Over Christmas 2021 I planned a new project for this year: an exciting and hopefully inspiring and sustaining idea for me. I am going to write a monthly blog. One article per month about … anything really. Anything that has relevance to my work as a jeweller and creative person. I often wish for a space to explain more, talk more and I think this might be a good space for it. We will see how it goes. I hope you will find it interesting!

Here now my first article, maybe a little different from the others I am planning, but I wanted to start with something special, something more personal …

Ancient Greece

Friday morning, 21st January 2022. I am on a train to London, excited as a child on her first school trip. I have not been to a museum in a long time and this is therefore really special, a gift to myself. The kids are in school and I have around six hours to get to London and back, walk to the museum and look around.

The weather is cold, frosty and the sun is somewhere behind the clouds but I am just getting in the mood, thinking about the hot sun in ancient Greece. It is taking me back to September 1997 when I went to Greece on a four-week travel scholarship to research contemporary Greek jewellery. This came at the end of my three years at Central St Martins for my jewellery degree. I had really needed a break. The trip took me to Athens, Crete and Ioannina. I visited countless museums, saw endless Greek vases, jewellery and just really enjoyed being away from London.

24 years later, a book gift from my husband and time over Christmas got me reading. I had already started on Greek mythology a year ago when both my husband and daughter read the Greek myths. Reading all these stories, imagining the scenes, landscapes and art I longed to be close to Greek history, Greek artefacts again. I have numerous books on Greek art, patterns and jewellery but seeing them in real life is different.

I finally get to the British Museum. It is still early but in the end I only manage to see two rooms but take in every last detail. School children with their notepads run around, trying to find this or that object on their list. It does not really interest them. I understand. What has changed for me? The time has come, it is the right moment. It makes sense.

Room 12 is about Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece in the Bronze Age, apparently the time in which Homer places the events of the Illiad and the Odyssey. Standing in front of the cases holding pieces of jewellery, pottery and carved stones seals I feel humbled and amazed. I have a book, entitled Greek Gold, of an exhibition I had seen at the British Museum in 1994, just as I was studying jewellery design. The close-up images are wonderful to look at to really appreciate the workmanship and detail of the pieces.

However, standing in front of the show-case of pieces found on Crete I am blown away by the scale. Minute, tiny balls of granulation and the most delicate filigree wires adorning the body of a fly or bee. No more than perhaps 20 mm long, the gold is worked with amazing expertise and skill.

(My image does not do justice to the piece.) Imagining the simplicity of tools and equipment available then - 1700-1550 BCE - the pieces attain yet another level of wonder.

Slowly, I work my way around the exhibits until I reach the next room: 13 – Greece 1050-520 BCE. Getting even more excited I cannot wait to see the painted vases with scenes of the Greek myths. But before I do, there are the examples of the Geometric period – the patterns I had come for.

I come to a vessel entitled The Elgin Amphora (760-750 BCE), this piece encapsulates the beauty of ancient artefacts for me. I stand in close proximity to this amphora, I can almost touch it, touch what a person, an artist created almost 2800 years ago. I can see him (I guess it would have been a man) in my mind, I can imagine a person with daily struggles, with a certain taste, how he sits in a workshop painting the vase. I see the perfection he created and yet, how the passage of time has added an extra dimension, a historical, imperfect, human dimension.

But it is not just the passage of time that I can see as damage and decay in the pieces on display, it is their use, their interaction with people from that time. I imagine how the jewellery adorned the women, the occasions they wore them, the person using one of these ceramic vessels for storing grains or oil – and to me this is the essence, the beauty of history: when objects open a window to a past world, to the lives and struggles of people long forgotten but whose lives somehow live on in these objects.

Finally, I turn around and come to the vases with mythological scenes. I smile under my mask and it feels as if I am meeting long-lost friends. I admire the beauty of the composition of the vessels, their proportions, the delicately drawn faces, limbs and clothes on the vases and the scenes come to life. I want to remember it all, but know I will buy another book to carry them home with me to live with me, to nourish and inspire my own work for some months to come.

[Amphora depicting Heracles bringing the Erymanthian boar to Eurystheus during his twelve labours; made in Athens around 550BCE.]