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The Tree Project: Julia Keyte
164 Plays10 months ago
Julia Keyte is a very experienced designer and academic, whose career has encompassed teaching, leadership, research and practice. She oversees the Architecture, Interior Design and Product and Furniture Design programmes at Bath Spa University, leading a group of talented designers embedding inventive, collaborative curriculums grounded in active and hands-on learning.
She has been leading and teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in design and craft since 2004, including BA (Hons) Product and Furniture Design at Bath Spa University, and BA (Hons) Jewellery and Metalwork at Sheffield Hallam University.
Julia graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1998. She also has an MFA in Product Design from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2003), from a department that embraced cross-disciplinary design. During this period her work was nominated for the first Dutch Design Prize.
During her time as Head of Jewellery & Silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art, renowned jeweller and educator Dorothy Hogg MBE inspired students in the workshop and beyond. For more information on Dorothy Hogg, the project and participants, visit: www.scottishgoldsmithstrust.org/tree-project.
Hosted by Ebba Goring
Edited & Produced by Eda Obermanns
Cover Image by Shannon Tofts
Music: Precious Memories by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
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Transcript
Introduction to The Tree Project
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Tree Project Dorothy Hogg Life and Legacy podcast series. I'm Eva Goring from the Scottish Goldsmiths Trust. This podcast series has been developed to highlight the impact and legacy of the late Dorothy Hogg MBE and her influential time leading the jewellery and silversmithing department at Edinburgh College of Art.
Participant Selection
00:00:22
Speaker
The participants in this project were selected by Dorothy alongside her friend Curator Amanda Gain. For more information on this project and all those involved, please head over to our website, www.scottishgoldsmithstrust.org.
Julia Keat's Background
00:00:38
Speaker
In this episode, I'm joined by Julia Keat. Let's start with introductions, when you studied at ECA and what it is that you do now. My name is Julia Keat.
00:00:51
Speaker
And I studied at ECA from 1995 to 1998. So I went into the second year. I work at Baths Bar University in the School of Design and my job title is subject leader in design. And I lead the course leaders and course teams for three courses and they are architecture, interior design.
00:01:16
Speaker
and products and furniture design. So basically all of the courses that are concerned with three dimensional world and the built environment and space or the relationship between people and the built world.
Influences and ECA Journey
00:01:30
Speaker
And so tell me going right back, what made you choose to study at ECA? After I finished my A levels at school, I went and did a foundation course.
00:01:40
Speaker
which was a really wonderful experience. I'm actually from Dorset, so a long way from Edinburgh. And I did my foundation course at Bournemouth College of Art and Design at the time. It's Bournemouth Arts University. And I did my foundation course in Shelley Park, a really amazing location building built for Mary Shelley. And I took the 3D route on my foundation course and one of my
00:02:08
Speaker
tutors was Janet Perry. And Janet Perry was one of Dorothy's, I think, early, possibly earliest graduates from ECA. Really, a really talented doula with a really sensitive approach to material and process. So she was pretty influential really. And on foundation, I think what she picked up on was my, I suppose, instincts for working on a very small scale.
00:02:37
Speaker
And what I really discovered while I was on foundation was materials and the fact that I was a three-dimensional thinker and I had no idea that I was, although I had made things, tiny things throughout childhood. That was a major sort of discovery and Janet started to show me some of the work of some of the ECA, jury and silversmithing graduates.
00:03:04
Speaker
and they really helped, I think, capture my imagination. I didn't have an interest in jewellery per se.
00:03:11
Speaker
It was the making and it was the scale and it was material. And I think what really captivated me was the idea of small scale sculpture. So I remember her showing me, she introduced me to Crafts magazine and I remember her showing me some of Gonya Morton's work, the little tiny kind of sculptural brooches with the little kind of turning components on them. That was very inspiring. She, along with the rest of the team, really encouraged me to apply to Edinburgh.
00:03:41
Speaker
which we saw as a bit of a long shot because I would have been going into second year, so there were limited places. And so I did apply for universities in England as well. I think the other thing that was pretty important in all of this is the prospectus. So the ECE prospectus, which we still have on our shelves because it really inspired me and my husband who studied glass. But it's the prospectus and the work of the graduates that was photographed in there.
00:04:11
Speaker
I went for my interview. I brought, you know, a selection of my work.
Adapting to ECA
00:04:17
Speaker
I do remember that Janet told me that the thing that grabbed Dorothy's attention, it was Dorothy and Bill interviewing me.
00:04:26
Speaker
was I had made one of my foundation projects. We were asked to make something that could carry the weight of an egg and I made it out of tracing paper. So I made tiny square section tracing paper cubes and I hinged it, so I made tracing paper hinges. I believe that she said if someone can make it tracing paper hinges and tubes on that scale, then they're meant to be a jeweler. Yeah, so that's how I got there.
00:04:55
Speaker
Thinking back to your time at Edinburgh College of Art, what do you remember about the department, the teaching, the culture? I think retrospectively, I was really lucky to be on such a kind of well established course with small groups. So, you know, we had those opportunities to get to know our tutors and our peers.
00:05:23
Speaker
And I think actually for someone coming from a relatively kind of, I suppose rural area in North Dorset to a kind of major kind of cultural center in Edinburgh, it was a nurturing environment. I think that's, that's very positive. And we also, we had the consistent influence of Dorothy, Bill, Sue and Hina technician, as well as other
00:05:51
Speaker
jury professionals and jury teachers as well coming in and bringing different perspectives. So that I think is a really valuable thing to have that balance of teaching input on a course. I think I found it pretty challenging. At first I came into the second year, so I came to a largely established group.
00:06:13
Speaker
And as I said, I came from North Dorset and I guess actually a very sheltered life in North Dorset, rural North Dorset. And then I had that kind of freedom and discovery and really wide open experimental kind of educational experience on my foundation.
Conversations with Dorothy Hogg
00:06:31
Speaker
And then coming to Edinburgh, I found it constraining at first. I kind of found it more limiting than my foundation course.
00:06:42
Speaker
But I think part of that was just a really big adjustment for me to a new city, a totally different kind of cultural and learning experience, which of course in the end was really positive. But in those early stages, really challenging. The thing reflecting on that now is that slowly I felt able to talk to Dorothy about that.
Key Projects and Learning at ECA
00:07:11
Speaker
And interestingly, then, that conversation continued after I had graduated and gone into education as she, you know, tried to make sure that I guess that that experience wasn't repeated, which I think was really generous in a way. And she listened to that. So it was very much part of the building blocks of the conversation that we then continue to have over several years. And reflecting back, Julia,
00:07:38
Speaker
Do you remember any key projects or aspects of your learning that have shaped your practice and career? I think I really enjoyed the immersion in making and I really enjoyed some of those second year projects. What I really remember was the second year stone setting project and also the silver smuthing project, which was with Bill.
00:08:00
Speaker
And I actually really enjoyed those discoveries, you know, making in three dimensions in base metals and in copper and in gilding metal and in silver. They were really valuable and enjoyable experiences. I was also interested in gemology as well and through ECA I did get a job in
00:08:26
Speaker
in a shop, so it's a retail job, which other graduate have, graduates have done as well, because we kind of, you know, it went from one person to another as a Saturday girl. But that was interesting. You know, that, that, that, I learned about gemology there as well. So that was really interesting, but I was also really inspired by Onno Bucat, a Dutch designer in Düler who visited and did a project with us called Thing on a String.
00:08:51
Speaker
which can completely open out what is jewelry. It's a thing of string. What could be jewelry? So we're using a lot of found objects and that really ignited my interest as well. We did a lovely project with ostrich eggs. We may have been the only year that got to do an ostrich egg project.
00:09:09
Speaker
But that was great, sort of reinterpreting ostrich eggs as new objects. And I also really enjoyed meeting Otto Kunzli, so Dorothy took us, she did I think every year, she took us to Munich and that was in third year. And then we got to meet Otto Kunzli, German jeweller, who like on a book out was
00:09:30
Speaker
know, through his practice and teaching with pushing at the edges of jewellery design and what that is. I was interested in the edges pushing at the kind of boundaries. I didn't do that through what I made necessarily but I think it just sowed the seeds of sort of a more expanded approach than simply being a jewellery designer. I basically sort of found myself sort of straining to experiment beyond
00:09:54
Speaker
what I felt at the time was like a clearly sort of defined approach. I was doing that somewhat naively and also perhaps not understanding that a constrained approach, I felt it was constrained, but actually a clearly defined approach actually gives you, I guess, boundaries so that you're able to be productive within that rather than kind of lost in the desert of, well, what am I going to do now?
00:10:19
Speaker
Tell me a bit more about your relationship with Dorothy and any of your peers that you met while studying. Relationship with peers, like I said, it was really pretty amazing, I think, to be in like a small group. You kind of get a lot of mutual support. And compared to educational opportunities now, it was really privileged to have a space in a workshop. And it was a very disciplined environment, which again,
00:10:47
Speaker
I struggled a little with it first, but, you know, ultimately that's a good thing because, you know, everybody expects to come in every day and work together. So that, that was very positive. And I think we all learned a lot from each other. I think, you know, because I'd gone from my sort of fairly kind of sheltered rural upbringing to then this very experimental foundation course, then to Edinburgh, which was again, a different type of education.
00:11:15
Speaker
I think I basically became really curious about education and what each of those experiences had
Career Path and Educational Philosophy
00:11:22
Speaker
done for me. And actually I did, I kept all my briefs. I have all my briefs from Edinburgh and my foundation course. So it started me sort of thinking about education and I wrote my dissertation about the course. And so through that dissertation, then I interviewed Dorothy and I interviewed Sue.
00:11:44
Speaker
I think I also interviewed some graduates, but I looked very closely at the work of graduates. So some of the graduates whose work had really inspired me when I came onto them.
00:11:54
Speaker
course, ended up in my dissertation. It was a really authentic interest. It was something I was very interested in. So I was talking to Dorothy and Sue about the graduates who had inspired me, and two other people as well. And this was supported, you know, really well by my dissertation tutor Elizabeth Cumming. So that was a kind of very interesting kind of process of discovery that I think was also a stepping stone into
00:12:23
Speaker
going into education myself. It was that kind of curiosity and the investigation and talking to my teachers about how they felt their teaching had influenced what the course had become. So that's when my conversations with her I think really started. And how did that continue after graduation and what you did next? She was really supportive when I started to make steps into education.
00:12:51
Speaker
My first kind of permanent job in education was at Plymouth College of Arts. So I moved down to Plymouth after graduating with my now husband. So we moved down from Edinburgh to Plymouth where I developed my own practice. But sort of working on my own practice, it went fairly well and I learned a lot through it, making my own work based on my degree show work.
00:13:20
Speaker
and exhibiting and selling in various galleries at the Oxford Gallery at the time was really kind of prominent and dazzle and lots of the kind of jewellery outlets and platforms for contemporary jewellers at the time. But again, I started to feel a bit constrained and I wanted more of that kind of opportunity to think critically about my discipline and also to expand into other disciplines.
00:13:47
Speaker
About two years after graduating, I applied for a job as small scale metals lecturer at Plymouth College of Art. And so she was, she was very supportive with that. So I got back in touch with her and, and she provided me with the reference, but also just, she, she was generous with her own experience and, and, you know, helping me to, yeah, make, make the step, I guess, into education. Shortly after that, we decided to move to Amsterdam and I went to study and I did a,
00:14:16
Speaker
an MFA in Master in Fine Arts in Product Design at the Sonberg Institute in Amsterdam. While I was there, Dorothy visited with her students. So that was really great to kind of reconnect with Dorothy and just with the course as well. So that was brilliant. And I just remember, you know, having some really good conversations around that and around what I was learning on my course in Amsterdam, which
00:14:43
Speaker
felt again, like another different educational experience to learn from. So being able to digest that with Dorothy was great. When you did the MFA, were you thinking that you might go into being a product designer or were you thinking still at that point, actually, I want to take that learning and then apply it to my career as an educator? I don't think I was that clear.
00:15:10
Speaker
But the reason that that course was attractive was because it was really very interdisciplinary. And there were also, there were a fair few dualers on that course. So it was, or it connected many different disciplines, to be honest. It was a very experimental course, which really kind of connected to my interests. And of course, you know, the Netherlands is really, it's a hub of design and design understanding.
00:15:38
Speaker
And as well as that, there was sort of more of a tradition of designers setting up their own practices and being sole designers. And that went for product design. You know, not just jewelry, it wasn't about craft. It was about design and using design to question and to test and to think about society. Hugely valuable experience. Really different to my experience at Edinburgh. So it was really interesting to have that conversation with Dorothy.
00:16:09
Speaker
Tell me about what did you do then after being in the Netherlands? Well, we were there for three years and then I went back into education.
00:16:19
Speaker
I went back to jewellery design education. So in 2004, I went to become a full-time lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in what was then called jewellery and metalwork. So obviously you've got really long standing course and department in a city that's got deep roots in metalwork. So really interesting, but Dorothy was really pivotal in helping me to find that.
00:16:47
Speaker
It was great. I did say to her that I was looking for teaching work and she then helped connect me to various different people teaching in different courses in the UK.
00:16:58
Speaker
So I had some great conversations with other people that she was able to instigate for me, so brilliant. She also invited me back to, first of all, to talk to the students about my experience in the Netherlands and about my practice, and then to come and run a short project. So super valuable experiences, which then I was able to kind of take with me to Sheffield Hallam.
00:17:23
Speaker
And she also, she had a list of every jewellery and metalwork related course in the country and who was teacher on it. And she sent me this list. So I had that, I benefited from her overview of teaching in this, you know, actually what is a really specialist area. And then the conversation continued again, because it turned out that shortly after I started teaching there, she coincidentally became external examiner.
00:17:51
Speaker
So my first role there was as second year tutor and the second year of any university course has to be moderated by the external examiners. So then there was, you know, a formal conversation around what we were teaching, what students were learning that then continued the conversation for three or four years. Thinking about your experiences being taught by Dorothy,
00:18:15
Speaker
and time at other educational institutions. Could you talk a little bit about how that's influenced your work as an educator now? So they really have. I learned some of my really core values there at Edinburgh. I think one of the really important things I have carried with me throughout my career and life actually, generally, is just that listening and learning from materials. I know I said I felt the course was very constrained to start with, but actually
00:18:45
Speaker
We were really encouraged to be experimental within that creative framework, really encouraged to be experimental with materials and to learn through making. And I think that's, it's just so, so valuable. And something that I'm really passionate about is hands-on learning and, you know, learning about the built environment, you know, whether that's jewelry or products or architecture, whatever, learning about the built environment through making.
00:19:13
Speaker
I think it's a very, very valuable process. So listening to materials, working with materials directly and allowing those materials to inform design was something really, really fundamental, I think.
Current Role and Teaching Approach
00:19:27
Speaker
And then laterally, I've then applied that to learning about the built world and problem solving. So I think it was a really kind of powerful value to take beyond the kind of, like I suppose, original craft context that we were immersed in at the time.
00:19:43
Speaker
And I think also just that sense of vocation as a practitioner but also as a lecturer. I remember Dorothy saying it's all about passion and commitment. That's something I've really carried with me as well as the idea of being a professional lecturer. Do you continue to have your own making practice or any particular areas of research? My practice has been really important to me.
00:20:13
Speaker
But I'm not, I'm not practicing at the moment, but I am researching, I'm completing a PhD. But I think at Bath Spa, one of the things that really drew me to Bath Spa was that they still have this amazing emphasis on making. So it has really wonderfully well-equipped workshops and actually a fantastic ethos and fantastic technical team who really, really encourage students to be experimental with materials and across different sorts of materials.
00:20:43
Speaker
So I'm back in an environment, a lovely experimental environment where people really value material making. And I think that that's really draws a nice circle back to where I started. Part of what we've been doing on the courses is interpreting architecture, interior design, production, furniture design through the lens of art school and through making and learning through making.
00:21:11
Speaker
I think that's a very valuable, valuable thing. We'd kind of gone from teaching at Sheffield in second year in Dorothy B. and then on Xamino. Tell me a little bit about from then to going to Bath Spa. When I graduated from Edinburgh, my practice was really important. So I was a practicing jewellery designer for a little while and I also started to expand
00:21:39
Speaker
my practice so I did a project, Arts Council funded project called High Tech Low Tech. It's while I was in Plymouth so I worked in a non-woven textiles factory so exploring and experimenting with the material non-woven textiles in a factory context and that kind of helped expand what I was doing and that you know in a way was a stepping stone also to going to Amsterdam. When I went back into education at Sheffield Hallen I
00:22:06
Speaker
was then able to continue, I guess, practice under the umbrella of academic research. So I was working on making and curating with colleagues. At Sheffield Hallam, there are also opportunities to teach into some of the other design courses.
00:22:24
Speaker
and there's also a very thriving research centre at Halim which has kind of product design at its core so whilst I was teaching jewellery design I was also able to I guess build on my interests in that kind of more expanded approach to design and we moved to Bath partly for other reasons and because we are both my husband and I both from the southwest we wanted to move to the southwest we had
00:22:53
Speaker
two children while we were in Sheffield and we just wanted to be closer to family and so we came to Bath for that reason and unfortunately then my conversations with Dorothy sort of became a bit more fragmented but you know because I was focusing on my family and my job so life suddenly got a lot more full but then you know in the background of that I think at that time at ECA I think
00:23:21
Speaker
I think I got a sense of what it was to be a teaching, practicing mother. Again, another building block, I think, that has helped me to develop my career and make decisions as I've gone. I was going to ask you a little bit more about your practice or your research and things that interest you in design more specifically to get a more sense of your interests and inspiration.
00:23:49
Speaker
So for me personally, I think one of the things I've been working on for a while now is my PhD, which is just finishing. What I'm doing at the moment is analyzing interviews that I've made with industrial designers who are working in retail. So they're working in a very fast moving environment where they are working in a very agile way.
00:24:12
Speaker
designing a lot of products that make it very quickly onto the market to be consumed very quickly. And that's very interesting. And what I'm actually talking to them about is making meaning. So that's about whether it is possible to design products that have meaning to their users. It is about meaning making and design. So part of the work I've done is looking at how
00:24:36
Speaker
how people relate to their possessions in their homes, to the meanings that those possessions have. So it does connect back to jewellery and all those conversations in jewellery design around sentimental value and what jewellery means to people. But I've taken that, but I'm applying it to other types of possession in the home. And it's been very, very interesting because what the research appears to show is that
00:25:05
Speaker
meanings aren't connected to what something looks like, they're not necessarily directly connected to colour or form or material experience. So because the research was throwing that up,
00:25:20
Speaker
I have been interviewing industrial designers who actually design these products for the home to find out whether they think that it's possible to create meaning and what they do to strive to do that. And part of what that is doing is actually sort of revealing the material expertise of designers and how agile those designers need to be.
00:25:43
Speaker
when they're thinking about their user and their, their market and their clients, as well as material, material experience, the emotion that might be, I suppose, part of the experience with the user. So they're thinking about all that as well as manufacture, manufacture constraints, costs. So it's really kind of revealing just how skilled and agile those roles are in an industry, which is very, very fast moving.
00:26:13
Speaker
at a time when it's actually, I guess, really problematic in the context of environmental sustainability. Do you think that the meaning connected to an object is directly related to its durability and longevity? And so it will last long enough for that attachment, the user. I'm thinking right now about a pair of orange handled scissors in my kitchen that were in my kitchen growing up.
00:26:39
Speaker
They aren't particularly interesting design, but to me, they are as precious as a piece of jewellery. What my research seems to be showing is that when somebody keeps something over a long period of time, it's about people. It's about those relationships with other people, or it's about memories. It's about a time when that, for some reason, that object was important, most likely unintentionally.
00:27:04
Speaker
It's about time and memory and people rather than the object itself. It can also be about the home, about the spaces in the home and the spaces in the home offering opportunities for keeping. It's about processes of curation and display and storage. So what goes in deep storage?
00:27:22
Speaker
that you don't need to see but you need to keep, you feel you need to keep. What do you display? Curation is a process of making decisions about what is important to you and to yourself and to the development of your core self. So it's also about the relationship of possessions to your inner self. Could you tell me about the challenges and considerations you make as an educator and how things have changed since your time as a student?
00:27:53
Speaker
So it's, it's throwing up a lot of questions that we don't have the answers to, to all of them yet, but we're working hard to do that. And it goes along with EDI, equality, diversity and inclusion, which is such an important thing now, rightly, but actually redesigning courses and parts of courses and the delivery of courses to make sure that all students are able to access that content. That's also something that we're really trying hard to do.
00:28:20
Speaker
And, you know, like I say, we don't have all the answers yet, but it throws up really interesting questions about the things that we've always valued in art and design, particularly in the art school.
00:28:32
Speaker
In terms of that kind of studio environment where everybody works alongside each other and you have talks and lectures and you're visiting lecturers and so on, it throws up some interesting questions because actually what about those students who for different reasons aren't comfortable in that open and shared environment? You know, how do we make the course accessible for those students? Or if we're having a talk in that studio space,
00:28:58
Speaker
How do we manage that? How do we manage, you know, students working on their own projects alongside having lectures in the same studios? Part of this as well is, of course, cost of living means that a lot of students, they have to work. And so we can't expect students to be in their studios all day every day, like we might have expected once upon a time. So how do we help them access their learning in that situation?
00:29:22
Speaker
I think what I've really taken with me is that ethos of material experimentation. That's one of the key things I've really taken with me. And I think what I've tried to do so
00:29:34
Speaker
Prior to being in the position I am now leading three course teams, I was the course leader for products and furniture design at Bathsby University. And what I really tried to do with my team was to put that experimental kind of making process into the design process. Because I think what it can do is give you an understanding of construction and tactility
00:30:00
Speaker
and human experience that might be harder to access through more theoretical and computer-based learning. More theoretical and computer-based learning does of course have its place but what we're trying to do is something a bit different. So we try to give our students opportunities not just for making but also just for active learning so that our students are interacting not just with each other but the built environment and learning through that physical kind of hands-on experience.
00:30:30
Speaker
So it's basically trying to put that active hands-on learning at the centre of design process and creative process. And then part of that is problem solving is so important in design, learning to cope with complexity. And I think that making, and not that kind of skilled craft making that we were already immersed in, but just interacting with materials, even in a very informal and a quick way,
00:30:57
Speaker
can really help quickly understand and find solutions for a problem. So really trying to put making back into that cyclical creative and non-linear design process. I think what really came through my experience at Edinburgh was that valuing of individual creativity. We were really supported and encouraged to find
00:31:23
Speaker
something that worked for us as individuals as creative individuals and to really make our work and that degree show and that third year work particularly make that our own to find our own language to an extent. I've really held that with me as well and so I've been really really happy to find this opportunity at Bath Spa
00:31:43
Speaker
to find ways of putting individual creativity at the centre of what we do. And in my experience that means designing projects within our modules that allows the students within the parameters of a brief allows them to make their own response and to value their own response and not to feel that there is a set way of doing this.
00:32:07
Speaker
And I think that works well. We've had great feedback from external clients who work with us on projects. So, you know, design companies who set briefs for our students, who've given us very good feedback on those students kind of sort of sense of personal inquiry. I think what is really interesting about this and again, that throws up questions is how do you do that scale?
00:32:30
Speaker
You know, there were 12 people in my year at Edinburgh. There were four in my year at some very small groups, but actually how, how you do that at scale for a bigger cohort is, is an interesting question. And part of that is setting briefs that encourage creative responses, but also allow, I guess, less experienced.
Conclusion of The Tree Project
00:32:50
Speaker
students to meet their learning outcomes and those more experienced students who are able to really dig deep and run with the project to give them that opportunity as well. So I think those are some of the challenges of education now because of course it's generally run on a bigger scale than they did then. Thank you for joining us, Julia. There's further information about Julia, including links and images on the Scottish Goldsmiths Trust website.
00:33:19
Speaker
That was our final episode in this tree project series. And I'd like to thank again, all those who participated. It's been truly incredible, really wonderful experience to talk with you all. And thank you to all of those who've listened along.