Caroline Broadhead ( b.1951 ) British Jewellery Designer

New Jewellery Movement

Caroline Broadhead is a British jeweller who was born in 1950. She was a pioneer of a new generation of designers who created affordable fashion accessories out of synthetic materials.

Education

Caroline Broadhead received her education at London’s Central School of Art and Design.

Biography

She used coloured ivory in her early work. In 1977, she started producing necklaces with bound thread. In 1978, she designed a wood- or silver-framed bracelet with tufts of nylon through which the hand could be squeezed; she was a leader in the new jewellery movement that began in 1968, and she used plastic, cloth, paper, and rubber instead of precious metal.

Tufted necklace 1979 Tufted nylon, veneered wood and silver casing designed by Caroline Broadhead.

In the 1980s, she created a series of wearable objects that integrated sculpture, clothing, and jewellery into a single piece, such as her nylon monofilament necklace-headpiece veil, which she released in 1983. She made brooches and brooches out of laminated wood, cotton threads, rope, and coloured nylon filament, which would be more appropriate for industrial design or textiles than jewellery.

Necklace 1979 Bound Cotton (John Houston 1990) designed by Caroline Broadhead

Recognition

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London all include examples of her work. In 1997, she won the Jerwood Prize for Applied Arts: Textiles. In 2018 and 2019, she had major retrospectives at CODA in the Netherlands and the Lethaby Gallery in London. Professor Emerita Broadhead served as the College’s Jewellery and Textiles Programme Director and BA Jewellery Design Course Leader for nearly ten years before retiring in 2018. She continues to teach on the course and serves as a guest lecturer at several universities in and beyond the United Kingdom.