Welcome to the site page for this research project.
To the right is a link to a full an illustrated justification PDF.
The Appendices links to copies of other important documentation.
The exhibition “Like a Rolling Stone” (Bottomley & Cross) followed the 2016 workshop that invited ten international contemporary jewellery makers to visit the geological sea/landscape of North Berwick, Scotland and respond to themes of relocation, transplantation, camouflage, identity and materiality in the works that they made.
The Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh funded three Italian Goldsmiths, Maria Rosa Franzin, Gigi Mariani and Gabi Viet, as part of the 2016 Year of Italian Innovation, Architecture & Design,who joined seven UK Jewellery artists, Stephen Bottomley, Susan Cross, Jessamy Kelly, Rhona McCallum, Jo Pudelko, Jessica Turrell and Cristina Zani, to undertake field work in North Berwick.
North Berwick has had a long association with scientific research and was frequented in the 18thcentury by the ‘father of modern geology’ James Hutton. The coastline was instrumental in proving his revolutionary theories of the earth’s age through the movement of matter. The Berwick trip included geological field notes for each artist to engage with the topophilia and nascent ‘sense of place’. Ideas were explored through artist interviews conduscted by PhD researcher Rebecca Crowther and the project documented by photographer Shannon Tofts. In this research geological research heritage was juxtaposed with contemporary human-centred themes of reflection and enquiry which were reflected in the poetic lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, that lend the project's title.
This study combines ethnographic and anthropological narratives to explore open and multi-media creative studio practice through a maker’s lens. The partipants shared the same geographical space, temporal conditions and stimuli and applied their own individual practice-led research methodologies, in a “multimethod'or triangulatedapproach, acknowledging the complex nature of practice-based inquiry in a transient cultural and contextual framework” (Malins & Gray).
The exhibition opened at Munich’s State Mineral and Geological Museum during the 2017 International Jewellery festival. A 52-page catalogue edited by Bottomley, with essays by Crowther and Bernabei was launched at the International Handwerk Messe (10.03.18) with profits going to the charity ‘Help Refugees’. The exhibition has been invited by the Jewellery and Metalwork Group of Australia 2021 Canberra conference to exhibit at the Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2021, subject to the Covid pandemic restrictions.
