Jewellery and Metals

Jewellery and Metals

Jewellery and Metals at AUArts is a rich, intellectually challenging program balancing creative problem solving, technical proficiency, and entrepreneurship skills, with context, currency, history and meaning.

The program offers a multidisciplinary craft degree which explores ideas of making centred around ornamentation, the body, and functionality. Students investigate technical and material considerations within the discipline, contemporary aesthetics, and pressing conceptual questions and discourse of contemporary craft theory. With two full-time faculty and a studio technician, students are provided ample support to experiment and create.  Students are encouraged to extend the boundaries of jewelry and metals objects throughout their career.

Jewellery and Metals challenges students to utilize the space as a place for testing ideas and pushing past their limitations. Students are encouraged to explore traditional and contemporary processes of making, all available in a state-of-the-art studio. Student course work emphasizes exploration into both haptic and digital modes of making. In conjunction with the department, the university offers a craft-based MFA, courses in craft history and theory, and a focus on preparing students to leave the program with the skills required to become contemporary makers and designers. This approach to contemporary discourse affords graduates to develop careers as artists, bench jewellers, designers, and gallerists.

Studio facilities

High-quality studio facilities provide Jewellery + Metals students with the full spectrum of practice, from industrial jewellery to conceptual art.

• A full-time studio technician
• Laser welder,  PUK II fusion welder
• Aluminum anodizing system and reactive metals anodizing
• Casting facilities, centrifugal, vacuum, sand casting
• Stone setting microscope
• Makerbots and access to wax carver for digital production
• Full gemmology equipment and instruments
• Enamelling and PMC programmable kilns
• Small object photography systems
• Individual studio benches for third and fourth-year students

Access to all Jewellery + Metal Studios
Monday through Friday | 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday | 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Access to home studios, pounding room and Room 411C (No working alone)
Monday through Friday | 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Saturday and Sunday | 7 a.m. to 12 p.m. + 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Educational Art Technician

Brett Hollingsworth - 403.284-6793