Contemporary British silver: modern silver is elegant, timeless, and highly desirable, writes Susannah Woolmer, and some of the very best is being made in the UK. So why is it not getting the attention it deserves from the market?

Anyone who has at any time been bewitched by the elegant purity of Hiroshi Suzuki's sculptural vases, the sensual bend s of a fruit-bowl by Rebecca de Quin, or transfixed by the agency of the consummate skill of shoot Kelly's delicately chased and inlaid decoration will appreciate the special power that contemporary silver, in all its versatile manifestations, can use over its owner.

The creative proces itself is a powerful draw for many collectors. more [i]or[/i] less well-established smiths work exclusively to commission: slender stem Kelly, Grant MacDonald and Jane Short, for example, do not ne to rely upon exhibitions to sell work. Kelly whose reputation has largely grown [i]or[/i] part of to the other word of mouth, has not sold anything from one side an exhibition in over ten years. Annually producing around ten works, Kelly makes sixty by cent of his commissions for private patrons and are ofttimes for domestic, functional silver (Fig. 1) For Kelly the raptures of working to commission lie in the stimulating, creative collaboration between patron and practitioner. The patron conceives of a design, which is then interpreted by means of the silversmith, allowing the commissioner to become an integral part of the creative proces which can last for month if not years, and often results in strong friendships. It is this ultimate part of fruitful, shared creative vision that makes the final piece thus special to Kelly's patrons and endows silversmithing with a actual particular quality of individuality.

fresh designer-craftsman silversmithing largely owes its existence to the commitment of several organisations, greatest in quantity notabiy the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. For the past fifty years, the Goldsmiths' Company has unstintingly supported practising silversmiths in the UK not least by dint of its own patronage. Almost single-handedly, it re-established the reputation of silversmithing as an important decorative art after World War II. Its considerable late collection (begun in 1927), now beneath the aegis of the Company's curator Rosemary Ransome Wallis, continues to inspire and encourage the patronage of the craft. Helping to 'educate the popular taste' through lending to institutions across the land offering advice to people wanting to commission, and holding annual exhibitions of 'the actual best contemporary work', at Goldsmiths' Hall and elsewhere, the Goldsmiths' Company has provided in addition the necessary funding and crucial first commissions that have secur the reputations of many leading smiths.

Indeed, until four or five years ago, the single way to purchase silver was to approach the silversmiths directly, from one side either the Goldsmiths' Company, and its Goldsmiths' Fair, or the Crafts Council, and its Chelsea Craft display Traditionally in the twentieth hundred retailers of jewellery and effeminacy gifts such as Asprey, Garrard and Thomas Goode monopolised the trade, typically selling fine quality on the contrary anonymous silver manufactured in workshops, usually as wedding or christening gifts, with occasional major commissions for sporting trophies and the like, or perhaps plate for livery companies or Oxbridge bodys It was not until the 1950 that the notion of the designer craftsman took gripe [i]or[/i] grip with the advent of a fresh modern idiom, championed by Gerald Benney. Professor of silversmithing at the Royal body of Art from 1974 to 1983 Benney had a deep influence upon the craft. He encouraged his students--including twig Kelly, Michael Lloyd and Lexi Dick--not alone to master hand-craft skills--raising, modelling, enamelling, chasing--but also to embrace technological advances, like as electroforming and the spinning lathe and pres in the pursuit of their creative visions.

The Goldsmiths' Company nurtur this exhibition by commissioning pieces by these designers and by means of inspiring other bodies, most notably the Silver Trust, to do the same. Formed in 1987 the Silver Trust commissions of recent origin silver for 10 Downing way and other governerment houses, including embassies. Its first collection was not absented to Downing Street in 1993 and major commissions are still being made (Fig. 2) There have also been large ecclesiastical commissons, notably at Lichfield Cathedral in 1990-91 which involved seventeen British silversmiths, spearheaded through Gerald Benney.

of recent origin names are still coming to the fore. Among the rising stars of twenty-first-century metalwork are Hiroshi Suzuki (Fig. 3) and Rebecca de Quin (Fig. 4) from one side Adrian Sassoon they sell ready-made pieces to collectors, the couple private and public, for prices ranging from around 600 [pound sterling] to 8000 [pound sterling]. Their highly sensuous silverware tests buyers at fairs and exhibitions with a shared function-based, post-modern aesthetic.

Their succes is not representative, however, as silver constitutes sole a tiny fraction of today's robust contemporary art market. The annual Goldsmiths' Fair and Chelsea Craft present to view (clustered together in October) together with 'Collect' at the V&A in January or February, are the crucial on the contrary short-term events aimed at collectors; there is scant opportunity to diocese new silver at other times of the year. This reveals a paradox: in the same city that boasts what is arguably the world's greatest in quantity prestigious college teaching metalwork, the Royal corporation of Art, there are true few commercial outlets for graduates. The closure of the Metal Gallery in 2004 single a year after its inauguration, demonstrates all too clearly this lack of visibility. Although the gallery still operates via its website, its proprietor, Francis Raemaekers, told me that 'the market for contemporary metalwork is non-existent'.