Jacqueline Mina

Gold, Platinum & the Art of Jacqueline Mina OBE

30 July 2026 - 29 August 2026

Jacqueline Mina OBE is one of Britain’s most influential jewellers. For more than six decades she has transformed precious metals into sculptural works of extraordinary beauty, precision, and originality.

Her jewellery is not simply worn, it is experienced, responding to light, movement, and the body itself. Working in gold and platinum, Mina explores the relationship between geometry and organic form, creating pieces that are both technically brilliant and expressive. Elegant and timeless, Jacqueline Mina’s jewellery has redefined what contemporary jewellery can be.

About Jacqueline Mina

Jacqueline Mina
OBE
Born: 1942
Place of Birth: Buckinghamshire

Jacqueline Mina OBE (b.1942, Buckinghamshire) is widely regarded as one of the most important and intellectually rigorous jewellers working in Britain today. For more than five decades, Mina has redefined the possibilities of precious metal jewellery through an extraordinary combination of technical innovation, sculptural sensitivity and conceptual depth.

Her work occupies a unique position between jewellery, drawing and abstract sculpture, celebrated internationally for its quiet power, refined surfaces and deeply contemplative presence.

At the heart of Mina’s practice is an exceptional understanding of gold as both material and language. Rather than treating precious metals as static or decorative, she transforms them into surfaces alive with texture, movement and light. Through processes of scoring, oxidising, fusing and hammering, Mina creates richly nuanced forms where subtle shifts in tone and reflection become central to the experience of the work. Her jewellery often appears deceptively minimal, yet beneath this restraint lies immense technical complexity and a profound sensitivity to form, proportion and touch.

Mina’s work explores tensions between inner and outer space, control and spontaneity, geometry and organic form. Curves, folds and angular planes interact with finely worked surfaces that trap and release light, creating jewellery that changes constantly in response to movement and the body. Inspiration is drawn from a wide range of sources including abstraction in art, the human figure, natural forms and the sumptuous textile interiors of Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, whose layered velvets and etched patterns resonate strongly within her treatment of metal surfaces.

What distinguishes Mina’s work is the extraordinary balance she achieves between intellectual rigour and sensuality. Her pieces possess a meditative stillness while remaining intensely tactile and wearable. They reward close looking, revealing subtle dialogues between polished and matte surfaces, hard edges and soft curves, structure and chance.

Alongside her studio practice, Mina made a profound contribution to jewellery education. From 1972 until 1994 she taught at the Royal College of Art, where she inspired generations of students, many of whom went on to become leading contemporary jewellers in their own right. Her influence on the field of contemporary jewellery extends far beyond her own remarkable body of work.

In recognition of her contribution to contemporary jewellery, Mina received the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize for Jewellery in 2000 for “consistent innovation and a significant contribution to contemporary jewellery… for subverting and taking precious metal techniques to the extreme.” She was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2012. In 2011, The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths honoured her career with the major retrospective Dialogues in Gold, later followed by the touring exhibition Touching Gold, both of which confirmed her status as one of the defining figures in modern jewellery.

The Scottish Gallery has shared a long and significant relationship with Jacqueline Mina and has proudly championed her work since the 80s with numerous solo presentations. We are delighted to be planning a major solo presentation of her jewellery during the Edinburgh Festival in 2026, celebrating an artist whose work continues to shape and elevate the language of contemporary gold jewellery.

Her work is held in major international public collections including: National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; the Crafts Council Collection, London; The Goldsmiths’ Company, London; and Leeds Museums and Galleries.

I aim to achieve an aesthetic result that obscures the technical rigours of its production. I am preoccupied mainly with the surfaces of precious metals (which I always affect in some way before construction begins) and with form – juxtaposing the play of light, reflection, lustre with characteristic angle, curve and line – inspired by an abstraction of nature and art, and particularly of the human form. I am intrigued, too, by the potential for dialogue between inner and outer planes, with random patterns imprisoned within strictly delineated edges, the inclusion of chance, and the visual tension created by the contrast and harmony of all these factors. – Jacqueline Mina

View all works by Jacqueline Mina
Photograph by Paul Read
Gift Card

Struggling to find that perfect gift? We have the solution! A Scottish Gallery Gift Voucher is the perfect gift for friends, family, customers and colleagues.

Buy a Gift Card
Own Art

Own Art is a national initiative that makes buying contemporary art and craft affordable by providing interest-free credit for the purchase of original work.

Find out more

Join our mailing list

Sign up to receive the latest art news from The Scottish Gallery including forthcoming exhibitions, films, podcasts, blogs, events and more.