Angela Cork (born 1973)

Two ‘Slim Balloon’ vases

2006

Sterling silver, central shape flat-hammered over steel formers to a template; soldered sides with burnished edges. Height 25.8 cm; 20.2 cm. Marked: Angela Cork, London.

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Angela Cork is currently the specialist Silver Adviser on the Contemporary Craft Committee of the Goldsmiths’ Company. Like Ane Christensen, with whom she exhibited in 2022 as members of the new collective The Five, she is an artist of abstraction in metal. There is a strong graphic element to her work as a silversmith and designer. Her pieces stand out for their elegant lines and simple, pure forms rendered with meticulous attention to craftsmanship. The soldered and burnished edges of the two vases for instance have invisible joins with a perfect crisp finish. She likes her pieces to be functional, designing them in a way that invites handling, questioning and exploration. These two vases, commissioned just four years after she had graduated from the Royal College of Art, demonstrate how she plays with balance in her work. The delicately-poised vessels tip dramatically when filled with water and flowers, only to rock gently before finding a new point of balance. A second ‘Frame’ flower vase, commissioned for the Collection a year later in 2007, creates a functional supportive vase for a long-stemmed flower which leans out beyond the confines of the frame. It is new way of giving focus to a single flower. 

DT

Angela Cork talks about her recent work for the silversmithing collective The Five for the Collect art fair 2022 here.