The Award No One Sees

I haven't told you about this. In 2023 a piece of my work won in two separate categories in an enamelling competition. I knew about it the morning of, and I was alone in the studio when the email came, and I cried for about ten minutes and then I made a cup of tea and went back to the bench.

I want to tell you why I'm telling you now, and why I didn't tell you then.

Why I didn't tell you then: when you work alone the awards are quieter than you'd think. There's no team to high-five. There's no PR agency to put out a release. There's no ad campaign to run. There's just the bench, the kiln, the kettle, and the next piece. The award came in by email, it sat on my screen for an hour, and then it was a Tuesday and there was work to do. I didn't have a habit, then, of telling people about this kind of thing. I have one now.

Why I'm telling you now: because the work I do is the kind of work where you have to take the maker's word for it, and I don't think that's fair on you. When I tell you a piece has been built layer by layer in the right way, you have only my word to go on. The award is a small piece of independent evidence. Other people who know this technique — really know it, in the way that lets them tell a good firing from a lucky one — looked at the piece and agreed.

Enamelling competitions are not a public spectacle. The audience is mostly other enamellists, plus a small handful of jewellery historians and collectors. The judges are people who have spent decades in front of kilns. Their attention is the only attention I really cared about, then or now. To have a piece picked twice was, and is, the highest thing the work has ever done.

It also wasn't a turning point in any obvious way. The Monday after, I cleaned the bench. The Tuesday after, I started another piece. Awards are like that. They're a tap on the shoulder, not a parade.

What they did change, slowly, is my willingness to make harder things. I have a habit, when a design is uncertain, of choosing the simpler version of it. The award gave me permission to choose the harder one. The pieces that have come out of me since are more ambitious than they used to be. Some of them are in the collector range, which is to say they take weeks rather than days and are made for people who understand what they are. Some of them are still on the bench now, waiting for their tenth firing.

If you've worn something I've made — thank you. You were carrying a small win you didn't know about.

Come and see the current work on Saturday at Paddington Markets. I'll show you what "layer by layer" actually looks like up close.