Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: Victorian colour, jewellery and metalwork

Victorian colour, jewellery and metalwork

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Victorian colour, jewellery and metalwork

Nandini Das visits Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean in Oxford and talks to a jeweller.

Fashion, design and art and the vivid colours of new materials and paints are explored in an Ashmolean exhibition. The curator joins a jeweller and a historian of metalwork.

Man-made gems are the subject of research being undertaken by jeweller Sofie Boons. She joins presenter Nandini Das alongside Matthew Winterbottom, the curator of an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which explores the explosion of colour in design, textiles, paintings and jewellery in the Victorian period.  Dinah Roe has been looking at the the way colour infuses the pages of Victorian literature and in 1773, Birmingham Assay Office was founded  to provide testing and hallmarking of precious metal items - Chris Corker from the University of York has been researching that history.  

Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford runs until 18 Feb 2024 and Matthew Winterbottom is its co-curator and Assistant Keeper, Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Ashmolean.
You can find out more about "the alchemical jeweller" at https://sofieboons.com/
Dr Chris Corker lectures at the School for Business and Society at the University of York and you can hear more about his research in a previous episode of Free Thinking called Tin cans, cutlery and sewing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jcr0
Dinah Roe is Reader in Nineteenth Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University.  You can hear her discussing the writing and artwork of the Rosetti family which was displayed in an exhibition at Tate Britain in a previous episode of Free Thinking. 
Nandini Das is a historian and New Generation Thinker based at the University of Oxford. She is the author of a book called Courting India and has presented Essays and Sunday Features for BBC Radio 3 including Rainsong in Five Senses and A Jig Into History about a bet undertaken by Shakespeare's former clown Will Kemp https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001j4rz

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Victorian colour, jewellery and metalwork

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