Robin Shelton is an interdisciplinary artist working across the mediums of jewellery, photography, collage, drawing, and the written word. Since graduating from Loughborough College of Art and Design with a first-class honours degree in Silversmithing and Jewellery, his career has encompassed making, teaching, exhibiting (nationally and in Europe), and writing two traditionally published non-fiction books.

His early jewellery work explored the nature of the materials, processes, and philosophies presented to him during his studies. The first year of the course focused entirely on the instruction of traditional silversmithing and metalworking techniques—piercing, annealing, bending, folding, raising, forging, casting, machining, chasing, threading, drawing, and spinning.

Over the decades, Robin has refined his style by using these techniques in new ways with unconventional materials. He describes his creations as ‘the result of a dialogue between me and the objects I make or find.’ His studio is regularly scattered with objets trouvés that have caught his eye over the years. Whether from the street, beach, or forest, they assemble themselves, occupying valuable bench space, and murmur—softly clamorous at times, and at others, rowdy, insistent, or shouty. Half-made, abandoned projects from years past sometimes holler back, dragging themselves into being as he watches on, both amazed and amused.

Consistently blurring and stretching the interstices between form and function, made and found, precious and base, implicit and explicit, his desire is for his work to encourage others to do the same. He hopes to inspire exploration of the philosophy that life, much like art, is more rewarding, educational, and entertaining when you take the time to listen as well as speak, and when you ask more questions than you answer.

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Robin Shelton has collected found objects for as long as he can remember. Over time—sometimes in just a few fleeting seconds, other times over many years—these objects form associations between themselves, which he attempts to mediate and manifest using traditional techniques in unusual and diverse ways. By making appropriate and judicious interventions in each component of a piece, he achieves constructed harmonies that are sometimes poetic and often playful.

The materials are varied: tide-smoothed pebbles and glass, marine-grade steel cable, industrial rubber tubing, and odd fragments from beaches, pavements, or the countryside sit alongside a variety of metals, woods, and sometimes bone. These are carved, shaped, and bent to will in order to echo or enhance the casual allure of the found, which has itself been modified in some way as a gesture of compromise towards the made, breaking hierarchies.