David Watkins (1940–2023) was one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century British studio jewellery, a sculptor-turned-jeweller whose rigorous geometric sensibility and deliberate embrace of industrial materials challenged the conventions of a craft long defined by precious metals and gemstones. Working in acrylic, steel, aluminium, and gold — sometimes in combination, sometimes in deliberate opposition — Watkins produced wearable constructions that occupied the contested territory between jewellery, sculpture, and conceptual art. His influence on successive generations of British studio jewellers was profound, transmitted both through his long teaching career at the Royal College of Art and through a body of work that entered the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Crafts Council Collection, and the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, among others.

Formation and Early Career

Watkins studied sculpture at the University of Reading before proceeding to the Royal College of Art in London, where he encountered the interdisciplinary environment that would shape his entire practice. His sculptural training was decisive: he never approached jewellery as a goldsmith's craft to be mastered through traditional bench technique, but rather as a three-dimensional design problem in which material, form, and the body existed in dialogue. This orientation placed him squarely within the broader international studio jewellery movement that was transforming the field from the late 1960s onwards, a movement that drew energy from Bauhaus principles, from American craft revivalism, and from a European conceptual tradition that questioned what jewellery was for and what it was permitted to be made from.

In the early years of his career, Watkins worked alongside Wendy Ramshaw — his partner and a major jeweller in her own right — and the two became central figures in the emergence of a distinctly British approach to contemporary jewellery. Where Ramshaw's work often engaged with the lathe-turned precision of stacked rings and the poetic possibilities of the set, Watkins moved towards larger, more architecturally assertive forms: neckpieces, collars, and body ornaments that announced themselves as objects of consequence before they were objects of adornment.

Materials and Method

The most immediately striking aspect of Watkins's practice was his sustained engagement with non-precious industrial materials, particularly acrylic (Perspex) and various metals including steel and aluminium. This was not a gesture of provocation for its own sake, nor a simple rejection of tradition. Watkins was interested in what each material could do optically and structurally: acrylic offered translucency, the ability to carry colour through its mass rather than merely on its surface, and a crispness of edge that suited his geometric vocabulary. Steel and aluminium brought industrial weight and a matte or brushed surface quality that resisted the conventional lustre associated with jewellery metals.

Gold was not absent from his work — Watkins used it throughout his career — but it appeared on his own terms, as one material among several rather than as the self-evident ground of value. This levelling of the material hierarchy was philosophically consistent with the broader studio jewellery movement's argument that the significance of a piece resided in its conception and making, not in the market value of its components. In Watkins's hands, a neckpiece in acrylic and steel could carry as much formal authority as one in eighteen-carat gold, and the choice between them was an aesthetic and conceptual decision rather than an economic one.

His working method was characteristically precise. Forms were developed through drawing and model-making before being realised in the final material, and the finished pieces show a consistency of geometric logic — arcs, planes, grids, and modular units — that reflects a designer's discipline as much as a craftsman's. The scale of many works was deliberately generous: Watkins understood that jewellery operates in relation to the body, and that a piece must hold its own against the visual complexity of clothing, skin, and movement. His neckpieces in particular have a commanding presence that photographs well but is fully understood only when worn.

Acrylic Works and Chromatic Investigations

Among the most celebrated passages of Watkins's output are the acrylic neckpieces produced from the 1970s onwards, in which saturated colour — deep reds, electric blues, acid yellows — was deployed with the confidence of a painter working in three dimensions. Acrylic allowed Watkins to achieve effects impossible in metal: a form could be simultaneously opaque at its edges and luminous at its centre, or could shift in apparent colour as the angle of light changed. These optical properties were not incidental but were built into the design, so that the piece became a study in the behaviour of light through coloured mass.

The chromatic boldness of these works placed them in conversation with the Colour Field painting and hard-edge abstraction that were dominant in fine art during the same decades, and Watkins was evidently aware of those connections. His jewellery was not illustrative of painting — it was not jewellery that looked like a Mondrian or an Albers — but it shared an intellectual commitment to the investigation of colour, form, and their interaction that characterised the best abstract art of the period. This gave his work a seriousness of purpose that distinguished it from decorative modernism and aligned it with the more demanding end of the studio jewellery spectrum.

Teaching at the Royal College of Art

Watkins joined the staff of the Royal College of Art's Jewellery and Metalwork department and taught there for more than two decades, a tenure that made him one of the most consequential educators in the history of British studio jewellery. The RCA's jewellery programme, particularly from the 1970s through the 1990s, was a crucible for experimental practice, and Watkins's presence helped to establish the intellectual and material ambitions that defined it. Students who passed through the department during his years there encountered a teacher who took ideas seriously, who expected rigour in both concept and execution, and who modelled in his own practice the possibility of a jewellery career conducted at the highest level of artistic ambition.

The influence of this teaching is difficult to quantify precisely, but the number of significant British studio jewellers who trained at the RCA during Watkins's tenure, and who acknowledge the environment he helped to create, is substantial. His pedagogical legacy is inseparable from his artistic one: the two reinforced each other in ways that shaped the field for a generation.

Public Collections and Institutional Recognition

The presence of Watkins's work in major public collections on both sides of the English Channel reflects the esteem in which it has been held by curators and scholars of decorative arts and contemporary craft. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds examples that document different phases of his career, allowing the development of his formal language to be traced over time. The Crafts Council Collection, which exists specifically to represent the best of British studio craft, includes his work as a matter of course. The Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim — the most important specialist jewellery museum in the world, housed in the German city that has been a centre of jewellery manufacture for centuries — holds Watkins in its permanent collection alongside the other major figures of the international studio jewellery movement, a context that situates him precisely where he belongs: not as a regional curiosity but as a contributor to a global conversation about the nature and possibilities of jewellery as a form.

Watkins also participated in major international exhibitions of studio jewellery throughout his career, including survey shows that travelled between European institutions and helped to consolidate the field's identity as a distinct discipline within the broader world of contemporary art and craft. His work appeared in catalogues that have since become standard references for scholars of the period.

Relationship to the Studio Jewellery Movement

To understand Watkins fully, it is necessary to understand the movement of which he was a part. Studio jewellery — sometimes called art jewellery or contemporary jewellery, terms that carry slightly different inflections — emerged in the postwar decades as jewellers trained in fine art and design began to question the assumptions that had governed the field: that precious metals and gemstones were the appropriate materials, that wearability was the primary criterion of success, that the jeweller's role was to serve the taste of a wealthy clientele rather than to pursue an independent artistic vision.

The movement had important centres in Germany (particularly at the Pforzheim and Munich schools), in the Netherlands (where a conceptual rigour influenced by the De Stijl tradition was especially pronounced), in the United States, and in Britain. The British strand, of which Watkins was a leading figure, tended to combine formal sophistication with a certain pragmatic engagement with making — a legacy, perhaps, of the Arts and Crafts tradition — and was notably open to the influence of industrial design and technology. Watkins's use of acrylic and precision-cut metal was entirely consistent with this orientation.

What distinguished Watkins within this context was the consistency and authority of his formal language. Many studio jewellers of his generation produced interesting individual pieces without achieving the coherent body of work that constitutes a genuine artistic identity. Watkins did achieve that coherence: his work is recognisable across decades and across different material choices, because the underlying geometric logic and the commitment to the body as the site of the work remained constant.

Legacy and Assessment

David Watkins died in 2023, leaving behind a practice that had spanned more than half a century and a teaching legacy that had shaped the field he loved. The assessment of his significance is not difficult: he was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important British jewellers of the twentieth century, and one of the handful of figures who gave British studio jewellery its international standing.

His work remains relevant not because it was ahead of its time in any simple sense — the geometric abstraction he practised was very much of its time — but because it was executed with a rigour and intelligence that transcends the period. A Watkins neckpiece from the 1970s does not look dated in the way that much fashionable jewellery of that decade does; it looks like a resolved formal proposition that happens to have been made then. That is the mark of work that will continue to be collected, exhibited, and studied.

For the gemmologist and jewellery specialist, Watkins's career offers a useful corrective to any tendency to equate value with material. His finest pieces demonstrate that the hierarchy of precious and non-precious is a cultural construction, not a natural law, and that the intelligence brought to the making of an object is a more reliable guide to its significance than the market price of its components. This is a lesson that the jewellery trade has been slow to absorb, but one that the museum world has understood for decades — as the presence of Watkins's work in the world's leading collections makes abundantly clear.

Further Reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum — Jewellery Collection
• Crafts Council Collection
• Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim