A NEW VISION: DAVID WATKINS (B.1940) AND WENDY RAMSHAW CBE (1939-2018)
David Watkins and Wendy Ramshaw are internationally recognised for their pioneering body of work that has helped to shape and expand the perception of contemporary jewellery. During this year’s Goldsmiths’ Fair you will have the unique opportunity to explore a curated selection of their pieces in the first major display dedicated to Watkins + Ramshaw at Goldsmiths’ Hall for more than 50 years.
“At the moment when two souls meet, each with a different voice, they join and become something greater, together more beautiful, more truthful” – Bruno Martinazzi (1923-2018).
A pair of artists can be a powerful force. Twentieth-century artist couples such as Josef and Anni Albers (Germany/USA: painting/textiles); Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (Mexico:painting/murals/performance); Gijs Bakker and Emmy van Leersum (Netherlands: jewellery/product design) all illustrate this. Each produced independent work, but their life’s partnership was a significant influence on their artistic lives. In the UK Wendy Ramshaw CBE (1939-2018) and David Watkins (b.1940) became, through their new vision for what the art of jewellery could be in the modern world, one of our most significant artist couples of the late twentieth century. A New Vision celebrates this through a selected display of works by both artists, mostly owned by the Goldsmiths’ Company, alongside newly commissioned film material and interviews.
From the early 1970s, the Goldsmiths’ Company became active patrons of both, supporting their distinct talents, through acquisitions, commissions, and exhibitions. A joint show took place at Goldsmiths’ Hall in 1973 following an exhibition in Philadelphia, organised by Helen Drutt, which launched their important profile in the USA. In 1984 Movements in Jewellery, a choreographed dance performance in collaboration with Media Arts, took place at the Hall and they appeared in many subsequent group exhibitions and displays here and in museums and galleries around the world. Their works are now represented in over 70 major museum collections worldwide.
The Company Collection represents Wendy’s work in depth through 35 works across 40 years, and has a significant holding of David’s work with precious metals in the same period. Graham Hughes (1926-2010), the influential Art Director of Goldsmiths Company (1951-1980) introduced their work to the institution and was a considerable personal advocate for their work. His 2009 publication ‘David Watkins, Wendy Ramshaw: A Life’s Partnership’ strongly emphasised the importance of their personal relationship to their individual achievements in this most intimate of arts.
What form, however, did their new vision in jewellery take? Both in different ways brought a wide lens to jewellery, informed by European modernist thinking, curiosity about material possibilities and a respect for British industrial manufacture and design. Surprisingly, neither originally studied jewellery. “I came to jewellery as an outsider” as David says, having studied Fine Art and Sculpture at the University of Reading, beginning his professional life as a jazz musician.
Modern jazz is key to understanding his work, with its focus on improvising against a tradition. “When you improvise,” he says “you allow a new object to appear… you create a framework in which something surprising can happen… and that’s where the delight comes in.” Inflection III/I (1988) , on loan for this exhibition, shows one of his numerous improvisations on the circular neckpiece form that has presence when worn or when hanging on a wall (fig 2). The simple, austere shape made from gilded brass seems to reference both ancient torques and industrial machine parts.
“Wearing such pieces”, as jewellery historian Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, author of the 2008 monograph on the artist, states “is a wonderful experience. It rests comfortably on the body, so you are hardly aware of its presence, yet it seems to subtly change the space around you for both you and the viewer… a brilliant fusion of sculpture and body ornament.”
Wendy studied textiles and illustration at Newcastle University, then moved to Reading to study for an Art Teacher Diploma where the two met in 1961, marrying the following year. Wendy’s studies in textiles seemed to help shape her strong feeling for colour and pattern. Her exploration of colour was life – long, making new use of the jewellers’ language of semi-precious stones and enamel to beautiful effect, such as in this early enamel neckpiece and this set of 15 gold rings, both owned by the Company.
“Colour,” wrote artist Alan Davie, “is like a chord struck on a harp in the darkness… the mysterious element of colour is some – thing utterly magical… The colours must sing together very much like the notes in music”. Wendy understood this well, going on to use her palette in ever more inventive ways seen in this striking pair of Brooches of Coloured Tears for the Weeping Woman from Picasso’s Ladies (1989-1998), a major catalogued collection of 66 works created in response to portraits of women by Picasso.
The Company’s current Deputy Curator, Dr. Frances Parton, reflects on the effect of wearing Wendy’s rings:
“I am very proud to have a five-part Ramshaw ring set in silver set with amethysts, given to me by mother. I have worn it ever since; I wear it night and day, every day, and look at it on my hand so often that I can’t now imagine being or feeling my – self without it. It has become a part of who I am. I find it utterly beautiful. The colours of the stones change in different weather and different light over the course of the day.”
Wendy began the journey into jewellery first, discovering in the printmaking studio at Reading that she liked the etching plates more than the paper prints produced and began to cut them up and fashion them into simple jewels. When the couple moved to London in the early 1960s, they produced two, jointly-authored fashion jewellery col – lections: Optik Art, using new screen-printing technologies on Perspex, and Something Special Ltd, a vibrant paper jewellery col – lection, flat-packed for self-assembly, which found outlets in boutiques such as Mary Quant and Biba and went on to become a global fashion phenomenon, modelled by Twiggy and selling all over the world.
In the same period, David worked as a special effects model-maker at MGM Studios, London on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The improvisation, inventiveness and precision needed to construct models, in many materials but particularly acrylics, which would withstand 70mm filming and wide screen projection, were a revelation and became an import – ant catalyst for future work in jewellery. The bangle acquired for the Company collection in 1973 combines vivid blue dyed acrylic (the dyeing technique borrowed from the but – ton industry) with gold inlaid into the lathe turned grooves of the plastic joints.
In 1970 Wendy was invited to hold her first major exhibition at Pace Gallery, London by Ralph Turner and Barbara Cartlidge, who went on to found specialist art jewellery gallery, Electrum, the following year. David helped to design the catalogue, creating this memorable image of an early necklace by Wendy using the Sunderland bridge as a backdrop, the city in which Wendy was born and whose industrial shipbuilding heritage shaped her formal development and lifelong interest in man-made structures.
The Pace Gallery exhibition introduced a significant tool, the lathe, to Wendy’s workshop, heralding her typologically new form of jewellery, the Ringset. David already used lathes in his workshop but, his acquisi – tion of a Myford lathe for Wendy facilitated new developments in her work. He still has this lathe in his personal collection, a re – minder that although the artists developed their separate careers, their interest and support for one another took many forms.
This was also the year that Graham Hughes acquired Wendy’s first ring sets (earlier single rings had been collected) for the Company. These sets of multiple stacked gold and silver rings, enriched with gem – stones, enamel or geometric shapes, mounted for display on lathe-turned acrylic stands, took on the life of miniature sculptures of the body, and when worn individual rings could be re-arranged in different pat – terns by the wearer. They became a defining form for Wendy, appearing throughout her career ranging from sets of 4-40 rings.
David’s interest in jewellery as a branch of the sculptor’s art, beyond fashion, began to take root in the early 1970s, partly stimulated by seeing jewellery by artists Pol Bury (1922- 2005) and Gio Pomodoro (1930-2002) in a London gallery and partly through meeting serious jewellery curators such as Ralph Turner. Turner became an important advocate for David’s work, including both artists in the opening show of Electrum Gallery in 1972 and organising two major shows of David’s work when Head of Exhibitions at the Crafts Council (1974-1989).
David’s early jewellery works were in precious metal: this bold gold sculptural ring was the first acquisition of his work by the Company. By 1975, however, when both artists were included in Jewellery in Europe – a major modern jewellery exhibition curated by Turner and shown at the Aberdeen Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum – David’s growing interest in the poetic potential of industrial materials such as acrylic had already begun to lead him away from precious metals and the traditional ring form.
The 1970s and 1980s were fruitful years for the couple. They were exhibiting internationally and developing growing connections in Europe and the USA, with major works entering prominent museum collections — from the V&A in London, which had acquired Wendy’s award-winning Council of Industrial Design Collection in 1972, to the Museum of Art and Design in New York.
An invitation to take up an artist residency for both in Australia in 1978 led Wendy to new improvisations with clay, laying the groundwork for her important collaboration with Wedgwood, celebrated with a solo exhibition at the V&A in 1982. This striking neckpiece, acquired recently by the Company, was worn by the artist to the exhibition opening and was subsequently used by the Museum on an underground poster celebrating avant garde design. The lathe as a creative tool again comes to the fore, linking the worlds of art and industry in ways characteristic of both their works.
“Beads designed by Wendy were turned on a replica of a lathe installed in the workshop of Josiah Wedgwood in 1763, after Wedgwood had seen the original in operation in the great Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, owned by his friend Matthew Boulton.”
The Australian residency allowed David time to develop work with metal. His re – turn to the UK also saw him resume making larger-scale sculptures. Both aspects were shown in a major touring show at Leeds City Art Gallery and Stedelijk Museum, Amster – dam (1985). Critic Peter Dormer compared the ways David’s jewellery articulates the body with the ways in which his sculpture depends on movement of the human body to give form. The Company recently acquired his gold Ladder Pin (1979), which makes direct formal links to an important sculptural commission for Hereford Cathedral in the period.
Drawing was fundamental for both artists. David reflected that “sometimes I seem to spend more time drawing and thinking than making…. I try not to design my jewellery; I try to let things fall into place and to adopt a simple ungarnished solution”. He was an early adopter of the computer to complement his work at the drawing board. Later, he was one of the first to see the potential of this new tool in design education following his 1984 appointment as Professor in the Department of Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the Royal College of Art, continuing in this role until 2006. He had a clear sense of the value of new tools for his students:
“Just like every material, every technology has a unique voice… one can try to bring out its quality… because there is something real and true about it… there is also something somehow beyond calculation… something mysterious.” Leaf Diffraction II, acquired by the Company in 2007, is an example of his mature work, realised with computer de – sign and computer modelling, through which he creates a layered, formally inventive response to the natural world.
For Wendy, drawing was both daily practice and an exact way of communicating designs. She felt that drawing “is a wonderful way to release the spirit, it can suspend time and space… through drawing the imagination can function without constraint.”
This beautiful design drawing was for the Double Bow ringset, and commissioned by a private patron for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in memory of Valerie Stewart, Director of the Oxford Gallery (1968-2001), who championed her work for many years. Although it is clearly a precise prefiguring of the finished work, it also has all the poetry of a freehand sketch.
Both artists created forms that redefined jewellery in its time, bringing one of the oldest forms of human expression into new dialogue with modern materials, modern art, and design. Few artists of this calibre have made jewellery their lifelong focus. Their new vision for jewellery seems still potent for our contemporary world, embedded as it is in their own shared lives made rich through craftsmanship and creativity of the highest order. What it is to be human has rarely been so fully and beautifully expressed.
Written by Amanda Game, Independent Curator