25/09/2026
I’m adding my voice to the many ECA Jewellery & Silversmithing alumni speaking out about the proposed closure of the undergraduate course.
I studied at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2007, and the foundation year was one of the most important parts of my education. I actually never planned to study jewellery. During the foundation year we were given the opportunity to try different disciplines, and I chose to spend a block of time in Jewellery & Silversmithing.
That opportunity to explore and discover something I hadn’t previously considered is something I feel incredibly lucky to have had. I don’t know that I would be a jeweller today if I hadn’t been given that space to try.
What I particularly remember about the S&J course was the importance placed on drawing, experimentation and exploration. Ideas weren’t simply something you arrived at before making - drawing, sketchbooks, materials and the process of making were all part of working things out. We were encouraged to explore and develop our own way of thinking and making, alongside building a technical foundation.
Those foundations still inform my work every day. The technical skills are obviously hugely important, but so is the ability to generate ideas, experiment, question things and develop a piece through drawing and making.
The value of a specialist course like this isn’t simply in the number of students who graduate from it each year. It’s in what those students go on to do with the education they received - in studios, businesses, teaching, exhibitions and communities - and in the knowledge and skills that are passed on to the next generation.
I’m incredibly grateful that I was given the opportunity to discover jewellery at ECA, and it’s deeply sad to think that future students might not have the same opportunity to stumble across something that could ultimately become their career and their life.
I stand with the current students, staff, technicians, alumni and wider jewellery and craft community calling for the course to be reinstated.
ECA Jewellery & Silversmithing Department Edinburgh College of Art
The brooches pictured are from the collection I made for my degree show at ECA in 2007.
