Silver Piece

Silver Piece

Silver Piece

By: Juliet Haysom, 2009
Medium: cast sterling silver
Size: 56mm
Cast by: Niagara Falls Castings
Issue: The Medal, no 56 (Spring 2010)
Edition: 32

Category:

Juliet Haysom (b.1978) studied fine art at the Ruskin School, University of Oxford, and at the Royal College of Art, London, before being awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship in Painting and Sculpture at the British School at Rome in 2004. In the following year she took up a residency at Headington School in Oxford, after which she moved to London, where she now lives and works. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2002 and 2005, and in 2007 was awarded the Jerwood Sculpture Prize for Spring, which involved drilling a twenty-four metre borehole into the bedrock beneath the Jerwood sculpture park at Ragley Hall, Warwickshire. Since then she has undertaken two other large sculpture commissions, working in bronze for Urban Splash in Bristol and in stone for Royal Terrace Gardens in Torquay. Though of an entirely different scale, both these projects incorporate ideas about the edition that have informed her BAMS medal Silver Piece. Haysom has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has been included in exhibitions at the Drawing Gallery, London (2004-06 and 2009), the British School, Rome, and the Romanian Academy, Rome (2004 and 2005), Abbot Hall, Kendal (2006), Image Furini Arte Contemporanea, Arezzo, and the Moscow Art Fair (2007), the British Museum (2007 and 2008), the Victoria and Albert Museum (2009), and Trinity Fine Art in London and New York (2009). Her drawings are included within the collections of Pembroke College, Oxford, the Victoria and Albert Museum and he British Museum The artist writes about the medal: ‘The relationship between the value of an object’s form, the material from which it is made and the size of its edition is essentially combined within a medal, and Silver Piece evolved out of my interest in the nature and value of this particular sculptural format. Rather than make a single “original” that would then be copied by being cast, I wanted to develop a production method that worked within the lost wax process. First, a 56-millimetre diameter bar of wax was cast. This was then sliced into exactly one hundred pieces, so producing a series of similar, but not quite identical, medal “blanks”. The surface of each medal bears the grooved, uneven marks left by the serrated knife, proof of the single action by which they were made. Each wax was then cast directly into sterling silver, without the use of any moulds. As each medal is a unique cast, the price of each one reflects the current market value of its exact weight in silver. Each medal has then been individually numbered by the Assay Office, London, using the office’s numbered punches, which are usually used only to mark bullion. The numbering and the hallmark that divides it make up an “equation” of value for the piece by guaranteeing its number, scarcity, date, origin, maker, authenticity and material quality. The medal is therefore simple and tactile, while making use of its rich material and aesthetic values and associations.’ As the artist explains, each medal is individually priced according to its weight. Prices will therefore range from around £133 to £144. Members are asked initially to pay £144 (non-members £216).The difference will then be refunded to you in cash when the medal is sent.