RHS Harlow Carr Harrogate: surfing jewellery designer-maker Caroline Brogden showcases beautiful SS24 earrings, necklaces, rings

Unable to travel to the sea’s edge as often she wanted, the Barnsley-based jewellery maker decided to bring a little of the coast back to herself, and also back to others who love it as she does, encapsulating and turning it into beautiful and evocative pieces to wear, touch and look at, wherever you are.

A keen surfer since she was a student at Bangor University, Caroline works in a material called surfite, a byproduct of making surfboards, after a friend gave her a piece of resin that had come from boards made in California in the 1960s and ‘70s. “He said, ‘Play with that, see what happens,’ and I fell in love with it,” she says. She contacted a fellow surfer, Jay, who makes custom surfboards in Edinburgh, and he became her main source of surfite.

“He is probably one of the few surfboard shapers that really does amazing colourworks – he is an artist in his own right,” she says, adding that she also works with boardmakers in Devon and Cornwall, too.

“To make a custom surfboard, you first carve a foam blank to the shape you want, cutting, planning it and sanding it back, and then you put layers of fibreglass over it, and use liquid resin to seal it all in,” she says.

These resins of different colours are poured over each surfboard, and drips spill off and land on the floor as blocks of colour and pattern over time. Caroline says: “Those blocks build up and then they smash them up and off the floor and they normally get sent to landfill, but now I buy it. It's all chance, what colours, what patterns – it takes years to build up.”

Originally from Slough, Caroline moved to Barnsley 20 years ago with her partner, Ric Reeve, an engineer. She studied Sport at University in North Wales, then worked in a surf shop near a beach in Anglesey. She worked for a long time in medical sales, until a period of illness led her to start tinkering, as she calls it, making jewellery, and she decided that this was the path she would now follow. She is self-taught and has been making jewellery now for about 10 years, using the surfite for about five years.

Caroline works from her home studio where she has a series of areas that serve the different stages of making the jewellery from scratch using the resin. “It comes as quite big chinks, it’s quite dirty,” she says. “I have a shed down at the end of the garden with band saws, where I can cut it down to more manageable sizes.”

She then takes the surfite to her conservatory. “I have to carve under water,” she says. “I can use rainwater.” She has also made her own equipment, turning old pieces of conservatory and machinery to create lapidary wheels.

Caroline makes earrings, pendants and rings, using recycled precious metals alongside the surfite. “There are a few people using surfite who are based in America, but most people don’t carve it like I do,” she says. “I have never met anyone else who does surfite and metal together.

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She makes a couple of hundred pieces a year and takes commissions. Her customers are often those, like herself, who love the coast but do not live near it. “Some people wait quite a long time if they want specific colours, it’s just chance,” she says. “When I find it, I message and say, ‘right, I’ve got a chunk this big - what would you like?’ It’s often earrings that they want for a special occasion – you can make them big but it’s really lightweight because it has to be buoyant, so you can have bold stuff but not have the weight. Every single piece is completely different, and that’s why I love it.”

Surfite, she points out, is durable by design. For men, cufflinks are popular, as are spinner necklaces on leather that can be worn when swimming.

Caroline herself enjoys wild swimming especially in North Yorkshire, and surfs as often as she can, splitting her time between Cayton Bay and the Flamborough area, and beaches in North Wales.

She is currently exhibiting her own work and that of around 40 other artists at the Bath House at RHS Harlow Carr in Harrogate, where she and fellow artist Penny Hunt are running a pop-up gallery until July 14 under the banner Northern Soul Artists, whose works are inspired by their northern landscapes. Others taking part include Sarah Harris, Charlotte Morrison, Hester Cox, Catherine Woodall, Folded Forest and many more.

Caroline says: “I love spotting shapes in the surfite – landscapes, seascapes, waves and mountains, but I also love hearing what other people see. Where I see white tipped waves in a blue sea, they see stormy skies; where the stripes remind me of sunrise and sunset, they see deckchairs and raspberry ripple ice-cream.

“It has taken several years with many twists and turns, and a lot of studying and experimenting - not to mention many wonderful adventures exploring and being inspired by those I met along the way - to finally feel like I have found my voice as a jeweller.”

“It has taken several years with many twists and turns, and a lot of studying and experimenting - not to mention many wonderful adventures exploring and being inspired by those I met along the way - to finally feel like I have found my voice as a jeweller.”

See carolinebrogden.co.uk

Caroline Brogden’s surfite jewellery collection can also be seen now at the Northern Soul exhibition at the Bath House at RHS Harlow Carr until July 14; then at Holmfirth Art Week in the Postcard Inn, July 6-13; the Bath House at RHS Harlow Carr August 29-September 29; Staithes Festival, September 13-15.