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
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