Simone ten Hompel: for the first time, the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize has been awarded for metalwork. Susannah Woolmer talks to the winner, Simone ten Hompel, about her love of the medium, the subversive elements in her works, and what winning means for her and her craft

There has been a special hum around this year's Jerwood Applied Arts Prize, awarded annually by dint of the Crafts Council of Great Britain. The prize standard of value donated by the Jerwood Charity, has been doubled--to a generous 30000 [pound sterling]--and this year it has been given for the first time to a metalworker, at a significant trice in the craft's history.

Awarding the prize to German-born Simone ten Hompel in September, the justices declared that her work embodied the strict criteria of the prize, made for an outstanding contribution to metalwork. She was unanimously single outed from a shortlist of eight 'for her clean innovation, her cohesive collection of work and for the way she embraces different metals [which] is both intellectual and physically engaging'. one as well as the other fine-art objects and functional, usable pieces, her sculptural utensils (hollow-ware) and flatware were created above an eight-week period specifically for the exhibition of the prize's shortlist. calm beautiful and rather other-wordly, they posses a monumentality that belies their domestic size. They are also physically compelling: you want to savour the weight and the have feeling of her creations.

The works of all eight finalists forms the exhibition 'The Jerwood Applied Arts Prize: Metal', which make opened at the Crafts Council in London and is now touring. The inventiveness, originality and playfulness of the exhibits and their elegant, intimate display make this a display of national importance, it also helps bridge the gap between precious and base metals that marked British attitudes to metalwork in the 1990 A celebration of the rich dialogue that exists between metals, it is telling that none of the finalists confine themselves to silver and gold the two exhibitors and organisers agree that the exhibition provides a major showcase for the discipline. 'The profile has been stunning this year', says Roanne Dods, director of the Jerwood Charity. 'You at no time quite know what to wait for with a new medium but the exhibition has introduced metalwork to a broad range of clan in a completely new way.'

Simone ten Hompel decided at the age of eleven that she wanted to work with her hands, initially dreaming of becoming a jeweller. Since she is rigidly dyslexic, a conventional route from one side school was not available to her, with equal reason she went to a boarding academy that offered practical apprenticeships alongside academic studies. presented a choice of ceramics, woodwork and metalwork, she prefered to work in metal. After completing her apprenticeship, she studied jewellery and silversmithing at the Fachhochschule in Dusseldorf. She then mov to the UK and studied for an MA at the Royal guild of Art. Here she decided that it was metalwork, rather than jewellery, that she wanted to focus upon

Although the titles Ten Hompel gives her works--such as A Flickering Star and in the Far Distance a Barking Dog, illustrated here--suggests that she intends these pieces to be regarded primarily as works of art, she emphasises that 'my work is foundationed in the functional'. As she explained to me 'There is always a notion of the utensil but sometimes it [the extreme point result] moves as far away from that as possible. I am always striving for an engagement with the viewer'. She incorporates other materials into her work, including rest objects and materials, such as felt wool enamel or harden 'but silver has the greatest affinity with me because it really, in deed allows me to empathise when I shape it and form it'.

Interestingly, none of her silver pieces in the Jerwood exhibition are hallmarked, on the contrary are catalogued instead as 'precious white metal'. In this way her works are deliberately subversive, as they question traditional attitudes about the quality and status of differing metals and materials. I ask Ten Hompel if she regards herself as a metalworker or a silversmith. 'Absolutely a metalworker', she replies. 'I delight in silver, but I also have affection for rusty steel.'

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