Blushing Metals is an ongoing workshop series exploring sustainable patination through non-toxic, everyday materials. Developed across academic and cultural contexts, it invites engagement with metal through surface experimentation and material enquiry.
Running alongside Hepworth in Colour, this workshop approaches colour not as something applied, but as something that emerges through process. Metals are highly responsive to their environment, offering a rich and often unpredictable palette through the alchemical transformations of oxidation and patination.
Participants will be introduced to a range of accessible recipes for colouring metal, working hands-on to produce a small personal archive of samples, including individually patinated pendants. No prior experience in jewellery or metalwork is required.
All materials are provided and ticket price includes entry to the Hepworth in Colour exhibition prior to the start of the workshop.
This workshop will be led by:
Adi Toch is a London-based artist, metalsmith, and educator, exploring the sensorial, historical, and cultural dimensions of metal through the realm of objects and our close relationships with them. Her work responds to both inherited traditions and contemporary concerns. She employs her material’s transformative, reflective, and sonic qualities, engaging the viewer through an embodied experience. Her practice often involves iterative collaborations with museums and artists from other disciplines.
Adi exhibits widely in the UK and internationally, and is a lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She was a finalist in the Loewe Craft Prize (2017) and later served on its international judging panel (2019). Her work has been recognised with a Gold Award from the Goldsmiths’ Craft and Design Council, UK, and the European Prize for Applied Arts, Belgium. In 2021, she was commissioned by the Gilbert Trust for the Arts to respond to the restitution of a historic gold ewer, resulting in her artwork Place to Place, now on permanent display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Her work is held in major public and private collections including the V&A Museum, London; The Crafts Council, UK; The Goldsmiths’ Company, London; London Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Birmingham Museum; National Museums Scotland; National Museum Wales; Ulster Museum, Belfast.
