PRESS RELEASE: Award Winning Jeweller Brings Endangered Craft Back to the Bench
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Nicola Margai, award-winning jeweller, is launching a brand new workshop introducing makers and jewellers to one of the most overlooked materials in contemporary design - cattle horn.
The workshop, Introduction to Horn in Contemporary Jewellery, believed to be unique in the UK, is a dedicated, hands-on introduction to horn as a jewellery-making material, taught by an experienced practitioner of the craft. Margai is shortly to be listed on the Heritage Crafts Association's UK Red List as a recognised horn worker — formal acknowledgement of both her expertise and the rarity of the skill.
Horn has been used by humans since Paleolithic times, functioning as nature's everyday plastic long before synthetic alternatives existed. Despite this extraordinary history, horn working now sits on the UK Red List of Endangered Crafts — a designation that reflects just how close the
tradition is to being lost entirely.
Margai hopes to change that. Sustainable, versatile, and visually striking, cattle horn is a material she believes has tremendous untapped potential within contemporary jewellery practice — and her workshops are designed to put it back in makers' hands.
"Horn is a remarkable material that most jewellers have never had the opportunity to work with," says Margai. "It is sustainable, it has a history that stretches back to the earliest human making, and is genuinely a very beautiful material. I want to change the conversation around what jewellery materials can be."
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