Context

Overpriced

Concrete Gospel, verse 05 · 2026

A bag carrying its price where the logo belongs. The tag is milled steel with a satin finish, hung on a short chain from the strap hardware, and it reads OVERPRICED ON PURPOSE, one million pounds, YOU PAID FOR THE IDEA, .NOT FASHION.

Every luxury house charges for the story and points at the leather. The markup is the idea, the object is the excuse, and the entire apparatus depends on nobody saying that out loud. This one says it on the tag, in the typeface the industry uses for its own price cards, at a number too large to be a transaction.

The honesty is the luxury. There is nothing concealed in the object, and that is the only genuinely expensive thing about it. A buyer who understands the tag has already bought the piece; a buyer who is offended by it was never the audience.

It is the fifth verse of Concrete Gospel and it belongs to The Machine, the book about control and greed. Alone it reads as a joke about handbags. In sequence it is a receipt, and the person holding it is on it.

AIM 2026

Award · Independent music · 2026

An uncommissioned award for an independent music body. Loose tubes gathered from a round base, bound at five points up the shaft, splitting open at the crown.

The form carries one argument and will not carry another. Nothing in it stands up alone. Separate the tubes and every one of them falls; bind them and they hold a weight none of them could hold by itself, and the binding is visible rather than hidden inside the casting. That is what an independent sector is and what it costs, so the trophy is built as that and nothing else.

It opens at the top instead of closing into a figure or a cup. An award that terminates in a shape tells the winner the story is finished. This one is still growing at the point where it leaves your hand.

Rendered in satin black lacquer rather than the usual chrome. A mirrored trophy flatters whoever is holding it and photographs as the room around it. Black gives the light nowhere to go but along the tubes, so the object reads as structure rather than as a surface. The same lacquer is on the signet below.

For the Love of God

Signet, black lacquer · 2026

A signet with a flat, wide face and nothing struck into it. The words are inside the band, cut into the metal against the finger: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

A signet exists to be read by other people. That is its whole history, and it is the reason the face is the size it is. This one keeps the face and removes the message from it, which leaves an object that is unmistakably a signet and refuses the job.

An engraving on the outside is a statement made to a room. An engraving on the inside is a sentence one person agreed to carry. The ring says nothing to anybody else and says it every morning to whoever puts it on.

The black came after the silver. In satin lacquer the face stops mirroring and the ring reads as a shape rather than a reflection, and the engraving survives the change: the band takes a soft gradient across its curve and the cut letters sit darker than the band around them, so the words still read.

The Chess Set

Chess set, steel · 2026

A steel chess set on a steel board, shown on its own. The board is 40cm square and matte. A polished plate marks each light square and small brushed studs mark each dark one. One army is polished steel, the other dark brushed steel.

The whole set is one material and there is no colour in it. The sides are told apart by how each surface takes the light: one army mirrors it, the other is darker and softens it.

The pieces are legible as chess and are not accurate to any tournament standard. They were shaped to read at a glance from across the board, because the photograph is the product and the game is the subject.

There is no player and no hand on a piece, and the set stands alone on a white ground. A game with nobody at it is a different image from a game in progress.

Donnehill

One-off · 2026

A square ring with a circle driven through it. The outside holds four hard corners; the aperture the finger passes through is round, so the hand meets a curve while the eye meets an edge.

That disagreement is the piece. Rings are round because fingers are, and the roundness is usually allowed to dictate the whole silhouette. Here the circle is demoted to an opening and the square is allowed to be the object, which makes something that sits on the hand like architecture rather than like jewellery.

The name is stamped into the base rather than printed on the face. Stamping displaces metal and cannot be removed without removing material, so the mark is structural. It also puts the name where only the wearer and anyone handling the piece will find it, which is the correct place for it.

Ether Mode

One-off · 2026

A face worn on the hand. Two long ears rise off the crown and the eyes are cut open rather than suggested, so the piece is looking outward from the knuckle.

Polished to the point where the room is what you see in it. A mirror finish on a face does something a mirror finish on a band cannot: the features hold their shape while the surface fills with whatever is in front of it, so the expression changes with the room and never with the object.

It is a character rather than an ornament, and it is deliberately not cute. The ears are too long for the head and the eyes do not soften, which keeps it on the right side of the line between a figure and a mascot.