Box of Dreams is a unique jewellery and silversmith-led pop-up exhibition at the Goldsmiths’ Centre curated by artist jewellers Ella Fearon-Low and Jed Green. Exploring the notion of how we use boxes and other vessels to contain our ideas, treasures and secrets, displaying the work of a group of talented artists working across a range of disciplines. By combining precious and non-precious materials, the exhibition highlights the breadth and diversity of contemporary craft practice in the UK.
This themed presentation explores both conceptual and literal interpretations of containment, offering insight into the work of leading craftspeople and artists working today. The exhibition takes place in the contemporary event space at the Goldsmiths’ Centre, home to over 120 makers and businesses working with precious metals.
The exhibition showcases jewellery and silversmithing by Morvarid Alavifard, Ane Christensen, Ella Fearon-Low, Jed Green, Jo McAllister, Caitlin Murphy, Francicsa Onumah, Sarah Pulvertaft, Inca Starzinsky and Elsa Tierney. The curated Box of Dreams display also includes works by artists Amanda and Matt Caines, Richard McVetis, Ash & Plumb, Jo Pond, Amy Cushing and Carola Solcia.
Below is a brief description of the artists’ response to this theme and descriptions of the work they are showing. These works can be viewed at the Goldsmiths’ Centre in London as part of London Craft Week between 12pm - 6pm on Thursday 14 May and Friday 15 May 2026.
Morvarid Alavifard
Responding to The Box of Dreams, my work explores vessels as spaces for containing and releasing inner thoughts. Each bowl acts as a personal “box,” holding dreams shaped by restriction and a desire for freedom. Through metal I translate unspoken emotions into tangible form, using silver as a diary of experience influenced by a visit to Isfahan, Iran.
Using traditional silversmithing techniques, engraving, and raising I shape the material to reflect internal tension. These engraved surfaces are records of experience, extended through limited edition prints as visual echoes of my voice. The bowl becomes a carrier of emotional weight, inviting touch and connection, while silver’s luminous quality reflects my ongoing exploration of identity and freedom.
Whisper of Freedom
Amanda and Matt Caines
amandacaines@hotmail.co.uk mattcaines@hotmail.com
From childhood, Amanda’s attraction to the security of a safe space has been an underlaying theme surfacing in her paintings, stitchwork and jewellery. Comparatively, Matt considers the box as the vessel for a piece to inhabit. Within the boundaries of each boxes’ form, each brooch inhabits its own collaged world: a piece can be taken out and worn, but can also remain within its box to be displayed as a bas-relief.
Each piece begins its journey uncertain of what it will become. Through silversmithing and carving, creations can move towards sculpture, jewellery or a two-dimensional display piece. Within this organic process, the form asserts its agency and dictates which medium it is intended for: thusly, their work is inherently animistic.
Lanier Guita Brooch
Ane Christensen
I like the idea that the longer we live the more richness we carry with us. The many ages we have been, the lives we might have lived, our hopes, grief and wonder. And perhaps all these parts of us exist as inner ‘boxes’, some wide open and some possibly shut for good.
For ‘Boxes of Dreams’ I wanted to make tangible representations of these hidden boxes and have taken inspiration from my lifelong fascination with objects trapped in ice. Visible but strangely out of reach and otherworldly.
These pieces are the result of a project started a decade ago as experiments with metal cast in ice. They are made with technical support from glass artist Joseph Harrington.
Boxes of Wonder
Amy Cushing
Meticulously hand crafted using various kiln-forming techniques, this unique glass miniature depicts a fantasy scene granting escapism.
Playfully exploring construction with decorative elements that allow for wonder and imagination. This dream like scene encourages the mind to drift through shimmering elements and enter a utopian archway filled with joyful sunlight and radiant warmth. High clarity glass, polished with precision, creates a reflective environment further playing on introspective themes of contemplation. It is a treasured place I would like be, and hope others feel the same.
Carnelian Sunset
Ella Fearon-Low
Boxes for me have always been about containment of ideas and treasures. Squirrelled away secrets and hidden gems just for you. Both of the works I am displaying subvert this idea in some way. The plaster pieces in ‘Offering’ because its box like forms cannot contain anything and yet are informed by precious vessels such as those in the Gilbert Collection at the V&A; and Kaleidoscope because it is see-through and you can view its contents through the walls of the container as well as reflected back at you in the mirror base. It invites a playful interaction with the viewer and evokes childhood memories of the glittering fun inside its namesake. Kaleidoscope is made in response to a larger artwork – Pluvia Laetus (Joyful Rain) shown at Goldsmiths’ Hall in 2025.
Jed Green
Jewellery Box 3, made exclusively for ‘Box Of Dreams’, continues my series of larger pieces combining my roots in sculpture and my shift into jewellery. These works are part of my Wear / Display series, they are multi use objects, either worn, displayed as sculptures or used as containers. They tell stories of travel, discovery, and the emotional treasures gathered along the way.
These architectural columns sitting on a tiered base were inspired by recent journeys, rice fields, discovering mountain temples and castles, walking up steep staircases inside and being rewarded with the views from the top. Sitting on the top of each column is a removable piece of jewellery like a treasure waiting to be found.
Jewellery Box 3
Jo McAllister
My practice has long been concerned with boxes; for the containment and presentation of space, as well as for intangible, metaphysical concepts. ‘Box of Dreams’ presents archive pieces.
Stone Made Objects for Preserving, 2003: Metaphysical objects to contain, preserve and concentrate the mind on some of the most precious aspects of being human: Dreams, Wishes, Hopes, Spirit and Soul.
Wish Percolators, 2004: For wishes to become reality they need to be considered, pertinent, nurtured and activated. Wishes are whispered into the base and left to percolate into being.
Observer’s Binoculars, 2011: An optical box for wanderers who look, ponder and wonder; for someone who perhaps seeks to avoid small-talk, to take time to cloud-watch, to think quietly and dream deeply.
Richard McVetis
Time as object.
To make something is to resist time, to slow it down, divide it, hold a part of it still. The grid, the cube, the lattice: structures that contain. Not just space, but duration. Not just form, but what form keeps.
A box is an act of faith. The object becomes a container for a lived life. Each piece I make is evidence of a physical existence, a mark of a brief time here. The grids and cubes I return to are not empty and cold structures. They are architecture for tenderness. They are small interventions in space and time.
Tender Architecture, 2021
Inspired by Eva Hesse's Accession IV and her exploration of the tension between rigid geometry and organic interiority, this rag rug sculpture reimagines that dialogue through textile.
Millman Street
Embroidery is time made visible. Each stitch is a small act of attention, the hand as record-keeper. These cubes hold that labour within their form: slow, accumulated, embodied.
Millman Street
Caitlin Murphy
‘Box of Dreams’ was a theme that lent itself to the angular, geometric nature of my work. I often make boxes, whether containers or open cube forms, which led me to relook at origami and how cubes can be formed.
The ‘NET’ Pins draw on the idea of a deconstructed cube or box. Each NET is unique in its shape, yet all could be folded into a cube from their 2D self. I combined precious and non-precious materials, reflecting my approach that value comes from what we do with materials beyond their monetary value. I oxidised the pins black to suggest the negative space of the box left behind.
NET Pins
Francisca Onumah
The Murmur and Squat vessels hold figurative forms which, when grouped together, suggest familial anthropomorphic silhouettes. Though not based on specific characters, the vessels embody traits and temperaments of family and nurturing. They sit together and lean into each other, as if in whispered conversations, which reflects the importance of communing in Francisca’s cultural background. The vessels not only physically hold water, flowers etc. their sombre dispositions carry space for quiet contemplation.
Squat
Ash & Plumb
A family of five vessels, each distinct in form and character from the next, created as a celebration of the ancient history of the vessel and the enduring mythos of containment. Crafted from storm-felled English oak, the works explore how objects have long been used to hold not only physical contents, but also ideas, memories, rituals, treasures, and secrets.
Though open and sculptural in form, each piece suggests containment in a broader sense: objects carrying traces of time, intimacy, and human presence. Shaped slowly in response to the movement of the material itself, the vessels embrace erosion, asymmetry, and surface imperfections as part of their final language. Layers of smoke, fire, lime, and natural oils are applied to create rich patinated surfaces that evoke age, handling, and material memory.
Jo Pond
Stirred by a collection of diaries, hand-me-down stories, and inherited trinkets, Jo Pond draws on evocative artefacts to craft contemporary heirlooms. Suspended from leather straps, her domestic ‘lockets’ reference the boxed gas masks worn during WWII—objects sometimes decorated for children to soften their severity - yet embedded in everyday life. Reframing these forms as jewellery transforms symbols of protection and fear into intimate, wearable containers that invite reflection on memory, resilience, and inheritance.
Descended from generations of habitual collectors, Pond works with misplaced memories to create objects that carry something intangible forward. Like the women before her, she passes on more than material things, transmitting gestures, sensibilities, and traces of lived experience through form.
Bake wear lockets
Sarah Pulvertaft
Wonder Sifting - Quasi Spherical Compact
This palm sized quasi spherical compact has a glittering kinetic exterior which contrasts with its methodical interior. Its porosity speaks of its construction and echoes the process by which I like to sift ideas in my mind - I let ideas come and go, those that persist in time become sketches or models and a few are made.
As described, memory plays a part in my making process and contrasts abound in my work. I approached the making of this piece, responding to the theme ‘Box of Dreams’, after much sifting. It is a porous container made of impermeable material and assembled of many small elements which articulate individually. It can hold only solid items, an echo of the persistent idea emerging from the memory’s swirl.
Carola Solcia
In these three boxes, I explore jewellery not as something to wear, but as something remembered. Each piece captures a moment of loss or change, a broken earring, a slipping bracelet, a single fragment that remains. By altering the interior of the box, I shift its role from protection to storytelling. I use embroidery and carved stone as slow, deliberate ways to record what is no longer whole.
In response to ‘Box of Dreams’, I see these boxes as small containers for memory and imagination. They hold absence as much as presence, suggesting that what we keep is not always physical, but emotional, traces of objects that continue to exist through recollection and making.
Inca Starzinsky
'All my Love' is a collection of 6 hair pins. The hollow shapes represent clouds "containing" a loving memory with people close to my heart. The shape of each hair pin is made with merged letters of sentences describing these memories. In a way they are cloud-memories “floating” around the head.
Elsa Tierney
Before sleeping, I often drift into dreams of finding caskets of buried treasure, imagining it hidden deep in the sand or resting on the ocean floor, waiting to be found. That sense of wonder for jewellery began in childhood with my aunt’s jewellery box: I would whisper “treasure,” and she would let me rummage through her wonderful collection of Art Deco jewels.
Visits to the V&A and the British Museum with my mother deepened that fascination, as I would gaze into glass cabinets filled with real-life treasures and wonder how they were made.
These early “boxes of dreams” shape the jewellery I create today, capturing the essence of treasure, I make the jewellery of my dreams
