David Watkins’ approach to jewellery draws from a number of interests and experiences: his practice of the precise craft of the goldsmith, his embrace of manufactured materials, the possibilities inherent in the use of digital design technologies and the pleasure of musical improvisation. He centres his practice on the archetypal form of the circle, a shape that has defined ornament for the body since antiquity, and further defines his purpose by making works that relate to the circular rhythms of the body: the neck, the breast and the wrist. In his work In the gardens of Arqua Petrarca, Watkins has distilled the Palladian aura of the northern Italian town to a physical haiku for the wrist. In the space inside and around the circle he evokes the sense of a garden, its planting and contained, trellised architecture, and the unadorned use of the unyielding material of stainless steel. Hovering around the body’s pulse point, such reductive rigour allows the senses and the memory to flow unimpeded.