Karen Ward: 'I'm a jeweller and I love playing with metal and fire - most of us are pyromaniacs'

For 62-year-old Karen it all started nearly 15 years ago, when she and a friend went for a taster session making jewellery. For many years before that she’d painted people’s beloved pets, alongside her day job working for a bank. But suddenly, she’d found a new creative outlet – and she was hooked.

“I was very lucky that I had two really, really good teachers,” she says. “It wasn't just the obvious this is how you make a ring. It was if you need this tool to make it, you can actually make your own tool...Really when I've tried stuff over the past years - I've done different crafts, I did some ceramics, I've done drawing and painting, I found everything really easy to do. This was the first thing I think that I found that was hard. That's possibly part of (what drew me in). Then, you just get hooked.”

At her home, near Selby, where she crafts from her purpose-built garden workshop, Karen still has the first items she ever made. A piece of copper from that jewellery techniques workshop, sawn with straight and squiggly lines. And a silver ring, with a sapphire, her first wearable item of jewellery after she began attending weekly lessons.

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These days, she’s the one doing the teaching. As well as creating bespoke jewellery commissions for clients and bringing her own designs to life as “wearable art”, Karen offers workshops and individual tuition. She’s also keen to teach others about the process of making, from the original idea to the final piece, and it’s for this reason that she’s taking part in the next North Yorkshire Open Studios event, being held this weekend.

"A lot of these kind of crafts and a lot of the techniques are dying out,” she says. “People might say they don't want to share their knowledge because it's their little trade secret but then they die and that's lost. So the open studios is really good because it's getting people to come into the workshop and to actually watch something being made - to find out how long it takes, to find out how mucky it is. A lot of people think jewellery making is all really nice and delicate but it's not. It's heavy, physical work. It can be dirty work.”

It’s time-consuming, skilful and intricate work too, says Karen. “You can make something and put it in a shop and people just buy it,” she continues. “But I'm more interested in getting people to buy into it, getting them understand how it's made, what it is, and perhaps come and make something themselves that means something.”

The challenges and possibilities the craft presents are “infinite” she claims, and she enjoys experimenting with different techniques. Some of her work is with heirloom jewellery - repurposing and remodelling items whilst retaining the original metal – and she’s recently turned her hand to engraving fingerprint jewellery too. For the last eight years, a portion of her creating has also been for the benefit of people with a number of health conditions.

As the director and splint maker of The Beautiful Splint Company CIC, Karen creates orthotic metal hand, wrist and finger splints for people with conditions such as Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hypermobility. Working through medical referrals from healthcare professionals across the country, she handcrafts each support to prevent joints from painfully hyper-extending, allowing clients to carry out daily tasks like writing and cooking without suffering.

Karen, who has recently started wearing one herself after developing osteoarthritis in one of her fingers, says: “You can get splints from the NHS or buy them online but they are (typically) pink plastic. With mine people don't know that they're wearing a splint for a medical reason. They just think, ‘Oh, that ring looks different.’”

"It’s putting all my jewellery skills to use for something that bit more technical,” she adds. “Somebody comes in, you've got to make a splint to fit them, then you've got to make sure that it works to restrict the joint and support the joint. So, it’s just really interesting.”

The splints now make up around a third of Karen’s work. Since retiring from her day job, she has also found time to return to painting alongside her jewellery making and has started to experiment and develop a new collection bringing the two together – hand engraved jewellery with animal portraiture. “I am excited to see where this leads,” she says.

For this weekend though, her attention is firmly on the Winter Open Studios event, organised by artist-run collective North Yorkshire Open Studios. Karen has supported the running of the event and hopes, in future, to increase the number of artists taking part in her area of the region.

"There's loads of artists in York. There's plenty on the coast. There's plenty in the Moors, but down this end, there's only two or three. What I'm trying to do is get more people around here to join in to do the open studios events because if we have more artists in this area doing it, we'll get more people coming in to visit.”

And that means more potential for someone else to get hooked just as Karen did. A new jeweller in the making perhaps, to help her preserve the age-old craft and its techniques for future generations.

- Winter Open Studios takes place 11am-4pm on November 7 and 8. Visit nyos.org.uk/winter-open-studios