Photo: Philip Carr
Photo: Nicholas Sinclair

Jewellery is Life: new work by Mah Rana
FABRICA, Brighton, 2002
Mah Rana uses precious materials and found objects to create unconventional items of jewellery often based around stories, songs or fairy tales. For Jewellery is Life Mah created a series of ‘mourning’ brooches, birthstones and zodiac pieces which examined the role of memory, history and experience in our lives. The exhibition explored our relationship with jewellery – how we use it in both our daily lives and to mark significant events and occasions such as births, weddings, anniversaries and bereavement.







Prickings: new work by Catherine Bertola
FABRICA, Brighton 2006
Touring to BOWES MUSEUM and NOTTINGHAM CASTLE MUSEUM
For Prickings* curator Frances Lord, Fabrica, Nottingham Castle Museum, The Bowes Museum and artist Catherine Bertola collaborated to explore lace in the context of the social, political and cultural histories of each gallery site. Prickings was a body of work produced as a result of Catherine’s fascination by lace as object and status symbol, its manufacture and associations with women’s social history. For Fabrica Catherine created work which responded to a found photographic archive of famous Victorian women of Brighton: individuals who transcended the perceived and accepted roles of women in society at that time. For Nottingham she showed additional works inspired by the Nottingham lace designer Amy Atkin and for Bowes newly commissioned works were shown alongside the Fine & Fashionable: lace from the Blackborne Collection exhibition. Working on vellum and paper Catherine created a series of ‘portraits’ using the pricking technique to mark out and suggest lace clothing and accessories that may have been worn by the women. *A pricking is a vellum template used in the production of hand made bobbin lace.

Jewellery is Life
illustrated catalogue with essay
by curator Frances Lord
and introduction by
Gus Casely-Hayford
ed Frances Lord
ISBN 0-9543380-0-6
published Fabrica www.fabrica.org.uk








Catherine Bertola: Prickings illustrated catalogue with text by Frances Lord, Liz Whitehead
and Dr Catherine Harper
ed Frances Lord
ISBN 0-9543380-1-4
published Fabrica, 2006. www.fabrica.org.uk