Jane Adam is a lifelong innovator, a quiet revolutionary who has carried out her pioneering work with intelligence and perseverance through four decades. Her natural language is metal but she is unconstrained by its traditional rules. Apparent limitations are there to be tested, in a spirit of genuine enquiry, and then transcended. ‘I push my materials to their limits to explore their inherent qualities, such as how a metal tears or gains texture under stress, or the way a scratched line changes its physical character when it is stretched or compressed.’ Such free thinking allows unexpected outcomes to be appreciated and exploited for their intrinsic textural or visual beauty.

She treasures ‘the magical moment when the right piece finds the right owner… By becoming part of the wearer’s experience and expression of self, my jewellery is transformed and completed… I know I have succeeded in making something relevant when other people respond by buying and wearing my work’. 

Jane Adam’s jewellery changes people; it changes as it is worn; the maker herself changes over time. Her work shows steady evolution melded with continuity, and a sense of circularity, where everything comes around - but always in an original and excitingly different way.

Dr Elizabeth Goring, 2019