A Pair of Travel Cups

Goldsmiths’ Company’s Collection 2021

Sterling Silver & Enamel

H102, DIA85/73, D46 mm

Images by Clarissa Bruce

Dedicated to the unknown refugees

“Objects communicate across time messages about peoples and places and ideas.”

Neil McGregor, former director of the British Museum

To make an object for a ceremony, an event, or a particular person, is to tell a story of memory and belonging.  In creating a range of ceremonial vessels and containers of memories, I explore human attachment to objects.

The ongoing movement of refugees escaping from war or searching for a better life is a recurrent phenomenon. Leaving, or fleeing one’s home, seems to awaken a human need to take a meaningful object on the journey.

Travel Cups are traditional Jewish ceremonial objects, created for people on the move who need to perform specific rituals wherever they may be. I was inspired to relate this custom to stories of contemporary refugees by creating a pair of vessels designed for travel.

Each cup, made from sterling silver enamel, consists of three parts of a cone that fit into one another to make a drinking vessel, so it can be swiftly assembled and as swiftly packed away. The images fused onto the enamel are of ancient trees from my two homes: olive and oak in Jerusalem, apple and ash in Cambridge. Landscape is ingrained in us from early childhood, and trees which stay where they are, remind us of the places we have left behind.