The new jewelry: Trends and traditions

Jewellery has come alive again. 20 years ago a mere handful of designers in Europe and America were fighting the cliches of conventional design. Today there has been, in Ralph Turner's words, a "burgeoning of many kinds of ornament". Comprehensively revised and updated to incorporate the challenging work of the late 1980s and the 1990s, this book now presents in three sections the very latest examples of contemporary inventiveness. Mainstream abstract jewellery encompasses the diversity of modern ornament; whilst contemporary figurative jewellery is made by artists who sculpt and model in precious metals or everyday materials; and today's "jewellery as theatre" features radical workers and their controversial "wearables". Recent trends are given a special section of their own.