Charlotte E Padgham Contemporary Art & Jewellery

Charlotte E Padgham is an experimental and sustainable artist and jewellery designer-maker exploring themes of transition, manipulation, ephemerality and ‘imperfection’ using found objects, waste material and organic matter fused with precious and semi-precious elements. She has a fascination with texture, degradation and decay and in the traces and residues left behind often using her body as tool and material to explore the transference, intervention and preservation of the self.

Circular economy principles are an integral part of her process. With a focus and commitment to ethical and sustainable making, materials and waste are reused, reworked and recycled within and across her art and jewellery practices. She is passionate about sourcing materials with her own hands, re-using what is already in circulation, and giving new life to what cannot be recycled.

Since early 2020 Charlotte has researched and developed systems for reclaiming and reusing waste silver from used photographic fixer to directly plate and form elements of her jewellery and artworks. She has also established several methods of reusing waste non-recyclable resin-coated photographic paper as a new material for creating wearable photographs and jewellery, including ‘gemstones’, sculptural objects and intaglio prints. These techniques and processes are entirely unique to Charlotte’s practice and have culminated in an ongoing experimental body of work made entirely from photographic darkroom waste entitled DARK MATTER. Part of this work has been documented in two publications by The London Alternative Photography Collective and The Sustainable Darkroom.

All of Charlotte’s precious metal jewellery is Hallmarked at the London Assay Office, and she is a registered Fairmined goldsmith.

Charlotte is a member of the Association for Contemporary Jewellery, Heritage Crafts, The Society of British Jewellers, The Guild of Jewellery Designers and Precious Collective. She is also included in the Crafts Council Directory and was amongst the first 50 jewellers to have taken the Fair Luxury Pledge in 2021