Poet Liz Berry and the Birmingham Library

The combination of these two things gives me JOY. A like to which I cannot quantify or pin down. It’s a private kind of pleasure, a rarity of sorts, a sorta smug on the inside, keeping me me warm on a dark night kinda feeling.

This is what happens when parts of your Universe collide and that happened when I made Liz Berry, the Black country poet and general legend some Library Birmingham earrings. And she wore them.

So the pattern itself the interlinking rings were developed by the Library’s Architects, Meccanoo to represent the joining of jewellery links, referencing our historic jewellery quarter. There is historic evidence of this kind of pattern in the Assay Office Birmingham in the form of a nutmeg container made in the 1800’s.

I am quite obsessed with it, not only do I love the completeness of circles, their ability to represent wholeness, infinity, but in the layering of them new shapes form. A Marque, a diamond shape also can be seen in the negative spaces.

Now my husband hates me using this pattern. To him it’s done, to use it is fraudulent. So I’ve had to work away from his glare. I’ve cut folded, scaled, slotted, curved, layered and rivited it and for me it has been a voyage of how you can use something recogniseable and give it your own point of view, become an author, a curator of it. It’s like if your in a Band and you do a cover version- yas they can be sh**t