Dauvit Alexander

Dauvit Alexander (b. 1964), also known as The Justified Sinner, started making jewellery at the age of fourteen with John Gilchrist in Glasgow. Mistakenly diverted into landscape architecture, he quickly realised that his future lay in jewellery and spent many years honing his skills at the bench and in the classroom. Over the last twenty years, he has built an international reputation for his jewellery, which combines found, corroded iron elements with traditional jewellery materials and fine-jewellery skills, often incorporating gemstones. More recently, he has been looking at the way in which jewellery can be used to give meaning to social matters and has curated shows exploring explicitly political and social issues – nitrous oxide cylinders in No Laughing Matter, intersectionality and metalwork in {queer+metals} – and he is currently working with Norman Cherry on a project, ‘Swords into ploughshares: knives into jewels’, that uses knives sequestered from violent crime to get young people to commit to rejecting gang membership and carrying a knife. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of the BAMS Student Medal Project for many years and in 2022 produced a new design for the BAMS President’s Medal. His work is widely featured in publications about contemporary jewellery and is held in the permanent collections of both the British Museum and the Goldsmiths’ Company.

About his BAMS medal, For the Professors, Alexander writes: ‘The Punch and Judy show has been a staple of British culture since its first appearance in 1662, deriving from Italian Commedia dell’arte. It features Mr Punch and his wife, Judy, and became successful on the back of the dismal reign of the Cromwellian puritans in England. Mr Punch is a ‘Lord of Misrule’, a symbol of robust – and despicable – revolt against law and order. His much-beleaguered wife serves as a counterpart to his violence, giving as good as she gets, a loathsome couple but one which is much-loved and embedded in British culture. The show is traditionally performed by a single puppeteer, known as The Professor.

‘This medal has its genesis in the BAMS 2022 conference, held in Chester. I’ve had a long time love of the story of Punch and Judy and discovered that Teddy Bourne is a Punch and Judy Professor, leading to long discussions about the subject. I mentioned that for some time I’d been considering making a Punch and Judy medal. Teddy thought that this was a good theme and encouraged me, but it went to the back of my head as something to think about without ever being realised. An invitation from BAMS to create a medal for their editions seemed like the ideal time for this to be realised. With its conflict and resolution, its history and cultural importance, this is an ideal subject for a medal which is dedicated to The Professors everywhere who keep the tradition alive.’