Katy Gillam-Hull is a crafts artist and teacher with an MA in Jewellery and Metal from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Contemporary Applied Arts from the University of Hertfordshire with a period spent at Oslo Academy of the Arts. Based in London, she makes objects and jewellery mostly for museum- and gallery-specific installations. Her previous residencies and exhibitions include working with St Albans Museum, Ruthin Craft Centre, Munich Jewellery Week and London Craft Week.
Katy Gillam-Hull
Katy Gillam-Hull is a maker of objects, jewellery and walks that reflect upon found and archival materials and their capacity for encounter and for accumulating narrative through time. She often re-imagines these historic materials into speculative new forms and compositions, gathering them into collections that are explored through museum displays and guided walks. Katy’s fascination with the temporality of material is reflected in her use of heritage crafts techniques, inspired by their intimate history of making by hand. However, her interrogation and subversion of such techniques results in an aesthetic of both a contemporary and historical artefact, a purposefully delightful confusion that encourages curiosity in the audience. Katy’s work currently explores themes of memorial, heirloom, monument and the anthropocentric flaws and naivety of these. She pays attention to the accidental material inheritance of the world found in the waste and remnants of history and the stories they may tell.
The Beads of Gresham Street is a collection of beads made from found glass, inspired by fragments of Roman London beads also reworked and reimagined from found glass. The beads are experienced through a guided walk in central London that speculates, what if beads kept occurring in this place, just as the waves sort pebbles into tidelines? What if time gathers and accumulates beads to this space? Throughout the walk beads are brought out and revealed, each new one sparking a narrative of that space and adding a chapter to the story, another bead on the bracelet. Passed between participants along the walk, the bracelet is collaboratively made, each selection of beads unique to that group just as the walkers’ experiences are. This blend of material and place creates a fascinating kind of encounter; a meeting with the temporality of the glass creates a sense of awe and connection through history, both rooted in the space through the embodiment of walking yet relocated from our surface assumptions and experience of place, a kind of material time travel.
Medium:
Glass beads, vintage boxes and bespoke waxed cotton jacket
- experiments in glass and silver
A collection of material experiments in handmade found glass enamels. Layered on to the silver, the enamel is fired in such a way that the inherent tensions within the silver and glass are revealed. The surface tension of the glass manipulates the silver and is dragged and accumulated into these ripples, almost like landscapes that echo the muddy shores where some of the glass was found. The collection of fragments was designed in collaboration with the material: waste silver was melted into new free-form ingots, showcasing the shape the silver flowed in to. Once rolled into sheet they form fragmentary shapes despite being whole, imaginary shards that encourage assumption and speculation from the viewer. This ability to be fascinated and led by material is yet another layer in this process of noticing its.
Medium:
Silver and found glass enamels
Silver and enamel brooch
Clusters of silver gathered around glass enamels like set stones, the ripples of oxidised silver forming silhouettes of classic antique jewellery. Gillam-Hull uses found and waste glass in an innovative enamelling technique, recognising the glass as an accidental material inheritance, and reworks the forms into new jewellery. This is a reimagining of waste into a new precious form, creating speculative heirlooms of history with the potential to be passed on again to new wearers.
More of this jewellery collection can be seen and purchased at www.katygillamhull.co.uk
