Katie Lees

A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Katie dedicated her final year to the exploration of the perhaps incongruous concept of creating finely crafted jewellery, of silver and semi-precious stones, from the heavy industrial aesthetic of the shipbuilding history that has moulded the city of Glasgow. The language is drawn not only from the pragmatic forms and robust engineering of the ships themselves but also from the remnants of industrial steel sheds, from sheets of rusted steel and dock stanchions of weather washed wood that define the river Clyde along its length. The industrial aesthetic is not self conscious but prosaic and through a process of photographing, drawing and painting, condensing, repeating, and printing she has derived a body of work which extracts the essence of these evocative forms.