About Kate Hodgson
Drawing is at the heart of everything Kate Hodgson makes, and she always draws botanicals. She learned as a child, watching her grandmother paint bluebell woods and turn the natural world into drawings — and she still finds the same magic in drawing with a pen as in drawing with gold. For her, the two are never separate: her work is a continuous conversation between drawing and making, where each sketch informs a piece at the bench, and each piece she works in metal feeds the next drawing, through many iterations. That botanical influence has, quite literally, grown over the years — from her hammered petals to the large flower brooch and the commitment ring, to the botanical drawings behind every piece.
Kate began her career working with vintage jewellery, and those swirling, weaving Victorian motifs have never left her eye. Her hand-worked metal is then finished with the Victorian Flower Setting, where metal is folded over the stone to form tiny flower shapes — a technique passed through four sets of hands since the original Victorian craftsmen, and carried out by skilled craftspeople in Hatton Garden.
When someone commissions one of these pieces, they are wearing a small part of that making-and-design history — a new heirloom, with the flower setting to be seen and admired by the fifth and sixth generations. For Hodgson, jewellery holds the passage of time, and the flower setting carries meaning as well as beauty.