In a catalogue essay in 2014, Professor Dorothy Hogg MBE wrote of her fascination with 16th- and 17th-century European memento mori jewellery, ‘with its message that life is vulnerable and sometimes short’. Through a lifetime of making, teaching and curating, Dorothy – who died in April following a long illness – reminded us of the deep connection jewellery has to life, leaving us with a rich legacy of work and ideas that reveal the medium’s potential as a unique form of human expression.
Dorothy was born in 1945 in the Scottish coastal town of Troon. Writing in 1994, Crafts' former editor Martina Margetts felt: ‘It is fortunate that Dorothy Hogg was not a rebellious child. She might have refused a career in the same field as her father and grandfather.’ Dorothy remembered being ‘illegal child labour’ in the family’s jewellery shops, ‘dusting shelves, sorting pearls…’
She might not have been rebellious, but Dorothy was independent-minded. When choosing her specialism following two-year design foundation at Glasgow School of Art (where she studied from 1963 to 1967), she chose jewellery – ‘despite the expectation that girls would select embroidery as a craft subject’. She felt, then, that ‘metal was my natural metier.’