Sofie Boons is a jeweller working as Senior Lecturer in Design Crafts at the University of the West of England. She recently completed a four-year Crafts Council Research Fellowship at the Centre for Print Research and her PhD titled‘Neo-gemstones: an Alchemical Jeweller’s exploration of lab-grown crystals’. Sofie worked as Head of Academy for the British Academy of Jewellery and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013. She has continually exhibited her work internationally under the moniker ‘The Alchemical Jeweller’.
Yitong Zhang is a multi-award-winning practitioner and researcher in metal. Prior to her PhD at the Glasgow School of Art, Yitong graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and the GSA with first-class honours, during which she completed an academic exchange at the California College of the Arts. Yitong’s artistic practice and research have developed internationally across exhibitions, curations, lectures, and symposiums. In 2021, Yitong held a transdisciplinary exhibition with six renowned Chinese poets, Jewellery is a Poem, in Beijing, inspiring her ongoing inquiry into how the forms and methodologies of poetry might inform investigations into the poeticity of contemporary craft and metal language.
The Mineralogische Staatssammlung München is one of the best German mineralogical collections. The team of the Bavarian State Collection for Mineralogy is, in addition to the curatorial tasks for the maintenance of the collections, also engaged in the mediation of mineralogical and geoscientific topics in the Museum Mineralogia Munich. Dr Melanie Kaliwoda is the Senior Conservator and Deputy Director of the museum.
Curators: Sofie Boons & Yitong Zhang
Facilitators: Stephen Bottomley & Melanie Kaliwoda
Participating Artists: Sofie Boons, Yitong Zhang, Stephen Bottomley, Lin Cheung, Katharina Dettar, Adi Toch, Grace Wilson, Marina Ito, Lili Barglowska, Nicholas Yiannarakis, Syd Kendall, Anastasia Kan, Emily Murphy, Lily Straker, Naima Cheniya, Natalie Asher-Martin, Rebecca Prenga, Rozana Piper, Veroni Dimitrov & Veronika Dika
@thealchemicaljeweller
@sofie.boons
@yitong_zhangyt
sofieboons.com/transformactions
msm.snsb.de/museum
neo-gemstones.com
