique designs, often with a sculptural quality. Jewels of this period are often abstract in design and asymmetrical.

E. R. Nele (Renée) was born in 1932 and studied in Berlin, Paris and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London where she was a friend and contemporary of Gerda Flöckinger. She participated in the International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, curated by Graham Hughes at the Goldsmiths Company in 1961. She then moved to the Berliner Akademie and subsequently to the Paris workshop of Lacourière. She is a sculptor and graphic designer, but also made jewellery. Her best known work is 'Die Rampe', a sculpture commemorating the Holocaust.

Collection

Accession number

Explore the Collections contains over a million catalogue records, and over half a million images. It is a working database that includes information compiled over the life of the museum. Some of our records may contain offensive and discriminatory language, or reflect outdated ideas, practice and analysis. We are committed to addressing these issues, and to review and update our records accordingly.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ring | Nele, E. R. | V&A Explore The Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the early post-war years jewellery began to be accepted as an art form or 'wearable art', expressing the character of the wearer as much as that of the designer. In liberating themselves from the conventions of traditional jewellery, designers looked back to the modernist principles of the Bauhaus and to earlier avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism, Cubism and Constructivism.

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https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1897-0401-252

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Gold cylindrical bead; formed of wire block-twisted into a spiral and soldered together.

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https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1852-0329-366

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Description

Thirteen copper alloy cylinders of coiled wire.

Curator's comments

A summary introduction to the Bähr Collection of 1852 Professor Johann Karl Bähr (1801-1869) held a chair first as the Riga Academy of Art and subsequently at Dresden. He began to form an archaeological collection of mainly Balt and Finno-Ugrian material following the floods along the River Daugava (Duna) in summer 1837, which uncovered or washed out several inhumation cemeteries of the period, notably at Aizkraukle (formerly Ascheraden) and Sigulda (Segewold). Violent political unrest on the Continent in 1848-49 seems to have been one of the chief reasons behind his decision to sell his collection, as well as disillusion with the debate over the significance of the material he had assembled, which gainsaid his own view that the Iron Age artefacts had belonged to the native Finno-Ugrian Livs. The collection was acquired by the British Museum in 1852 on account of perceived analogies to Viking-period finds that were being made in England. Although no original manuscript catalogue seems to have reached London, Bähr published an account of his excavations at Aizkraukle and Sigulda (Bähr 1850). This forms the basis of and supplements the information about findspots recorded in the register. But it still itemises only eight of the fifty or more graves that he excavated at the former site and gives only a small selection of those from the latter and the region of Daugmale. There appear to be further arrangements of objects by significant groups in the register, which possibly indicate grave assemblages that future research may be able to identify. (Barry Ager)

Department

Britain, Europe and Prehistory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Description Thirteen copper alloy cylinders of coiled wire. Curator's comments A summary introduction to the Bähr Collection of 1852 Professor Johann Karl Bähr (1801-1869) held a chair first as the Riga Academy of Art and subsequently at Dresden.

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https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O122082/ring-unknown/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections

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The Viking were the seafaring peoples of Scandinavia in the early medieval period. They were skilled metalworkers and attached a high importance to precious metals. Large hoards of coins and gold and silver jewellery have been found in Scandinavia and across northern Europe. Gold jewellery showed status and success as a trader and a raider and was worn by men and women. It could be reused as currency - for much of their history, Vikings did not have a settled currency but would use other currencies such as Islamic or Byzantine coins or pieces of gold or silver jewellery hacked into pieces and valued according to their weight.

A Viking leader rewarded and retained the loyalty of his followers by gifts of gold or jewellery and by sharing the spoils of raids. Giving jewellery was both a concrete reward and an acknowledgment of the recipient's place in the social hierachy. The saga of Egil Skallagrimson describes the battles which Egil fought on behalf of the British king Aethelstan and states his pride was only satisfied by being given both the seat of honour at a feast but also a gold arm-ring, symbolically presented on the tip of a sword. Aethelstan was thereby fulfilling his role as good lord and 'ring-giver'.

The twisted shape of this ring is quite commonly seen in Viking finger rings but also as arm or neck rings. It could either be a simple gold twist or a more complicated form made of plaited gold wires.

This ring forms part of a collection of 760 rings and engraved gems from the collection of Edmund Waterton (1830-87). Waterton was one of the foremost ring collectors of the nineteenth century and was the author of several articles on rings, a book on English devotion to the Virgin Mary and an unfinished catalogue of his collection (the manuscript is now the National Art Library). Waterton was noted for his extravagance and financial troubles caused him to place his collection in pawn with the London jeweller Robert Phillips. When he was unable to repay the loan, Phillips offered to sell the collection to the Museum and it was acquired in 1871. A small group of rings which Waterton had held back were acquired in 1899.

Categories

Object type

Materials and techniques

Brief description

Gold ring, of plaited wire, tapering towards the back where they are beaten flat, Viking, 9th to 11th century

Physical description

Gold ring, of plaited wire, tapering towards the back where they are beaten flat

Dimensions

Height: 2.9cm

Width: 3cm

Depth: 0.8cm

Style

Object history

Ex Waterton Collection.

There are comparable rings in the British Museum (Dalton 213, 214, 215, 215A) and in the National Museums of Scotland.

Summary

The Viking were the seafaring peoples of Scandinavia in the early medieval period. They were skilled metalworkers and attached a high importance to precious metals. Large hoards of coins and gold and silver jewellery have been found in Scandinavia and across northern Europe. Gold jewellery showed status and success as a trader and a raider and was worn by men and women. It could be reused as currency - for much of their history, Vikings did not have a settled currency but would use other currencies such as Islamic or Byzantine coins or pieces of gold or silver jewellery hacked into pieces and valued according to their weight.

A Viking leader rewarded and retained the loyalty of his followers by gifts of gold or jewellery and by sharing the spoils of raids. Giving jewellery was both a concrete reward and an acknowledgment of the recipient's place in the social hierachy. The saga of Egil Skallagrimson describes the battles which Egil fought on behalf of the British king Aethelstan and states his pride was only satisfied by being given both the seat of honour at a feast but also a gold arm-ring, symbolically presented on the tip of a sword. Aethelstan was thereby fulfilling his role as good lord and 'ring-giver'.

The twisted shape of this ring is quite commonly seen in Viking finger rings but also as arm or neck rings. It could either be a simple gold twist or a more complicated form made of plaited gold wires.

This ring forms part of a collection of 760 rings and engraved gems from the collection of Edmund Waterton (1830-87). Waterton was one of the foremost ring collectors of the nineteenth century and was the author of several articles on rings, a book on English devotion to the Virgin Mary and an unfinished catalogue of his collection (the manuscript is now the National Art Library). Waterton was noted for his extravagance and financial troubles caused him to place his collection in pawn with the London jeweller Robert Phillips. When he was unable to repay the loan, Phillips offered to sell the collection to the Museum and it was acquired in 1871. A small group of rings which Waterton had held back were acquired in 1899.

Bibliographic references

Bury, Shirley, Introduction to Rings, London, 1984, p.22, cat 23 C

Oman, Charles, Catalogue of rings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1930, reprinted Ipswich, 1993, p.64, cat. 230

Bury, Shirley, Jewellery Gallery Summary Catalogue (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982), 32/ H/ 8

Waterton, Edmund Dactyliotheca Watertoniana: a descriptive catalogue of the finger-rings in the collection of Mrs Waterton, (manuscript, 1866, now in National Art Library)

Collection

Accession number

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ring | Unknown | V&A Explore The Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Viking were the seafaring peoples of Scandinavia in the early medieval period. They were skilled metalworkers and attached a high importance to precious metals. Large hoards of coins and gold and silver jewellery have been found in Scandinavia and across northern Europe.

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https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O143086/pendant-sir-alfred-gilbert/

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Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections

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On display at V&A South Kensington

Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery

Sir Alfred Gilbert was one of turn-of-the-century Britain's most prominent sculptors. His most famous public work is Eros in Piccadilly circus, London. Eros is made of aluminium, and Gilbert's interest in experimenting with metal also led him to design highly distinctive pieces of jewellery. Many of these used wire, set with inexpensive materials such as glass, shell, or semi-precious stones. Their spontaneous and informal appearance reflects the fact that Gilbert's jewellery was often made on the spur of the moment for friends or family.

Gilbert did occasionally create formal jewels, which showcased his unusual style in more precious materials. These included a mayoral chain for the town of Preston and a presidential badge and chain for the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, of which he was a member.

Categories

Object type

Materials and techniques

Hand-wrought iron wire and glass

Brief description

Pendant of iron wire and glass, designed and made by Sir Alfred Gilbert, England, probably 1890-1910

Physical description

Pendant of iron wire and glass, designed and made by Sir Alfred Gilbert, England, probably 1890-1910

Dimensions

Height: 6.7cm

Width: 2.2cm

Depth: 1.1cm

Style

Credit line

Given by Mr Sigismund Goetze in the name of the artist

Summary

Sir Alfred Gilbert was one of turn-of-the-century Britain's most prominent sculptors. His most famous public work is Eros in Piccadilly circus, London. Eros is made of aluminium, and Gilbert's interest in experimenting with metal also led him to design highly distinctive pieces of jewellery. Many of these used wire, set with inexpensive materials such as glass, shell, or semi-precious stones. Their spontaneous and informal appearance reflects the fact that Gilbert's jewellery was often made on the spur of the moment for friends or family.

Gilbert did occasionally create formal jewels, which showcased his unusual style in more precious materials. These included a mayoral chain for the town of Preston and a presidential badge and chain for the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, of which he was a member.

Collection

Accession number

About this object record

Explore the Collections contains over a million catalogue records, and over half a million images. It is a working database that includes information compiled over the life of the museum. Some of our records may contain offensive and discriminatory language, or reflect outdated ideas, practice and analysis. We are committed to addressing these issues, and to review and update our records accordingly.

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Pendant | Sir Alfred Gilbert | V&A Explore The Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On display at V&A South Kensington Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery Sir Alfred Gilbert was one of turn-of-the-century Britain's most prominent sculptors. His most famous public work is Eros in Piccadilly circus, London. Eros is made of aluminium, and Gilbert's interest in experimenting with metal also led him to design highly distinctive pieces of jewellery.

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https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O55143/lace-ascot-brooch-fisch-arline-m/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections

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On display at V&A South Kensington

Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery

The pioneer in adapting textile techniques to metals was the American jeweller and teacher Arline Fisch. She is particularly known for her light and airy knitted pieces. In the 1970s she worked in silver or gold wire, and from the 1980s in colourful coated copper wire.

Arline Fisch's interest in textiles goes back to her childhood, and was revived when she first began to teach in 1957. By the mid-seventies Fisch explored the boundaries of jewellery and clothing with her knitted, braided or woven body adornments or wearable body art. At first she knitted the wires by hand but ater used a loom. In 1975 she wrote a book, which has since been reprinted, explaining the various techniques she has become renowned for: " Textile Techniques in Metal for Jewelers, Sculptors and Textile Artists" (New York, 1975).

Fisch travelled extensively and her first inspiration was Egyptian jewellery, but even more important was her fascination for Pre-Columbian textiles. She studied cultures and their artefacts worldwide, however the Mediterranean cultures, Viking and Celtic metalwork and Elizabethan ruff collars particularly caught her interest.

The cravat brooch here, is in fact, inspired by a 17th-century 'lace' cravat of carved limewood by Grinling Gibbons in the V&A's collection and transformed into subtle and pliable wires, almost like a textile.

For decades Arline Fisch has taught generations of young artist jewellers and been at the forefront of American contemporary jewellery.

Category

Object type

Materials and techniques

Brief description

Knitted silver wire brooch, designed and made by Arline Fisch, 1980; USA.

Physical description

Large brooch of loosely-knitted silver wire in the shape of a cravat. A pin fastening is concealed behind the bow at the top of the brooch.

Dimensions

Height: 28cm

Width: 23.5cm

Depth: 4cm

Credit line

Object history

Inspired by a 17th century 'lace' cravat of carved limewood by Grinling Gibbons in the V&A's collection.

Summary

The pioneer in adapting textile techniques to metals was the American jeweller and teacher Arline Fisch. She is particularly known for her light and airy knitted pieces. In the 1970s she worked in silver or gold wire, and from the 1980s in colourful coated copper wire.

Arline Fisch's interest in textiles goes back to her childhood, and was revived when she first began to teach in 1957. By the mid-seventies Fisch explored the boundaries of jewellery and clothing with her knitted, braided or woven body adornments or wearable body art. At first she knitted the wires by hand but ater used a loom. In 1975 she wrote a book, which has since been reprinted, explaining the various techniques she has become renowned for: " Textile Techniques in Metal for Jewelers, Sculptors and Textile Artists" (New York, 1975).

Fisch travelled extensively and her first inspiration was Egyptian jewellery, but even more important was her fascination for Pre-Columbian textiles. She studied cultures and their artefacts worldwide, however the Mediterranean cultures, Viking and Celtic metalwork and Elizabethan ruff collars particularly caught her interest.

The cravat brooch here, is in fact, inspired by a 17th-century 'lace' cravat of carved limewood by Grinling Gibbons in the V&A's collection and transformed into subtle and pliable wires, almost like a textile.

For decades Arline Fisch has taught generations of young artist jewellers and been at the forefront of American contemporary jewellery.

Bibliographic reference

David McFadden, Ida Rigby, Robert Bell, Elegant Fantasy. The Jewelry of Arline Fisch, Stuttgart 1999,

Collection

Accession number

About this object record

Explore the Collections contains over a million catalogue records, and over half a million images. It is a working database that includes information compiled over the life of the museum. Some of our records may contain offensive and discriminatory language, or reflect outdated ideas, practice and analysis. We are committed to addressing these issues, and to review and update our records accordingly.

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'Lace Ascot' | Fisch, Arline M. (Professor) | V&A Explore The Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On display at V&A South Kensington Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery The pioneer in adapting textile techniques to metals was the American jeweller and teacher Arline Fisch. She is particularly known for her light and airy knitted pieces.

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https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O73667/necklace-calder-alexander/

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Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On display at V&A South Kensington

Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery

The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was born in Philadephia and originally studied engineering. By his own account, his first jewellery was made for his sister's dolls when he was aged 8, out of discarded copper wire. Wire remained an important element in his larger work and his preferred material for jewellery. He worked in both silver and brass, either hammering or twisting the wire to achieve strong, simple forms. Calder's jewellery exemplifies a light-hearted genius. It introduced a highly individual note to the jewellery of the 1930s.

Categories

Object type

Materials and techniques

Conical spirals of brass wire, joined together by brass loops

Brief description

Necklace of conical spirals of brass wire. Designed and made by Alexander Calder, Paris, 1938.

Physical description

Conical spirals of brass wire, increasing in size towards the centre joined by brass loops.

Dimensions

Unfastened length: 39.4cm

Object history

Summary

The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was born in Philadephia and originally studied engineering. By his own account, his first jewellery was made for his sister's dolls when he was aged 8, out of discarded copper wire. Wire remained an important element in his larger work and his preferred material for jewellery. He worked in both silver and brass, either hammering or twisting the wire to achieve strong, simple forms. Calder's jewellery exemplifies a light-hearted genius. It introduced a highly individual note to the jewellery of the 1930s.

Bibliographic reference

'Jewels and Jewellery' Clare Phillips, V&A Publications, 2000

Collection

Accession number

About this object record

Explore the Collections contains over a million catalogue records, and over half a million images. It is a working database that includes information compiled over the life of the museum. Some of our records may contain offensive and discriminatory language, or reflect outdated ideas, practice and analysis. We are committed to addressing these issues, and to review and update our records accordingly.

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Necklace | Calder, Alexander | V&A Explore The Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On display at V&A South Kensington Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was born in Philadephia and originally studied engineering. By his own account, his first jewellery was made for his sister's dolls when he was aged 8, out of discarded copper wire.

# data[].attributes.body
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O73764/collar-nele-e-r/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On display at V&A South Kensington

Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery

In the early post-war years jewellery began to be accepted as an art form or 'wearable art', expressing the character of the wearer as much as that of the designer. In liberating themselves from the conventions of traditional jewellery, designers looked back to the modernist principles of the Bauhaus and to earlier avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism, Cubism and Constructivism. This allowed them to create unique designs, often with a sculptural quality. Jewels of this period are often abstract in design and asymmetrical.

E. R. Nele studied in Berlin, Paris and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. She then moved to the Paris workshop of Lacourière. She is a sculptor and graphic designer, but also made jewellery. All these elements come together in this early neckpiece. Her later work was more sculptural with flowing shapes, often bizarre almost bordering on Surrealism.

This neckpiece won the Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale of 1957.

This collar was exhibited at the Milan Triennale of 1957 and also at the International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery held in Goldsmiths' Hall, London, in 1961. The aim of this exhibition was to demonstrate the artistic potential of jewellery and to revitalise the British jewellery trade. This had been depressed by wartime austerity measures and prohibitive purchase taxes.

Category

Object type

Materials and techniques

Twisted gold wire, formed into panels

Brief description

Gold wire collar, designed and made by E.R. Nele, Germany, 1957.

Physical description

Collar of gold wire twisted into irregular openwork panels.

Dimensions

Object history

Shown at the Milan Triennale of 1957 and at the Internation Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, Goldsmiths Hall, 1961.

Production

Made for the Milan Triennale of 1957

Summary

In the early post-war years jewellery began to be accepted as an art form or 'wearable art', expressing the character of the wearer as much as that of the designer. In liberating themselves from the conventions of traditional jewellery, designers looked back to the modernist principles of the Bauhaus and to earlier avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism, Cubism and Constructivism. This allowed them to create unique designs, often with a sculptural quality. Jewels of this period are often abstract in design and asymmetrical.

E. R. Nele studied in Berlin, Paris and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. She then moved to the Paris workshop of Lacourière. She is a sculptor and graphic designer, but also made jewellery. All these elements come together in this early neckpiece. Her later work was more sculptural with flowing shapes, often bizarre almost bordering on Surrealism.

This neckpiece won the Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale of 1957.

This collar was exhibited at the Milan Triennale of 1957 and also at the International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery held in Goldsmiths' Hall, London, in 1961. The aim of this exhibition was to demonstrate the artistic potential of jewellery and to revitalise the British jewellery trade. This had been depressed by wartime austerity measures and prohibitive purchase taxes.

Bibliographic reference

'Jewels and Jewellery' Clare Phillips, V&A Publications, 2000

Collection

Accession number

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Collar | Nele, E. R. | V&A Explore The Collections

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On display at V&A South Kensington Jewellery, Rooms 91, The William and Judith Bollinger Gallery In the early post-war years jewellery began to be accepted as an art form or 'wearable art', expressing the character of the wearer as much as that of the designer.

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