JANE ADAM Jewellery

Jane is internationally known for her innovative work in anodised aluminium, which she has been selling and exhibiting in Britain and abroad since she left the Royal College of Art in 1985. Her work is represented in collections such as the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Crafts Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Museums of Scotland.

She loves using colour and pattern, and her work has been influenced by her travels in India, as well as by the forms and colours of embroidered textiles, carpets, fish or shells. She enjoys contrasting the immediacy and richness of the decorated surface with simplicity of form, function and structure, and the coolness of aluminium.

Her Jewellery is made of anodised aluminium and silver. Anodising is an electro-chemical process which gives the metal a hard, transparent surface layer of aluminium oxide. This layer is colourless, but can absorb certain dyes and inks. These colours are then chemically sealed into this tough surface and cannot chip, flake or peel off.

Through constant experimentation, she has found that this material offers an enormous wealth of possibilities for surface decoration by painting, printing in various ways, drawing, overdyeing, etc. She enjoys the way that spontaneous marks become a permanent part of the metal's surface.

Her Byzantium range are decorated by an unpredictable and complex process of monoprinting. The design is drawn onto the metal through a layer of paper onto which ink has been rolled. The outlines thus created are painted with washes of dilute ink, which run into and blend with drawn marks. They are then immersion dyed to give a background colour.

Her jewellery range Afrika, and her new block-printed clocks are printed with coloured inks applied with hand cut rubber stamps. The work is then immersion dyed to give a solid background colour, the inks resisting the dye solution and remaining distinct.