My posts are all to amuse and are fiction, sometimes inspired by my life. I often exaggerate to make things fun. All my advice is just my opinion and not intended as expert advice.
Thank you, Kirsteen
My posts are all to amuse and are fiction, sometimes inspired by my life. I often exaggerate to make things fun. All my advice is just my opinion and not intended as expert advice.
Thank you, Kirsteen
Press Release:
Silver Shell Jewellery
Recovering from Illness with Art.
Silver Shell Jewellery is the new business of designer / maker Kirsteen Lyons-Benson BA (Hons) born out of a desperate year of illness and lockdown it’s finding the shine in life again. www.silvershell.art
“I know my story is be no means unique. So many people have had a really unthinkable year. My family and I all caught corona in early March and I nursed the while household and worked hard while unwell. I was also volunteering on a helpline and listening to terrified old ladies locked in and unable to get food or help. The stress and illness took hold and I got long covid and have been unwell for a year. The government have been worse than useless restrictions and fear making future hope and recovery harder to achieve.
I am a textile designer and crated fabric designs for a studio in Europe but it is a shrinking industry and lockdowns have made it much worse, two billion pounds worth of fashion has been cancelled from Bangladesh alone this year. I was lost for a future.
I grew up in a craft pottery and my mum and I used to have a pottery together, my mum stated a new pottery in the garage during lockdown it has been her project keeping her creating and hopeful. I stated making pottery again and really enjoying it when I was strong enough. I remembered all my clay and modelling skills I have developed since a child. I also remembered that I had heard there was a clay made of silver you could sculpt into jewellery instead of more traditional methods. I have wanted to try it years ago but time had not permitted. Well the one thing you have while recovering from illness is time.
I watched some you tube tutorials and ordered some materials, I made simple things and experiments, some broke, some melted! I watched more tutorials I tried again, some worked. It became my passion, little bright objects emerging from the flames made me happy and hopeful about the future again.
The lockdown has been painful for so many people and I’m so glad it is ending. I hope my jewellery gives others the same feelings of renewed hope that designing and making it has given me.” Kirsteen
About Silver Shell Jewellery:
One off, original, contemporary silver jewellery. Handmade by Artist and designer Kirsteen Lyons-Benson BA (Hons).
Every piece is a little artwork, they are not made by machine, they are hand made by me one at a time. They are each given my love and create and attention.
These pieces are made by sculpting “metal clay” which is metal and a tiny amount of organic material, then I heat the hardened clay (with a blowtorch) to burn away the organic material leaving only silver metal behind. I then hand polish this to a shine. Hand made products from natural materials will always have slight differences one to another. I think this is part of the charm but it’s possible your jewellery will not be identical to the one photographed.
I have been creating art all my life, starting out with clay in my parents pottery when I was four years old, I have spent a lifetime learning to sculpt and paint and design. I create these pieces because I love to, I hope you enjoy owning them as much as I enjoy making them.
“When you make something unique you advance the culture, it’s not like owning something mass produced, that’s just repeating what came before, you own a little piece of the future. Art is life, art is peace, art is purpose, it’s worthwhile to support that in all of us.”
About Kirsteen the artist and designer:
Kirsteen Lyons-Benson is the child of two artists who met at Glasgow art school in the sixties, got married, and fled the city to a remote Scottish island, to live on a beach, in a tent, with two kittens and a chest of drawers!
Growing up in a craft pottery, and later a cottage in the woods, Kirsteen planned to rebel, and have central heating and breakdown cover when she grew up!
Grow up she did, and studied textile design, not fine art (more rebellion). She did very well at university winning two prestigious competitions and getting a job with a wallpaper manufacturer straight out of uni, it was new product development, so she went from there to other innovation companies and tried all sorts of middle class ideas out, including paying a mortgage, and working in PR, but soon found her parents were correct - they are very overrated ideas.
Kirsteen tried selling paintings on-line, London markets, starting and running a craft fair, starting a gallery and pottery, starting and running a face painting business, and finally returned to textile design to freelance from home, and be mum to a daughter and a son. Throughout this she has always taught art and created her own paintings.
After designing fashion fabrics for for a few years, she made the switch back to interior fabrics and wallpaper and signed with a design house in Europe.
For two years she created a drawing every day, just for the art of it, practice, effective relief from parenting and simply because it makes her happy. So many people were inspired, uplifted and delighted and wrote to her telling her that her art project had made them return to art, that she wanted to carry the movement forward somehow, the idea for her book stated there.
After the book Jewellery became the passion of the future for Kirsteen. Her love for style, fashion, nature, clay and shine all came together in a perfect art form. All her previous artforms and experience inform her jewellery design and creation, in a wholly unique blend.
She has now fully come to terms with her hippy origins and feels she belongs in middle class suburban England like a Bengal tiger belongs on a water slide! For this reason Kirsteen spent two winters travelling Spain and Portugal in a series of beat up camper vans with her kids and blogging about it. All her underfunded and ill-planned adventures have widened her experience and raised her courage, but most of all taught her the world has a bright and hopeful face as well as a dark one, and that face of hope can be reflected in the art in our lives, what is more it should be for all our sakes.
More artwork can be found at:
Kirsteen
Silver Shell Jewellery
#art #peace #live #create #aesthetic #happiness #purpose #kirsteenart #jewellery #silver #shell #silvershell
Long before the British or Spanish had empires, the Portuguse sailed to OZ and brought back eucalyptus trees, but it was a bad choice as now they are often the cause of forest fires!
Storks mate for life and migrate back to the exact nest every year, for this reason it is illegal to destroy anything a stork nests on in Portugal. There are sites in Lagos where whole factories have been torn down except two chimneys because they have nests on!
The tiny orange variety of the algarve is both sweet and juicy, but you can't get it anywhere else in Europe because it's bellow European Union regulation orange size so it can only be sold locally!
Lagos has the site of the oldest slave market in Europe but Portugal was also an early adopter of abolition. First in, first out!
Out on the bay in a kayak feeling like you have the sea to yourself! Jumping off the boat into the water and having so much fun with my big girl! She's so brave! I'm so proud of her. They gave me a waterproof tub for my camera phone and I had to unlash it from the kayak to take a picture then try not to drop it in the sea with my freezing hands! So I just took this one picture. Plus some of us before and after. #lovehomeschool #loveworldschool
Corona, Media and Taking Sides.
I feel I want to write something about taking sides. I feel like we are more polarised recently. Are you Trump or anti? Are you pro or anti mask? Are you vaccine or not? Which side are you on? Are you pro or anti China because someone may or may not have eaten a bat! This is polarisation, you have to be one extreme or another and the other side are wrong, the bad guys, stupid or even enemy. Don’t like Greta, say she’s mad!
I was recently told I am Sikh, I was told that the three main things that make a Sikh are truth, faith and service to humanity, as I am these things, I am Sikh (I have always been a Scientologist) but this wonderful inclusiveness literally made me cry. I am now proud to be Sikh, but this does not polarise me away from my Muslim friends, nor my agnostic ones. Indeed this does not polarise me away from my political left friends nor the right.
Politics recently and especially in the pandemic has been very polarised, you don’t like masks, then you must be in this whole camp and stupid too! With social media and air travel, and the internet we can connect so widely around the world and into communities we would not have known existed. I have a potter friend in the USA I met on Facebook by mistake. We share children’s book recommendations. I watch master kimono makers in Japan like I’m in their studio on Youtube. My friend from Kazakstan stays in touch via instagram, I think pre internet we would have lost touch after she left the UK…there is so much opportunity to make everyone on your side.
The dangerous thing about taking sides is you then need a side to go away to and be separate. So if kids pick sides then they say, our side is the half of the garden with the tree and you have the side with the flower bed, and you can have a snowball fight or ignore each other. All good. But there is only so much garden and at the end of the day we are all in it.
What is a closed system? A closed system is when you recycle everything around and around. Like a little space station with four people in it. No new stuff comes in so they recycle air, water etc. Imagine if these four people chose to polarise, the two people who believe in the tooth fairy against the crazy ones! Imagine then if the tooth fairy team set their own limits on use of resources and the crazy ones do too - without consulting each other! It is a doomed closed system, and very fast too. What if crazy side send a bomb to tooth fairy team? No closed system.
Well a planet is a closed system too. It’s not so noticeable because it’s quite big and complicated and has lots of languages and mountains and tennis courts and hot dogs, but it is a closed system too. Not much leaves and not much comes in. And if you let off enough bombs in one end the other end will suffer. Don’t like refugees coming to your rich country? don’t crate wars for them to flee! Don’t like poor people taking your wealth? Look for solutions to 1 percent of the planet owning 99 percent of the wealth. It’s a closed system, one garden, one space-station, one SIDE!!!!! You can’t afford to take sides!!!!
We need to communicate more with one another, we need to transcend polarisation and forge links, try to understand the other team, if you can’t at least respect them. The media and those who profit by chaos and war will always forward polarisation. You are in one team or another they say. You are with me or against me. Look what THEY did? Be outraged!!!! The truth is if you don’t like someone’s idea it’s their idea you don’t like, that does not make them your enemy. So speak out against their idea - don’t call them your enemy. Don’t call them crazy, don’t attack the person or group.
There are good ideas in every political spectrum, look for them, support them, look for what really helps. I don’t think anyone should go against their personal integrity and do what they feel is wrong, but a wrong policy is not always a symptom of an enemy. Ignore the rules you don’t agree with or speak out against them, that’s not the same as slandering the person who made the rule. Try to understand. Seek to be one team.
Corona restrictions have isolated us from human contact, cut down our travel and made our friends and family harder to see in person. So we are seeing our world through our screens. Don’t let that isolation colour your view of the world. What you see from the media and on your screens is a fear driving version of the world, a worsened picture meant to drive forward hysteria and polarisation for the profit of a few. The world is mostly a very friendly place, people are kind, towns and villages are safe, life goes on as normal mostly.
So this was a long rant in which I got a little over excited. I don’t mean to try to say I’m better than anyone else or perfect, nor am I trying to point fingers. I just wanted to offer the idea that we are all on one side and that picking sides inside a closed system does not have infinite workability.
I hope my thoughts are helpful to someone.
Love, Kirsteen
(The pic is me at the tomb of Marko Polo in Saville)
My posts are all to amuse and are fiction, sometimes inspired by my life. I often exaggerate to make things fun. All my advice is just my o...