The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914
The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914

Author: Sarah Laurenson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1501357999

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Shortlisted for the History Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards, 2023 During the long 19th century, Scotland was home to an established body of skilled jewellers who were able to access a range of materials from the country's varied natural landscape: precious gold and silver; sparkling crystals and colourful stones; freshwater pearls, shells and parts of rare animals. Following these materials on their journey from hill and shore, across the jeweller's bench and on to the bodies of wearers, this book challenges the persistent notion that the forces of industrialisation led to the decline of craft. It instead reveals a vivid picture of skilled producers who were driving new and revived areas of hand skill, and who were key to fostering a focused cultural engagement with the natural world – among both producers and consumers – through the things they made. By placing producers and their skill in cultural context, the book reveals how examining the materiality of even the smallest of objects can offer new and multifaceted insights into the wider transformations that marked British history during the long 19th century. Uniting a vast array of jewellery objects with a range of other sources – including paintings, engravings, newspaper reports, letters, inventories of big houses and small workshops, sketchbooks, novels, works of literary geology and early travel writings – this book provides a deep dive into the cultural history of jewellery production through accessible thematic studies. In doing so, it sets out innovative methodologies for writing about the histories of craft production, the natural environment and the material world. Now available in a paperback edition, it will be an important addition to the bookshelf of cultural historians and those interested in Scotland's wild landscapes and natural objects.

The Material Landscapes of Scotland's Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914
The Material Landscapes of Scotland's Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914

Author: Sarah Laurenson

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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"Jewellery is used to adorn the human body, to mark wealth and status, and to build and mark personal and emotional ties between individuals. The role of goldsmiths and jewellers in manipulating materials to fuse symbolic and monetary value in precious and deeply meaningful objects has seen their skill command a high level of respect across time and place. Yet the making of jewellery during the modern era has received very little scholarly attention. The Material Landscapes of Scotland's Jewellery Craft 1780-1914 challenges the tired but persistent notion that industrialization, by replacing the human hand with the machine, destroyed skilled craftsmanship by exploring the neglected but rich area of Scotland's jewellery craft during the long 19th century. It demonstrates that industrialization was, in fact, the driving force behind a deeper engagement with hand skill and nature that is more closely associated with goldsmiths of the early modern period. The book explores the material, visual and symbolic dimensions to jewellery through a craft-based reading that considers these sources by fusing social and cultural history methods with approaches drawn from art, design and dress history. The making and wearing of jewellery are considered as embodied cultural practices throughout, forging a new methodological approach that can be applied more widely to the study of material things. By placing producers and their skill in cultural context, the book reveals how attending to the materiality of even the smallest of objects can offer new and multifaceted insights into the wider transformations that marked British history during the long 19th century. With its focus on the relationship between materials, making processes, and the social and cultural meanings of things the book offers a novel approach to the history of material culture"--

Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840
Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840

Author: Freya Gowrley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1501343351

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Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries' social and emotional lives. The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

Setting Up a Successful Jewellery Business
Setting Up a Successful Jewellery Business

Author: Angie Boothroyd

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1474241980

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An updated edition of the best-selling handbook, this all-encompassing guide for jewellery entrepreneurs of all levels covers key lessons for setting up, running and growing a jewellery business. From the college graduate looking to set up a workshop, to the established maker ready to expand their business, Setting up a Successful Jewellery Business equips creative jewellers with the essential knowledge and tools to operate a professional jewellery business. Encouraging individuals to define their business objectives and strategy for the future, the guide deals with topics including: · presenting your brand; · protecting your designs; · how much to charge for your work; · selling to shops, galleries and individuals; · creating your website and driving traffic to it; · managing your time and finances plus other essential business skills. Updated with two new chapters, an expanded section on social media and a revised appendix, this is an indispensable jeweller's companion that provides the resources to take your business forward.

Ceramic, Art and Civilisation
Ceramic, Art and Civilisation

Author: Paul Greenhalgh

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-24

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 1474239722

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In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.

The Transformation of Edinburgh
The Transformation of Edinburgh

Author: Richard Rodger

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-03-25

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 9780521602822

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This is a study of the physical transformation of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century.

Craft and Heritage
Craft and Heritage

Author: Susan Surette

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1350067598

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This collection of 19 original essays argues for a critical and sustained engagement between the fields of craft and heritage. The book's interdisciplinary and international array of authors consider how heritage and craft institutions, policies, practices and audiences encounter the constraints and opportunities of production, recognition and exhibition. Case studies spanning 125 years raise and address questions concerning authenticity and commodification, innovation and improvisation, diasporas and decolonization, global economies and national and professional identities. Authors also analyse mechanisms through which craft mobilises and has been harnessed by heritage processes and designations. Examples range from an Irish village at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the role of chronopolitics in contemporary Vietnamese pottery, to the invisibility of crochet within Swedish heritagisation processes and the application of game theory in a ceramics museum. With section one considering citizenship and identity, section two sustainability and section three dynamic craft in cultural institutions, Craft and Heritage interrogates how craft objects, makers and processes intersect with current heritage concerns and practices.

The New Politics of the Handmade
The New Politics of the Handmade

Author: Anthea Black

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1788316568

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Contemporary craft, art and design are inseparable from the flows of production and consumption under global capitalism. The New Politics of the Handmade features twenty-three voices who critically rethink the handmade in this dramatically shifting economy. The authors examine craft within the conditions of extreme material and economic disparity; a renewed focus on labour and materiality in contemporary art and museums; the political dimensions of craftivism, neoliberalism, and state power; efforts toward urban renewal and sustainability; the use of digital technologies; and craft's connections to race, cultural identity and sovereignty in texts that criss-cross five continents. They claim contemporary craft as a dynamic critical position for understanding the most immediate political and aesthetic issues of our time.

Sloppy Craft
Sloppy Craft

Author: Elaine Cheasley Paterson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-09-24

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1472533070

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Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts brings together leading international artists and critics to explore the possibilities and limitations of the idea of 'sloppy craft' – craft that is messy or unfinished looking in its execution or appearance, or both. The contributors address 'sloppiness' in contemporary art and craft practices including painting, weaving, sewing and ceramics, consider the importance of traditional concepts of skill, and the implications of sloppiness for a new 21st century emphasis on inter- and postdisciplinarity, as well as for activist, performance, queer and Aboriginal practices. In addition to critical essays, the book includes a 'conversation' section in which contemporary artists and practitioners discuss challenges and opportunities of 'sloppy craft' in their practice and teaching, and an afterword by Glenn Adamson.

The Material Culture of Basketry
The Material Culture of Basketry

Author: Stephanie Bunn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-10-29

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1350094048

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The Material Culture of Basketry celebrates basketry as a culturally significant skilled practice and as a theoretically rich discipline which has much to offer contemporary society. While sometimes understudied and underappreciated, it has much in common with mathematics and engineering, art, craft and design, and can also act as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. Contributors show how local knowledge of materials, plants and place are central to the craft. Case studies include the skill in weaverbird nest building (challenging how we perceive learning in craft and nature), an engineer's perspective on twining Peruvian grass bridges, and the local knowledge embodied in Pacific plaited patterns and knots. Photo-essays explore materials and techniques from the point of view of artists, anthropologists and mathematicians, revealing how the structure and skill in basketwork illustrate a significant form of textile technology. Thus, the book argues that the textures, patterns and geometric forms that emerge through basketwork reflect an embodied knowledge which expresses mathematical and engineering comprehension. The therapeutic value of the craft is recognised through a selection of case studies which consider basketry as a healing process for patients with brain injury, mental health problems, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. This reclaims basketry's significant role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well–being. Finally, basketry's inherently sustainable nature is also considered, demonstrating the continuation of basketry in spite of handwork's general decline and profiling new and recycled materials. Above all the book envisages basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing. It presents the craft as embodying care for skilled making and for the social and natural environments in which it flourishes.