Cecilia Moore

Golden Fleece Award

Based in Dublin, Cecilia Moore has received a BA and MA in Design from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, and has also studied silversmithing at Birmingham School of Jewellery and dinanderie in Paris. Often working in series and groups, she makes one-off sculptural pieces in a variety of metals.

The physical contact, energy and ritual inherent in the laborious and time-consuming traditional processes she employs – between the metal, the hammer and the artist – are foremost to her work. Her making is a singular and deliberate act, but meditative and magical. While the physical forms she produces could, in theory, be made using mechanical techniques and less laborious means, the handmadeness of the pieces, the care and attention focused on each one, is central to her practice. The solitary nature of her work processes is counterbalanced by the playful groupings of objects she assembles. Arranged according to colour, form and character, they appear to interact and communicate with each other, meeting again in new formations every time they are displayed.

Cecilia Moore applied for a Golden Fleece Award seeking the financial support that would allow her to continue focusing on ‘raising’ (an ancient, near-obsolete silversmithing process of repeatedly hammering sheet metal to form hollow sculptural forms) in superior materials – namely silver, a much better medium, in place of the gilding metal she had been using to date – and sound barriers to dampen the noise made by the raising process when working in a shared space.