Gina Cowen came to make sea glass jewellery after wide travels and a varied career that has included publishing, music management and journalism. Born in Cape Town in 1957, she moved to England via the States, was brought up in Oxford, read English at Cambridge, then worked and travelled in Africa and India. A growing interest in jewellery led to part time study at the London Guildhall University (John Cass) 1993-5 and a further year (1998-9) at Camberwell College of Arts in London.
Gina specialises in jewellery from sea-glass because of the beauty in these simple, tide-tossed luminous pebbles of colour. Her earliest pieces were inspired by glass picked up on a small stretch of shingle near Cape Town.
"Much of the glass I work with comes from a stretch of beach in the north east, where there was once a Victorian factory called Londonderry Glass, later Candlish Glass. At its peak, the factory produced over 20 million bottles a year, as well as decorative glass in a multitude of colours. The waste glass was dumped in the sea, and over the intervening years in a recycling process that could hardly have been imagined at the time, nature has gently transformed this negligence into jewels."
She has a studio in Oxford overlooking the Thames and regularly show work in selected galleries around the UK.
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Selected Exhibitions
Aldeburgh Festival ('Aldeburgh 100')
Strand Gallery, Aldeburgh
Winchester Contemporary Art
'Three Artists', Edinburgh.
Yew Tree Gallery, Slad (Out of the Earth)
Strand Gallery, Aldeburgh (Summer exhibition)
Contemporary Craftsman, Monouth (All at sea)
The Workshop, Lewes (Plastic and Glass)