Suzy Dunford-Gent is a jewellery designer and visual artist currently based in London.

 

Her practice, encompassing contemporary jewellery design, traditional craft processes and installation, draws on the materiality of vernacular architecture and historical costume, exploring their significance as expressions of human ideals and drives.

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'Architecture and textiles, strong signifiers of the basic human drive to protect the body, act as cultural records of and reflections upon the human desire for corporeal containment that is fueled by our dual nurture-threat relationship to our natural environment.

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Walking, foraging, spinning, dyeing, sewing, carving, ceramics, building, tool-making, drawing, collage, photography, casting, weaving… In the course of my practice I use a variety of processes united by a common aim: an attempt to connect to our surroundings, be it urban or rural, through the materiality of place.'

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Each project starts with a physical encounter of a site, followed by a period of in-depth research and material experimentation. Using the literal stuff of the earth (clay, stone, metals, plant/animal fibres) to make wearable articles that attempt a transformative effect on the wearer, the end result often takes the form of a layered installation within which the specificity of the materials is the central focus.

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These tactile objects exist as intimate dialogues between self, place and time: material artefacts that transcend the corporeal into the mysterious and join the temporal narrative of a site.

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