33.3%

We've been searching frantically for a home these last few months, our rent was rising by a third! Fingers crossed, yesterday we got something. Very expensive, very small and very far away.

I recently got caught in the sights of a local woman who loves nothing better than bawling at total strangers. Her insults can be pretty painful sometimes so I did my best to avoid eye contact. Strange then, that I should've noticed the her spectacular collection of brooches (worn all-at-once on the same jumper). Maybe we're not so different after all.


Unlike the work of Lea Stein, my favourite brooch is not in the least collectable. Originating from a small fishing town in Denmark, Buch & Deichmann’s founder took inspiration from the ‘shiny rings of the moors’ to make bracelets, expanding the full line of accessories in the plastic-loving 80s. These days they make frames for glasses.

Early Bird

I gave up on milk the day a Japanese friend explained that westerners famously smell of cheese! So, although those beautifully blank bottles no longer figure in my fridge, they do feature on the doorstep of Early Bird, our latest print.

With a lingering whiff of nostalgia, the traditional milk bottle has a look I still enjoy in umpteen applications, from the cast concrete bollards outside a dairy to the roughly drawn outlines emptied on Tom & Jerry. So ubiquitous is the symbol that it occasionally jolts my reality when I see one filled with orange juice!

Pound, Shillings, Pence

They're a highbrow bunch up in Shropshire. Our latest stockists, Black Bough, take their name from the Ezra Pound poem, In a Station of the Metro. Run by Adam Withington, the go-to guy during our stint at Great Western Studios, Black Bough takes its cue from the eerier elements of British Modernism. Can't wait for the shop to go online... just check out those bowls!

Similarly, a current group show at Clerkenwell's Rob Tufnell Gallery focuses on the activities and ongoing influence of Vorticism, a term coined by Pound for the British movement quashed at the outbreak of WWI. Under the title of Ken Russell's 1972 biopic of group member, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Savage Messiah exhibits a range of art and artefact (from publishing, periodicals and posters to sculpture, relief and film) spanning the entire tumultuous century.

• Karin Ruggaber, Relief(s) #67, #89, #94, 2008-2010

Savage Messiah
Rob Tufnell at
1 Sutton Lane EC1M 5PU
Wed-Sat, 12-6pm
23 April-23 May 2011