BA Hons Jewellery Design Graduate Awards At Central St Martins

2021 is the 13th year that Theo Fennell have sponsored the BA Jewellery Design show at Central Saint Martins and presented their annual design awards. For the second year running students coped extraordinarily well with the limitations of Covid and produced outstanding levels of work across the board. This year we virtually awarded prizes to three students for Technical Achievement, Design and an Overall First prize.

‘In very difficult circumstances, the CSM students have produced some really interesting and accomplished work and I am delighted by how they rose to overcome the challenges of the last year or so. As always, it has been rewarding to work with them and the Theo Fennell award winners were very worth of their prizes’

Theo Fennell

The Winners

Theo Fennell Award First Prize: Roni Levy

Revealing

Roni‘s collection is a love affair with the onion. Its an affair that unfolds tear-jerkingly; in the quest for a nutritious kernel of truth, each layer of the journey is just translucent enough to invite deeper investigation. Composed entirely of onion skins, her biodegradable pieces bring romance to a material that has long been relegated to the scrapheap. Roni embodies the shedding of an onion through her collections metamorphic narrative. She begins with an intricate, defamiliarised composition of the onion, which she then peels back to reveal its true organic form.

Roni is a London based jeweller and artist. Whilst using a wide range of materials in her designs, her main passion lies in exploring the use of sustainable materials. Her skill-set incorporates a conscious approach to traditional bench work, by introducing transformative techniques that bring new life to otherwise “unwanted” waste products.

Theo Fennell Award For Technical Achievement: Ruby Mellish

Contemporary Self Portraiture

Ruby’s collection draws on her personal experience of isolation. Deprived of external inspiration, Ruby became her own muse, questioning her own perception of identity through the image of her eye. Her eyepieces subvert conventions of traditional self-portraiture by enabling the wearer to see from the artists perspective. Viewing the human eye as a vessel of ‘the self’, Ruby uses acetate to allow the wearer’s face to become part of each piece. By gradually distorting her eye, she shows the inability to truly capture the self, which is constantly fluctuating, inherently personal.

Ruby is an experimental jewellery artist who uses a wide range of materials and techniques to achieve unique outcomes. Her practice is primarily influenced by the body and carries surreal themes through the application of computer aided design and hand-crafting. She specialises in Photoshop, exhibiting her original interpretation of digital manipulation and converting virtual projects to life through a considered range of materials. 

Theo Fennell Award For Design – Imogen Burch

Emotive

Traditionally, rings memorialise specific events. In ‘Emotive’, Imogen steps beyond this, turning sober, commemorative rings into light-hearted versions of themselves while maintaining an emphasis on preciousness. From heirloom to cocktail to engagement, each ring sets aside weighty tradition, instead becoming fun, playful and kinetic. By each representing an individual feeling or emotion that is less present in traditional notions of ring-wearing, such as being tipsy, they collectively illustrate a more developed picture of the intimate wearer-ring relationship.

Imogen is a Jewellery designer and maker based in London. She explores the relationship between jewellery, emotions and people. She situates her practice within luxury fine jewellery as a means to navigate identity in a playful and light-hearted way. By reinterpreting and updating traditional pieces, she challenges the assumptions of what is expected from fine jewellery. She does this by designing objects that update traditional steadfast designs, in an attempt to connect people in a shared experience.

Gilded Youth

Theo Fennell has an ongoing commitment to supporting the jewellery industry through our Gilded Youth initiative which aims to encourage great designers for the future as well as giving a voice to emerging young jewellery and silver talent.

The Gilded Youth project is our ongoing mission to support and nurture the best master jewellers and designers of the future. The reason we sponsor prizes, awards and initiatives for young starters, apprentices and college students, at, amongst others, The RCA, Central St Martins and The Goldsmiths Centre – is to try and help them prepare for the future and promote the extraordinary young talent we have in this country.

Theo Fennell

Collection descriptions courtesy of Central St Martins BA Hons Jewellery & Design Catalogue