Kim Ellwood studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and worked for a time in Vienna. The jewellery in the Collection is made from steel with rich enamel colours and etched surfaces with gold leaf embellishments. The pieces are abstractions of human and animal forms, incorporating ancient symbols, fireworks and circus-tent stripes. She described these works as "explorations in the abstraction of figures, archers and armour, the ancient symbols - spirals, crescents, crosses. Steel has an amazing strength and intractability, enabling me to use very fine forms. It has beautiful subtleties of colour when oxidized with the flame, and a sophisticated density when coloured chemically. This blackness contrasts powerfully with the bright enamel colours and gold embellishments."


All that glisters: New Jewellery in Britain, The British Council 1992

http://www.abbottandellwood.com/

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.