Kelvin Birk
While there are many fine makers at Cockpit we could have included in this feature, we chose to focus on Kelvin Birk and his distinctive jewelry. The forging of his upcycled designs offers the perfect counter point to Clunie’s slow art carving. Clunie’s work is steeped in tradition, Kelvin’s breaks with tradition and re-envisions it.
Kelvin grew up in a small, traditional Bavarian village and longed to find a creative way out and into the larger world. An acceptable path would have been to study architecture, but such did not appeal to Kelvin. Instead, he chose to study jewelry making – which he sees as the architecture of ornament.
The first stop on his search for creative expression was at the Berufsfachschule fuer Glas und Schmuck, a German college where he undertook a degree in goldsmithing. This early rigorous and practical coursework was steeped in the Bauhaus design tradition and philosophy. Appreciative of this formal training yet eager to continue his education and to leave Germany, Kelvin attended the London Metropolitan University where he received his MA in Silversmithing and Jewelry (awarded with distinction) from the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art in 1997.
In 1998, Kelvin was accepted to Cockpit Arts. His early creations embodied many qualities of his Bauhaus training.2 This early work featured clean lines, simple, useful shapes with little or no decoration, and involved the pairing of two unrelated materials: cement (hard, affordable, and used in mass production) and silver (malleable, more expensive, and traditionally used in the making of decorative objects). And while he realized commercial success with this work, the inspiration for what has become his signature style came to him while grieving the death of his mother.
Kelvin explained it this way: when someone dear to you dies, your whole world falls apart and you feel only loss. Yet with the passage of
time, one comes to understand how loss reconfigures the self. Over time, our identity is forged by those parts of ourselves rooted to our past as well as our upbringing with the individual. Exploring this idea further, Kelvin began to experiment with the idea of smashing precious stones, dismantling, and melting down heirloom jewelry and reconfiguring the metal and stone fragments into entirely new creations. Yes, out of loss comes rebirth.
I asked Kelvin how he comes by his precious stone fragments. It seemed crazy to think he would buy precious stones, only to smash them. He agreed and told me that, at first, he approached some high street jewelers and asked if they had any fragments they would consider selling him. A few generous jewelers agreed, allowing him to get started making these new creations. Later, after some early commercial success, friends began sending him broken gem pieces, jewelry missing a stone, or a single item from a lost pair. Then customers began sending him pieces they inherited, asking if he could rework these “old” pieces to make something new, personal, and modern. Kelvin found his métier and his fame. His work is now found in galleries in Australia, America, and the UK.
To learn more visit: https://www.k2jewelleryacademy.london
Contact Kelvinbirk.com, [email protected] @kelvinjbirk
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