This year’s annual Seattle Metals Guild Symposium is happening and will be presented online for your convenience on Oct. 10, 2020. If you’ve never attended one because of expense or distance you’re in luck! There will be an outstanding lineup of speakers, artists, silent auction, speaker panel, and even a Happy Hour! It will all be recorded for viewing anytime from your time zone. You can register and get tickets now.
The Seattle Metals Guild put on the symposium annually – you’ll have seen me spruik it here before – and this year a few of my buddies are speaking. It’s not a local affair by any means – the 5 main speakers are all very much non-Seattleites, but 3 of them just happen to be colleagues/friends I would pretty regularly catch up with around the US at different events. There’s Cappy Counard, Stephen Yusko and Maria Eife, my occasional SNAG wife (or wifey, cos Eife and wifey… For those unfamiliar, there’s a lot of people who share a twin room at SNAG every year with the same friend, who claim their shared-room-partner as their SNAG-spouse 😉 ) along with Andrea Hill and Morgan Asoyuf.
Yes! They still managed to get an international guest! Morgan Asoyuf hails from British Columbia and is a jeweller and cultural education teacher. She is from the Tsm’syen people and has a rich First Nations and traditional goldsmithing background. And Andrea Hill will be talking growth for jewellery businesses, so it’s a very well rounded year, with those two, Stephen the precision blacksmith, (I bought a lovely bottle opener made by him the first time we met, which was nicked by some rascal at a party at ours one time – something tells me I shoulda searched Andy Cooperman [see video above] as he left the party… He and I both were introduced to Stephen at the same event and he lusted over it too.) Cappy the professor of jewellery who I did the Smitten Forum with in 2018, whose beautiful layered practice really makes you think, and Maria the designer par excellence who has been innovating with laser and 3D print technologies her whole career, and who knows the ins and outs of the jewellery fair scene. See pic below for proof!
So the benefit of not being in realbody for this symposium, aside from the ‘no pants’ option Andy has kindly laid out to us, is that those of us in completely non-synced time-zones can get onboard and see these unique and talented makers talk about their works when it’s convenient for us. For a price that’s about a third of the usual dirt-cheap SMG Symposium sign-up fee. Huzzah! COVID-19 can’t take all our fun 🙂
And so, I will get up at 7am next Sunday and while still bleary-eyed make myself an early morning mimosa, to toast all of my friends at the Zoom Happy Hour. Feel free to join me!
(And don’t let it slip, when I tell them it was all great, that I won’t be watching them speak until later that day. Ssshhhh…)