Jewellery TIme
I would like to congratulate Nigel Wong on his winning this year’s Regal Castings Awards competition, held in conjunction with The New Zealand Jewellery Show. His win was no great surprise to me as Nigel is a fine goldsmith and was a runner-up in the competition two years ago with his tanzanite ring. The piece he made was very typical of Nigel — a very well engineered design with moving parts. I was almost expecting it to be motorised.
I have known Nigel for a long time - ever since he first came to work for me in the late seventies during the last year of his apprenticeship. I always felt that Nigel was somewhat wasted in the jewellery trade. His meticulous adherence to precise detail in everything he made, would have him better suited to working for NASA in their space programme. NASA’s loss is the jewellery trade’s gain, I suppose.
Again, I was involved as photographer of all the entries, so I had plenty of time to study them. There were a number of innovative designs and very finely-crafted pieces in this year’s entries and I think the judges Steve Parker (Wellington), Sandy Pigott (Whangaparaoa) and lain Henderson [Dunedin) did an excellent job in picking the four finalists. They gave up a day of their time to travel to Wellington and go through each item carefully (independent of each other) to come up with the eventual winners. It is heartening to see goldsmiths supporting the trade in this way. Thank you, to all of you.
— Brian Barrett
GGNZ Chairman
