22.06.2025
A good jaunt to the graduate show with my friend, I managed to get quite a few artist interviews while I was there. Here’s a few summaries:
Priyal Jain
Exceptionally aromatic and very light, Priyal’s sandalwood jewellery is intended to bring a versatile and innovative new material to the field of jewellery design. The jewellery is shaped by native craft techniques and celebrates Indian culture. The jewellery is a wearable, concrete aroma and therefore there is a synaesthetic approach to design, the invocation of the senses of sight, smell and touch. Wood has always been used in religious jewellery in India – Priyal mentioned the ‘rudraksh’ (the tears of Shiva) to me. This was the movement of that beauty of the wood into the secular realm of fashion.
“Priyal Jain is an Indian jewellery designer who explores the intersection of identity, memory, and material through sculptural, and sensory design. Rooted in storytelling and ancestral craft, her work bridges the personal and the architectural. Her collection, Baari — is carved from sandalwood and stillness.”
Jiangling Wang
https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/@jianglingwang
https://www.instagram.com/jiangling._wang/#
jianglingwang9@gmail.com
A merging of textile and jewellery design, these interdisciplinary ethereal pieces were almost celestial in their magnificence. Jiangling put one of the pieces on my friend and the jewellery immediately transformed him and transported him to an otherworldly realm. Wonderfully detailed, textural and beautiful, the technique of treating silver as threads of cloth created a gossamer-like miracle of light, both delicate and imposing. The intense work on each piece created an unforgettable and sophisticated visual memory. The translation of weaving techniques into jewellery design represented the nature of innovation: bringing knowledge from one field into another to create a new visuality like Harry Beck’s knowledge of circuit boards into the represention of the map and geographical space.
“The CANG series draws inspiration from textile craftsmanship, exploring the interaction between tools, techniques, and materials in the formation of jewellery structures. Silver serves as the primary medium, hand-twisted into various wire forms, then woven, assembled, and reconstructed to examine the flow and rhythm between lines.”
Helena Palmeira
https://www.instagram.com/helenapalmeira/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/estudiohelenapalmeira/?hl=en
Helena’s aim was to celebrate the local materials of Brazil and to build exclusive luxury jewellery items with them. The nature of the materials shaped the designs. The vegetable ivory took time to shape. The wood pieces were an intriguing story. The wood was now extinct in Brazil so the only way to source it was to trawl through vintage markets to obtain the material. It took Helena about two months to find some old furniture that was made out of this now extinct wood and to repurpose it. The work had an emphasis on sustainability and also on difficulty: difficulty in sourcing, difficulty in shaping. But difficulty built exclusive, rare, unique pieces of jewellery. It was inaccessibility and hard labour which created the treasure.
“Helena Palmeira is a Brazilian artist and designer whose practice explores the intersections between body, materiality, and cultural identity.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins (MA Design), Helena’s work is grounded in deep material research and an ongoing dialogue with historical, social, and personal narratives.
Through a sculptural and tactile approach, she reimagines objects as mediums of transformation, expression, and connection.
Sustainability, cultural memory, and the reshaping of form are at the core of her process, often working with responsibly sourced materials such as reclaimed woods, botanical elements, fairmined gemstones, and recycled metals.”
Julie Yuan
Insta: @julilie.y
An innovative screen with four divisions, ‘like everything left in disarray’ played with the two dimensionality of the image and the three dimensionality of the screen and its enclosure of space, with the tension between opacity and invisibility. The screen represented the projection of the dream onto human memories and photography, the merging of fantastical elements with the recording of reality. My friend was particularly impressed with the painterly brushstrokes and the subtle, mother of pearl aesthetic of the piece.
Dalia Halwani
Insta: @dxlixhxl
Dalia’s video installation was surrounded by her photography. She criticised the Orientalist tropes of sci-fi films such as contemporary avatars of the Odalisque which worked with dog-whistle racism to denigrate Arabs and Arabic culture in the capitalistic framework of the Western film industry. And which subverted that culture through the sexualisation of its misappropriated characters. The piece was mounted on a carpet which invoked the stereotypical imagery associated with the Arabs such as the fantastical flying carpet from feature films such as Disney’s Alladin.
diary of a lone man 