Sarah Pulvertaft - Delightful Kinesis
“Over time I’ve tried to develop basically a language, which describes in abstract form movement in nature or the repeat that you see everywhere. There’s something meditative in that”. For Goldsmiths’ Stories, Kate Youde talks with jeweller Sarah Pulvertaft about creating delight with kinetic pieces, the spareness of the cube, and weaving jewellery from silver, gold, and gemstones.
Sarah Pulvertaft is dextrously holding a tiny silver cube with pliers in her left hand while she saws off the sprue from this casting with her right. She then swiftly runs a steel file across the 2mm x 2mm shape to remove the sprue lines and smooths the whole with emery paper.
This preparation work takes a matter of seconds, yet the pieces are the (literal) building blocks of her jewellery. The repetition of tiny cubes - an ever-present motif throughout her 30-year career - is central to her elegant, sculptural designs in silver and gold.
“I love the spareness of [the cube],” she says. “And so over time I’ve tried to develop basically a language, which describes in abstract form movement in nature or the repeat that you see everywhere. There’s something meditative [in that] if you’re in a field of wheat, or in a wood, you know what the shapes might be.”
Sarah grew up in the Teign Valley near Dartmoor in Devon, in a household where making was the norm. Her stay-at-home mum would weave, print on fabric, restore china and spin wool. Her father, a nuclear engineer on submarines, made toys for Sarah and her two siblings. He set up a dark room in the downstairs loo, complete with a red light on the outside, where she learned to develop photographs.
She studied photography as part of her foundation course at the then Plymouth College of Art and Design, but it was the jewellery module that decided her career. “I went into this room and sat at a bench into the cutout, and it felt so lovely,” she recalls. “I made a piece… and I loved the concentration of it and the absorption. And I went on from there. I’ve always made jewellery ever since.”
Following a term and a half at London Metropolitan University, Sarah followed her then boyfriend to Australia and studied at Sydney College of the Arts. She majored in jewellery and silversmithing under the guidance of the Danish silversmith Helge Larsen, who made kinetic jewellery with his wife, Darani Lewers, and the Australian conceptual jeweller Margaret West. “Because of that mix, you didn’t have to make anything wearable,” says Sarah. “As long as it had a relationship to the body, it counted. So I got some skills but more ideas.”
Sarah remembers clearly a lecture by Larsen during which he showed 1960s kinetic jewellery by the German artist Friedrich Becker, who drew on his knowledge as an aircraft engineer, and the Belgian artist Pol Bury. The subtle movement in the undulating patterns of her own jewellery is a nod to their practice. “I’m not an engineer, I really am not wired that way, so mine is more akin to weaving,” she says.
Sarah has some of her silver cubes cast with a jump ring attached; others she cuts and drills by hand so that they can revolve around a pin. She makes a frame for her piece of jewellery and drills holes through this frame. She threads her cubes onto silver wires either through their drilled holes, or via the jump ring so the shapes stand proud from the surface. Sarah then solders these pins onto the frame at the ends. She wants to bring “delight” with the added element of movement, describing it as “a cheeky wink”.
On her return from Australia to the UK in 1988, Sarah worked in London for a prop maker supplying the Royal Shakespeare Company. She then sewed hats that she sold on a stall at Hyper Hyper, a since closed space for independent designers in Kensington, along with jewellery made by Sian Evans. “She later told me I was one of her best stockists,” says Sarah.
Wanting to get back into jewellery herself, she asked Sian for a job and spent three years at the bench making Sian’s designs while taking evening classes in technical skills at London Metropolitan University. In 1995, she set up on her own, having received a grant from the charity Craft Central. The following year, she received a “huge” order from the department store Barneys New York for the US, Japan and Singapore after jeweller Alex Monroe took her to his appointment. “Literally, the fax machine spilled paper,” says Sarah. “It was like a film.”
When her two children came along, she found the pace of designing two collections a year “too fast and furious”, and the scale of orders from Barneys diminished with a change of buyer, so she chose to make “slower work” instead. Being accepted into Goldsmiths’ Fair for the first time in 2011 gave her the platform she needed to make bigger pieces, as opposed to the less expensive work she already knew would sell.
This change in approach was boosted by her work environment. Sarah and her family moved from London to a cottage in rural Oxfordshire about 20 years ago to ease the commute for her husband, Craig Richardson, a professor of fine art, who was working in Oxford at that time. Having initially worked out of someone’s shed, she found her current workshop - one of two in a converted ranger’s lodge on the Cornbury Park Estate near Charlbury. She soon appreciated the influence of a nice workplace on her output. Her bench faces the window and overlooks the drive, which is sandwiched between grass and trees. In the spring sunshine on the day I visit, it is the picture of a rural idyll.
While repetition had inspired Sarah’s designs in London, the landscape of her new surroundings brought a fresh dimension. “When I moved here, [I would be] going through fields and thinking, ‘What is it about this that is so gorgeous?’ There’s something meditative if you’re in the middle of a field and all the crop is going like this around you,” she says, swaying her arms. “All the shapes are the same, and ever so slightly different.”
She captured this beauty by working on larger pieces such as the 5.5cm-diameter circular Sequin brooch (2017) that is now in the Goldsmiths’ Company Collection. It features a silver frame containing 23 rows of drilled square beads with “outcrops” of 18-carat gold cubes raised from the background.
Sarah is not too literal in how she responds to her environment. “It’s almost like I want to be inspired by [the rural setting] but then I’m going to come away and make something that only has an essence of it,” she says. She takes lots of photographs on her phone when out on walks: patterns made by a plough; a tree; crop marks. Some of these are printed and tacked to the white workshop wall near the door. She looks at the photos and draws so as to explain to herself how to make something, but her design “usually begins in the metal”. She always has little piles of cubes on her bench that she will push into different patterns.
She works in sterling silver - and may have been a silversmith in “another world” - but likes to inject colour with gold or gemstones. “You’ve got the movement and the monochrome of the silver and then you add another element and it just elevates it a little bit,” says Sarah, who works with an external stone setter.
Some of the cubes in her Bough brooch are set with emeralds, tsavorites, sapphires and tourmalines. She showed the piece alongside her first narrative collection, Supernature, with Goldsmiths’ Fair at Collect Art Fair in London earlier this year [2025]. The new designs included two necklaces, the form of which was inspired by Ordnance Survey map holders.
The collection interprets a long field near Sarah’s home in which she walks every day during summer, when it has paths mown through the crop. At the top of this West Field, there is a wildflower meadow, “which is lovely because it’s ugly at times, when it’s all slightly decaying, and then it’s suddenly very beautiful”. Sheep gather at a ring of trees, which she says at about 5pm on some days becomes a “burning bush” because of the way the sun shines on it and creates a red hue underneath. A hedge, from a certain angle, “looks like a portal to another world”. “I call it Supernature because it seems to me that there are lots of amazing natural happenings that happen in a quite pedestrian proper working farm field that I’m privileged to see,” she says.
Taking part in Collect was a career highlight for Sarah, who turned 60 this year, and she would love to be represented by a gallery on a permanent basis. She also has the ambition to have a piece enter a museum collection.
To try and achieve this, she will continue to develop unique designs with silver cubes, a process that is both meditative and “mind-bending”. “It’s all wrong sometimes, it’s too much, and there’s a tension in that which is really lovely,” says Sarah. “So you can spend hours making something… and then it isn’t right and you have to start again. It’s maddening. But then when it works, it’s such a hit… I’m a dopamine junkie.”
Written by Kate Youde for Goldsmiths’ Stories | Photography by Paul Read