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jeweller and silversmith, daughter of a Sydney doctor, was a highly skilled metalworker and enameller who trained in London and was active in Sydney as a professional jeweller from 1907 to 1919. Through her professional practice, teaching, and membership of the Arts and Crafts Society of NSW, she strove to promote craft skills for women working in the production of jewellery as a business. Creed travelled extensively in Europe and studied enamelling and repoussé metal work in London before returning to Sydney in 1907. She is credited with pioneering art enamelling in Australia, exhibiting a collection of her enamelled 'modern art jewellery’ in the non-competitive section of the Women’s Work Exhibition that year, both in Sydney and Melbourne. In the 1910 catalogue for the annual exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society she advertised as a designer and craftworker from her studio in Bridge Street, Sydney, offering lessons in enamelling, jewellery, metal work, leather work and stencilling; she was also prepared to accept commissions for original work.

Mildred Creed was renowned for her technical skill in the production of beaten silver spoons. Her reputation as the designer and maker of over 2,000 of these during her career suggests that her studio functioned as a thriving small business.

Mildred Creed’s exhibits with the Arts and Crafts Society in 1910 illustrate the range and variety of her jewellery: pendants, necklaces, sleeve links, brooches and other works, 'all designed and executed by the exhibitor’. At the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria’s exhibition at Melbourne in 1919, she exhibited a mounted pendant and two brooches painted by Ada Newman . Commissions included the design and execution of 'a beautiful silver repoussé cover, set with opals’ for the Honour Roll in St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Armidale in 1923.

In 1943 a memorial exhibit of Creed’s hand-wrought jewellery and metalwork was held by the Society of Arts and Crafts of NSW in recognition of her thirty-seven years as 'one of the Society’s most esteemed members’, a committee member 'who upheld the highest ideals in all craftwork’. She provided a role model for women aspiring to an independent income in the crafts through her establishment of a studio that functioned both as a school and a productive small business.

WORK: Heritage chapter 7, plate 293: 293: Tarantula Pendant and Chain n.d. (c.1914), silver and blister pearl 3.4 × 3.1 cm on silver chain 39.4 cm. AGNSW, purchased 1914

This ornamental tarantula with bulging eyes is no suitable subject for a neck…

A silver tarantula set with pearl…

Can such a seemingly sinister ornament be imbricated into the functionalist oeuvre of craftswoman Muriel [sic?] Creed?

2,000 silver spoons indicate the scope of her dependant income.

This pendant is dependent on that production.

This gem of creative craftsmanship is a singular work for the period in which it was made.

This tiny, sinister object, this personalising of specific difference, represents a shift from the serial reproduction of 2,000 spoons, no matter how individually different and expressive of handcrafted skill and aesthetic function each spoon may have been. The question is whether the functionalist aesthetic of truth to materials and honest handicraft, offering a sense of order and harmony in a world of disorder, can apply to a silver and pearl ornamented tarantula?

It may be that the etymological meanings of craft inhere, where craft and art are cognate words suggestive of both a destructive and constructive act. Origins which include the Hebrew cheresh or `secret craft’ may involve a fabrication from matter to reveal the hidden and concealed. It may be that by adding an aesthetic expressive of dimension Muriel Creed extended the concept of craft to include an idea of matter and spirit inhering in the object, an idea of an assertion of the senses. At the intersection of the senses, where material and form, fabrication and adornment activate associations and the memory of the maker through the made, it may be that the spider form is a residual fragment of the jeweller’s memory of both a widespread penchant (`the pursuit of novelty in jewellery, particularly in the form of insects, having a lengthy tradition’) and a personal distaste for the fabrication of the insect form. This may explain the inherent paradox.

Muriel Creed’s singular departure from functionalist aesthetics suggests a more wayward incorporation of the creatures of the everyday into the excesses of ornament and its detail. It suggests, too, the intersection of craft and art which characterised the Arts and Crafts Society of New South Wales. It suggests that Muriel Creed’s intention as both craftsperson and artist was to function in both worlds: truthful both to the hidden meanings of materials and skills and to the individuality of the craftsperson’s interpretation and interpenetration of the utilitarian functions and ornamental form, however sinister, of the transactions of the everyday.

Writers:

Giacco, Louise

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992