Daughter of Mercury

Hand crafting large pieces using traditional metalworking bench techniques! No casting, no machines, all hand wrought.

I am Daughter of Mercury, a jeweller/metalsmith in Scotland. I work mainly in base metals (for the moment, anyway) which allows me to utilise heavier gauges of metal and expand into larger scale works, while always maintaining the high quality of well trained hands.

My background in making goes all the way back to my childhood, helping (read: bugging) my grandfather in his wood workshop. Through my years in school I wondered and meandered and dabbled my way through different mediums and vocations until I came to metalworking. It was in a carpentry class when in an extra project there was a call to dish a small piece of sheet steel and braze on a short section of pipe to make a candle holder, and the moment I set hammer to metal my fate was sealed!

The following years I got myself into metalwork classes, progressed to smithing, attended Hereford College of Art’s Artist Blacksmithing degree course at the National School of Blacksmithing and it was there towards the end of my degree where I started back towards sheet metal work/repoussé and adorning the body with it, as opposed to hot forging.

Artistically I have always centred around certain themes; Feeling of uncanny, feeling of primordial depth, power, purpose, longevity/continuity, archetype, collective unconscious or memory, universal constants, growth and change.
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My work hopes to grasp and hold up those feelings and concepts to the maker, viewer, or wearer, with the intention to incite growth and change by encouraging analysis, meditation on those images with a primordial feeling of significance of a deep or arcane, religious or occult nature and confronting those feelings and what they mean to the person in question.