Allison Macleod

After a career in medicine cut short by ill health, wirework jewellery making in 2011 started my journey to the creative arts. I was encouraged onward by classes with Jo MacFadyen and Robin Bell at the Dundee based Vanilla Ink. Sandra Wilson inspired me to attend the full time jewellery design degree course at Dundee and I graduated in 2019.

Attending DJCAD helped me identify my design strengths; fusing medicine and art, mixing ancient with modern, experimenting with materials, using CAD as my sketchbook and 3D printing for prototyping. My interested in exploring connections continues; between material, tool and user and the connections between modern materials to more traditional ones.

My current design theme has been to explore and display how our mitochondrial DNA has changed over 10,000 years. It is the fundamental DNA link between all and shared by a female inheritance pattern. I hope to capture and celebrate this link. Revelling in our reassuring sameness and reflect that this links us both back in time and stretches forward in time too.