Caitlin Murphy is a Northern Irish maker who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2022 with first class honours. She is a third-generation silversmith who has a passion for challenging boundaries through making, creating, and designing. During her time at the Glasgow School of Art she was awarded the Richard H Arrow Memorial prize, the South Square Trust silversmithing award and is a Goldsmiths’ Craft and Design Council competition gold award winner.

She is a hardworking individual with an ambitious mindset and is keen to build her business. She works on a predominantly silversmithing scale, showcasing this through her degree show collection titled ‘XYZ’. Caitlin has since exhibited at New Designers at the Business Design Centre, London. Having sold half of her collection across these two events she is keen to see what the future holds as she begins a further year of study at Bishopsland Educational Trust this autumn.

Caitlin Murphy’s XYZ Collection is centred around a high level of accuracy and precision. By folding and working with metal as if it is paper, she achieves unique sculptural pieces. The work began during the pandemic where an increased amount of time spent in the bedroom of her student flat led to finding alternative materials to create 3D forms. By cutting sheets of paper into strips and reweaving them back together, she began to make a new sheet of paper with structural quality and surface texture. This then translated into working with aluminium cans, giving not only texture but also pattern through the range of colours. Once Caitlin got back into the workshop, she began to challenge the weave as she moved onto more precious metals. Her work is often a direct translation from paper to metal. As these handmade forms are attached to steel frames they come to life as three-dimensional objects.