Reflecting on 5 decades of working precious metals and stones
Although I officially started work in 1972, I began helping my father, the silversmith Jack Spencer, in his Sheffield workshop from the age of twelve. Today my little studio in Tavistock looks out onto the granite uplands of Dartmoor in the far west of England, a landscape that has inspired me more than any other.
I was born in grimy, but beautiful Sheffield, a place I left in my early twenties as my wife and I wanted our children to grow up in cleaner air and nearer the sea, so for the majority of my life I’ve lived on the East Devon/Dorset border only moving to West Devon three years ago.
Over the years I’ve worked for Exeter Cathedral, the Royal Air Force, The Independent Broadcasting Corporation, Devon and Cornwall Police and of course hundreds if not thousands of individual clients. In 2006 I made wedding and engagement rings for a young lady for whom I’d made a Christening bracelet 22 years previously. The continuity of that was humbling.
In 1997 I was made a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. Proposed by my former City and Guilds teacher Bob Lamb, a Liveryman of the Company and seconded by an old family friend, the retired Assay Master for Sheffield and a former physics teacher at my old school, David Johnson. It was a great day when my wife and I went up to Goldsmiths Hall for the ceremony.
Family stories and history are the heart of my work
I want to capture in each piece a feeling of another life, the past life of an old piece intertwined with a future use, maybe grander, maybe not, but certainly with some thread of sentiment running through it.
Over the years, I’ve striven to re-smelt silver and gold and remove precious stones from worn out settings, all to be remade into something new.
Most metals I work with are recycled and repurposed from older pieces. It keeps the cost to the client down, and helps families carry their memories and keepsakes across generations.
It means a lot to me that my skills can make this possible. It’s a practise I personally know the value of. On a chain around my neck I have my grandmother’s original wedding ring melted into a rough ingot. Wearing it, I feel connected to her every day, even though she died a number of years ago.
My metalsmithing roots, my process and inspiration
Coming from Sheffield, some my work I feel is quite raw and industrial, I like to forge silver, draw it down to tapers and points like a blacksmith, drill and beat beads of 9ct gold into the silver so they colour and texture the surface of the piece when hammered and polished.
I rarely design a piece - that is, plan and sketch it out on paper. I work at the bench and respond to the metal and the stones as I work, forging a relationship between the raw materials and the tools that shape them. I love working with Victorian, old cut and rose cut diamonds as these have a history and the sense of their own fascinating narrative, if only they could tell it.
Most of my pieces are one offs - I don’t fabricate something and then cast off fifty identical pieces. If a customer sees a photograph of something I’ve made and likes it, I will happily make another. From scratch. It may be a little larger or smaller, thinner or thicker, have a different stone set within - whatever, it will be unique and that, I think makes my work appeal to many people.
“Find beauty, be still.”
Photo by Louis Tripp on Unsplash
I’ve seen the words ‘my work has been inspired by nature’ many times on other websites and I can attest truly that with me, this is indeed the case. I love rendering acorns, oak and ivy leaves, fungi, hagstones and other natural forms in silver and gold, graving in veins and texture, attempting to recapture the life of the original.
This feeling I have of drawing from landscape and place has its counterpoint at the bench. When I re-work family gold, I have a feeling for it and its history, so endeavour to preserve that feeling throughout the whole remaking process. If the job say is a wedding ring then I will give a subconscious nod towards the success of the marriage, if it’s for a child’s naming ceremony I think of the future health of the child. I don’t know why, it’s just something I’ve always done.
I have never in my life followed a conventional belief system, instead gleaning a little here and a little there from a lifetime of reading, walking in the city as well as the countryside. Certain places are just more numinous than others, Stanage Edge near Sheffield, Wistmans Wood on Dartmoor, the little style at the top of Muttersmoor Road in Sidmouth where the view over and towards the sea is of roofs and chimney pots. A magical place isn’t necessarily a high viewpoint over sublime country. As W.H. Murray the climber wrote, “Find beauty, be still”.