The Beginning and the End

   I'm finally dusting off the cobwebs of my blog as I finish off my three years in Birmingham. So since I last wrote here I have been working on my final collection called 'Tell It In Colour' inspired by the stories from the group of the same name (see www.tellitincolour.com). So here's a little about my process if you would like to know...
   I began by taking some of my personal favourite TIIC stories and brainstorming and creating mood boards around the imagery contained in them. The three stories I chose to use were 'The Other Side' , 'When a Car Becomes Your Home', and 'The Shawstreet Redemption'.

'The Other Side' is a story about a young person called Andy who lives on the protestant/catholic interface in Belfast- the story tells of how he had never crossed to the other side of the street but when riots broke out he along with his youth group took gift bags over to the other community to show they didn't support the fighting.

I took the imagery of bridges for this story and went through the design process of a ring resulting in the designs below

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The second story 'When a Car becomes Your Home' is about an organisation called Christians Against Poverty who in an act of national solidarity took part in 'sleep outs' in their cars to show people in debt that there was hope and a charity to help them through their problems. My imagery for this was car wheels and so I designed the pendants shown below...

The last story I used was 'The Shawstreet Redemption' which is a story about a lady called Jeanette who wants to see her street transformed into a friendlier place so endeavours to get to know her neighbours and even throws a street party. Since Jeanette is bringing light and hope to her street I took inspiration from street lamps and created this brooch...  

The ethos of Tell It In Colour is to pick out the colour from the grey amongst our communities so therefore my pieces were oxidised which is a treatment that turns the silver a grey colour and I used mystic topaz stones to add symbolic colour. Hopefully they do the stories and the group justice! One part of the project I really enjoyed was the marketing and communication of the pieces and the whole concept of using the jewellery to promote Tell It In Colour. Here is an example of the one of the adverts I designed-hopefully you will get the concept I was going for :)

So this is the body of work that ends my time at the School of Jewellery its been an amazing experience and steep learning curve that I truly believe will set me up for an exciting future. I am currently on the job hunt with the rest of the world but in the mean time my work will be part of an exciting evening showcasing all sorts of local talent in the Black Box in Belfast on thursday 7th July- be sure to come along now! check out www.platformbelfast.co.uk and my new website www.susiealexander.co.uk