POP 565 Wednesday 20 April 2011

Today’s POP is the POP office. And the winner is…

Recently Simon Fraser, the Central Saint Martins MA Course Director proudly announced the winner of a month long jewellery project in collaboration with Palladium Alliance. Leigh Cameron is the name. Now remember it!
The brief was… brief: Go off and create beautiful jewellery AND use the relatively unknown precious metal palladium.

POP: Tell us about the course you run.
Simon Fraser: I run an MA in design which is ceramics, furniture and jewellery. It's a bi-project so the students all bring in their vision of what they want to do, and that's what the course is about. They spend 2 years with us working on that vision. It's very hard work, but we've got a proper research period. And we love it. Because by the end of 2 years, we've got 20 people who all become experts in different areas and the course grows out like this. It's a bi-project masters and these are the pathways. I'm the jewellery subject leader. We work very closely with the team.

POP: Is it the first time you work with palladium and how did it differ from traditional metals?
S.F.: For me personally, yes! And certainty for many people we worked with in the industry. It's a much more interesting material than any of us expected. It's a precious metal, it’s very light and really strong. It's much lighter than gold but as you can see it's great and you get a fantastic surface.

POP: Any comments on your 5 finalists?
S.F.: I'm really thrilled about this. I’m always curious when we do these competitions. We didn't know what it was going to be like to actually work with palladium. In terms of the finalist, I'm really pleased. What’s been amazing for us is that the Palladium alliance allowed us to put our ceramics students, our furniture students and our jewellery students into the project. I was saying to them 'These people are all designers. They bring in completely different vision but they are all people who understand what we're trying to do. So let's see what happens.' And they were like ‘Yeah!’ And now look, we've got 2 jewellery students in the finalist, 2 furniture students and a ceramic student. The student’s have got a great sense of spacial arrangements, spacial awareness. They know how things might be constructed. When you come from the outside and you work with a jewellery production team, that means you can bring in your sensibility and it translates into another medium. What that tells you as a designer when you work with another medium, that tells you about your own work doesn't it? It allows you to look at what your doing. I think what is really important about the course is that we've got these groups of people who come to focus on their project. Part of the course is you learn skills as you go along. For us there are things in there that jewellers would never have done. Somebody like Leigh Cameron who works with furniture, you can see there is a very strong sense of spacial arrangement in there and its a very simple design. Jewellers don't do that. If it's that simple they are worried about it. They go 'People will think that I can only do simple'. But actually simple is a good idea. It gives us the opportunity to state the obvious. And in design sometimes it's about stating the obvious. Everyone goes 'Yeah I know that' but when you do it and people go 'Oh my god that's fantastic'. It’s a question of stating the obvious.