Harvest

For a long time, I tried to keep my jewellery life separate from the rest of me.

I was a jeweller over here, and then there were all these other parts of my life and practice somewhere else. The eight years I spent studying within a Western esoteric and alchemical women's spiritual group, my relationship with ritual, death, grief, the body and the natural world, the writing, movement, poetry, performance and all the strange little tributaries I have followed throughout my life.

Of course, they were never actually separate.

They were always finding their way into the things I made, into the symbols I was drawn to, the materials I chose and the way I understood transformation. They shaped how I saw the world, how I met my own shadows, how I avoided them, and occasionally, how I walked directly into them.

But I think I was always editing myself a little.

Was this too witchy? Too woo? Too strange? Too much?

I would put myself out into the world and then quietly retreat again, which I suspect is something many artists understand. Making something from somewhere inside yourself and placing it in front of other people is an oddly exposing thing to do.

Recently, something has changed.

Perhaps it has come through a year of profound grief, losing two very dear friends and being brought, rather abruptly, into the reality of mortality, theirs and my own. There is nothing quite like death for reminding you that this is, in fact, life lifing!

A big ole' dose of meeting life on LIFE'S terms...

The enormousness of it, the nothingness of it, the ridiculous, absurd, beautiful brevity of being here.

And I am here to create.

So I find myself less interested in separating myself into acceptable pieces.

My friends have always laughed at how many pots I have cooking. For years I thought perhaps I needed fewer pots. Now I realise I have simply been making one enormous stew...

It is all in there.

I was a tightrope walker and learnt something about balance. I practised capoeira for years and learnt something about community, movement and play. I studied Western esoteric and alchemical practices and learnt ways of looking at transformation. I am training around death, dying and grief. I have trained in touch and cuddle therapy. I write, I make things, I dance, I play instruments terribly, but then again, it is called playing an instrument, not knowing an instrument haha.

And through all these many lives within this one life, jewellery has been one of the constant threads.

For years I called myself a jeweller almost as though that were separate from being an artist and it didn't quite fit. I could make objects, curate experiences and create work, yet somehow the word artist felt like it belonged to somebody else.

Which, looking back is quite funny.

I received an artist grant through The Emergence Network for a project called Becoming Monster and created a three-day gathering called What's Dying to Live around death, decay, grief, fertility, life and transformation, bringing my work and the work of multiple artists together.

I also worked with my dear friend and incredible artist Naomi Lewis during her Master's in Photography and Film at the RCA, creating adornments from bones, mother-of-pearl and other fragments gathered on our walks along the Thames. The pieces became part of an artistic practice, a meeting place where our two mediums intersected, informed one another and became something neither of us would have made alone.

Still, somewhere inside myself a voice was saying I'm not an artist.

More recently, I applied to Mortem, Death School for Artists, a research residency through The Biophilium. Even its name feels beautifully aligned with the work: biophilia is the innate, genetically determined human tendency to seek connections with nature and other living forms. There is something wonderfully paradoxical about entering a place devoted to biophilia in order to study death, and yet, of course the two are inseparable. The deeper I move into death, the more interested I seem to become in life.

As part of that process, I had to do something surprisingly confronting. At 47 years old, I had to write my first artist CV.

I had to gather together a portfolio of my work, jewellery and otherwise and look at it as a body of work rather than a collection of unrelated things.

And there I was.

An artist.

A multidisciplinary one, certainly, a liminal one, probably, an artist nonetheless.

And perhaps that is the culmination I am feeling now.

For years, motherhood necessarily took so much of me. I have been raising my son on my own, often with the persistent feeling that I wasn't doing enough, wasn't making enough, wasn't achieving enough, that somehow I was always falling short.

He is now fifteen, almost sixteen and I can look at this person growing in front of me and understand something I couldn't always see while I was in the thick of it.

That time went somewhere.

I put it into him.

And as he grows increasingly into his own life, some space is beginning to return to mine.

Space for this other baby of mine. My work, my website, my curiosities, my art. The things I still want to study and make and bring into the world.

The alchemy of me.

So this new iteration of Sara Rothwell Jewellery is not only about jewellery. The jewellery remains at its heart, but I am no longer interested in pretending that the hand making it can be separated from the person I am becoming.

I don't make these things simply for the sake of making more things.

I make them because something compels me to put them into the world.

They come from everything I have studied, loved, lost, questioned, practised and played with. From motherhood and mortality, from metal and stones, from bodies and bones, from nature, ritual, mythology, grief, desire, humour and the endlessly fascinating business of being alive.

All these things I once thought were disparate have turned out to be wonderfully woven together.

Perhaps that is what culmination really means to me now.

Not arriving at some polished final version of myself, but gathering in the harvest of all these different lives and finally recognising that they belong to the same field.

All of me is welcome here.

So, hi there and hello from all of me.

Sara x

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