ADORN at Waterside

Manchester’s first dedicated jewellery week has big ambitions. Co-founder Eve Redmond has said the event takes its cue from Munich, home of the international calendar’s leading contemporary jewellery week, while staying rooted in Manchester’s own maker community. Co-founder Jo Lavelle has described the wider aim: to open jewellery up to audiences who wouldn’t normally encounter it.

Unlike Cotton to Graphene, the week’s showcase for graduating jewellery students, or Bound, Fabricate and Worn, staged by the event’s own organisers, Adorn is curated by Michelle Keeling for Waterside, and deliberately mixes career stages – this year’s graduates, billed as ones to watch, alongside makers further into their careers.

The range shows in the work itself. Charlotte Verity has exhibited jewellery worked in glass, including at Coutts London Jewellery Week; Toby Cotterill’s fine metal pieces often take the form of insects, sculptural enough that Manchester Art Gallery stocks them in its shop; Katherine James’s chainmail works (pictured above) reimagine armour physically and symbolically. Between them they make the point Keeling’s curation is built on: that “art jewellery” isn’t one material or one technique.

Waterside, of course, is not a specialist crafts venue. Its programme runs to theatre, comedy and family shows, and that’s precisely what makes it useful to a week trying to reach new audiences: people may be there for reasons that have nothing to do with jewellery, and encounter the work anyway. That’s a more direct route to Lavelle’s stated aim than a dedicated craft fair would offer, where the audience has typically sought the work out already.

Full list of exhibiting artists: Ange B Designs / Josie Chanfi / Toby Cotterill / Zoe Garner / Katherine James / Emily Kidson / Friday Lawrence / Rosina Payan Pecorelli / Samantha Ross / Charlotte Verity / Amy Whittingham / Bernice Yu