The long way around: what I discovered when I finally stopped doing the sensible thing

I have a confession to make.

The version of my story that sounds good at parties goes like this: I always loved making things, I went to art school, I became a jewellery designer. Clean, logical and inevitable.

The true version is considerably messier. It involves a degree I abandoned, years in a career I chose for the wrong reasons, and a long stretch of being very good at a life that didn't feel like mine. It involves being 43 years old, walking back into an art college and feeling, almost immediately, like I had come home.

I'm telling you the true version today. Not because it makes a better story, though I think it does, but because I suspect some of you might be living somewhere inside it right now.

The thing I got wrong the first time

I have always been a maker, that part is true. As a child I tried every craft I could find from knitting, sewing, quilling with paper, polymer clay, to lace making, whatever someone would teach me. Making things was my happy place. It was the one context in which I was completely, uncomplicatedly myself.

After A-levels I did an Art Foundation course that I can only describe as a year of joyful revelation. Photography and darkrooms, ceramics and sculpture, printmaking, working with wood and metal, there was no part of it I didn't love. I learned more in that year than almost any other period of my life. I arrived not knowing what I was and left with a much clearer sense of the shape of my own curiosity.

Then I went to study Craft at university and my heart broke.

I felt boxed in. Creatively constrained in ways I couldn't fully articulate at the time but felt acutely. The freedom of the foundation course, that expansive, try-everything energy, had been replaced by something that felt like narrowing. I left without finishing, one of the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make. I transferred to Cultural Studies, which suited the intellectual part of me and which I genuinely loved, but it wasn't making things. It wasn't what I was for and I felt adrift for a really long time.

I didn't know what to do with that realisation. So I did what a lot of people do when they don't know what to do: I got on with things.

The years I was good at the wrong thing

After university I travelled to Australia and New Zealand, the particular freedom of being somewhere vast and unfamiliar with no fixed plan and then I came home and the jobs began. Various roles, none of them especially memorable, none of them really me. Eventually I found myself in the world of project management, which I was pretty good at.

That's the insidious thing about being good at the wrong thing. It keeps you there. You get results, you get recognition, you get asked to do more of it, and slowly the idea of doing something else, the thing you actually want to do, starts to feel less like a possibility and more like a fantasy you entertain on bad days.

I was organised, reliable, capable of managing complexity, and underneath all of it, I was quietly miserable in a way that was very easy not to examine too closely because I was too busy being useful.

That was until 2010 when I couldn’t take it anymore and I just quit. A necessary step for my own sanity. I set up on my own making jewellery and cufflinks, which felt like finally facing the right direction. It was the right instinct but I didn't yet have the skills or the design language to fully realise what was in my head. 

Life continued, I had a daughter, and I moved back to Herefordshire.. The years passed in the way that years do when you are busy with the texture of an actual life until my daughter started school and I was free to walk back into a classroom.

What 43 feels like in a studio full of twenty-year-olds

I want to be honest about this, because the version people expect is the brave one, the woman who overcame her fears, who pushed through discomfort to start over. That is not quite my story.

Walking back into art college did not feel like an act of courage, it felt like relief. The studio, the making, the thinking-through-your-hands energy of that environment, it was exactly where I was supposed to be. Starting over idd not feel like loss, it felt like a breath of fresh air after years in a room with the windows shut.

This does not mean there were no challenges. Writing essays again after years away from academic life was a bit of a shock to the system and I had to re-learn how to do it. Plus I was the oldest person in most of my rooms with many of the students young enough to be my children. Most were wonderful, a few not sure what to make of me, but when you are doing the thing you are actually meant to be doing, other people’s uncertainty is pretty easy to dismiss.

The Covid enforced break from my studies was challenging. Home schooling made holding onto my creative education impossible, and lack of studio access meant I couldn’t continue making jewellery.  When Covid was over and I could return to art college I had to make a decision - did I carry on and finish or give it up and return to my old life. It wasn’t much of a choice. I kept going because I had come too far to stop, because my mother had gone back to school as an adult herself and shown me there is no age at which it’s too late to become who you actually are, and also because my grandmother had believed in me and my idea of returning to education in my 40s. I kept going because the alternative, returning to a life that hadn’t fitted me, to the life that didn't feel like mine, was no longer something I could contemplate.

The two people who changed everything

I have been blessed with many amazing tutors who have all taught me lessons I continue to value but two in particular shaped me as a designer in ways I am still discovering.

The first was Peter Cosentino, who taught me ceramics during my art foundation course and who helped me solve a problem I really struggled with: how to translate a 2D drawing into a 3D form. I found it near impossible to visualise in three dimensions. It was a block that was limiting what I could make and imagine. Peter patiently helped me through it and what he unlocked is visible in every piece I make today.

The second was James Smith, my art school tutor, who taught me something more fundamental still: how to design. Not just how to execute an idea, but how to develop it. How to get thinking onto paper. How to work through a process rather than around it. How to treat every experiment, including the ones that fail, especially the ones that fail, as valuable learning rather than defeat.

Most importantly, James taught me the question that now drives everything I make.

What if?

What if I change the scale? What if I move this line? What if the texture on that manhole cover becomes a piece of silver? What if I take this shape and push it until it becomes something I couldn't have imagined at the start?

That question doesn't have a final answer. Every piece I make opens three more what ifs. This is what produces really interesting pieces, the reason the work stays alive, the reason I still sit down at my bench with genuine curiosity rather than just going through the motions of making.

What I found when I stopped doing the sensible thing

Here is what I discovered, in that studio, in those years: I have a creative voice. A real one, fully mine, that I couldn't have found without the long way around.

I discovered I am drawn to patterns, to the repeating geometry I find in everything around me, in architecture, in the details most people walk past without seeing. I discovered that my work is always curved and organic despite being inspired by hard-edged, angular sources, and that this tension is not a contradiction to resolve but the thing that makes my pieces distinctive. I discovered that colour, introduced with restraint, one bold colour per piece, can transform the feeling of silver without compromising its sophistication.

I discovered that making is a form of thinking. That the what if question, followed wherever it leads, produces work that surprises even me.

I graduated. I won an award I am still a little disbelieving about. I launched Roxwoods.

Now I make jewellery in my summerhouse workshop in Herefordshire, with silver on the bench and a head full of questions, for people who know something about the feeling I have been describing, the one where you have been so long in the wrong life that you have forgotten what the right one feels like.

Jewellery is a small thing, I know. But sometimes a small thing is exactly the right thing. One piece that reminds you who you are. One piece that says: I am here, I am considered, I am not finished yet.

That's what I make.

If any part of this story feels familiar, if you recognise the years of being good at the wrong thing, or the moment when something finally clicked back into place, I'd love to hear from you. Reply to this post, or drop me a message through the website. Some of the best conversations I've had since launching Roxwoods have started exactly that way.

Victoria

You can browse the full Roxwoods collection at roxwoods.com. To be first to hear about new pieces and behind the scenes from the studio, join the newsletter here.