When you’re an artist or creative doing a theory based academic PhD – it’s very hard to ‘not’ want to make your research visual!
Actually I still want to do this – it’s sooooooo much easier to ‘see’ patterns and similarities as well as timelines when you can visually ‘see’ imagery or illustrations about what you are learning. I think this is true of ANY subject.
When I was finishing my PhD at the Royal College of Art in London, it’s customary for ALL students to put on an ‘end of year show’ – so I needed to think about ways to visually showcase what I’d been working on and my research.
One of the ways I did this was to design 300 POSTCARDS with images of children’s jewellery dating from prehistoric times to the early 2000’s – and I called this exhibition ‘300 Little Gems’.
As this was early 2000’s BEFORE we all carried cameras on phones in our pockets – the photographs I took of the ‘actual’ show weren’t the best quality! 🙄But it’s still interesting to look back on this.
You may have seen some of my ‘postcards’ before as I often feature them in my reels – so now I thought I’d design a new series and share more about my ‘300 Little Gems’ as these really are – the ‘little gems’ of history!
This post (and subsequent posts) draw on visual material created for an exhibition-based research project exploring the history of children’s jewellery. It is shared here for educational and research purposes. Full object documentation, image sources and references for each image can be found in the related archive entry.
