A little more detail…

The Last Unicorn

A Hairy Growler Signature Work, Hand Pierced from Two Silver Shillings

Once held within the old silver. Now she walks free.

There are pieces I make, and occasionally there are pieces that seem to have been waiting inside the silver all along.

The Last Unicorn is one of those pieces.

Handcrafted from a pair of old British silver shillings, two pieces of former currency have been cut apart and brought together again to create a miniature woodland world.

At its centre stands the unicorn.

Bright against the darkness of the forest, surrounded by twisting branches, leaves and flowers, she appears to be stepping out from the old silver itself.

And perhaps that is exactly what she is doing.

From Crown to Wilderness

The unicorn has a much stranger place in British history than its modern image might suggest.

For centuries it has been associated with Scotland, monarchy and heraldry. It became one of the great beasts of the Royal Arms, standing opposite the English lion.

But the old unicorn was never a gentle fantasy animal.

It represented purity and courage, but also extraordinary strength and wildness. Medieval tradition imagined it as a creature so fierce and free that it could not ordinarily be captured.

And yet the heraldic unicorn of the British establishment is famously shown restrained by a chain.

That contradiction has always fascinated me.

The wild creature made into an emblem of authority.

With this piece, something has happened in reverse.

The old British coins have been opened with the piercing saw.

The silver that once belonged to the world of monarchs, currency and establishment has become woodland.

And from within it, the unicorn has been released.

The Last Unicorn

She stands alone.

There is no herd behind her and no second unicorn hidden among the trees.

That solitude is important.

The Last Unicorn is about the possibility that something ancient, beautiful and untamed might survive even when the world around it has decided such things no longer exist.

She is not running from the forest.

She belongs to it.

The branches close around her. Flowers grow at her feet. The darkened silver creates the feeling of an old wood continuing somewhere beyond the edge of the coin.

She has simply allowed us to glimpse her.

Two Shillings. One Tiny World.

The pendant begins with two genuine old silver shillings.

Rather than melting them down and turning them into anonymous sheet silver, I preserve the coins and work directly into them.

Each layer is pierced individually by hand using a jeweller’s saw.

The rear shilling becomes the woodland, a dense lattice of trunks, branches, leaves and negative space.

The second becomes the foreground, dominated by the unicorn with her flowing mane, raised leg and the vegetation curling around her.

The two pierced coins are then brought together to create depth that could never be achieved by simply engraving an image onto a flat disc.

The woodland physically exists behind her.

Light passes through it.

Shadow gathers between the layers.

As the pendant moves, different details appear and disappear.

It is a small piece of silver that contains an entire landscape.

Look Beneath Her Feet

I deliberately leave fragments of the original shilling visible.

At the bottom of the pendant you can still find the marks of the coin that existed before the woodland did.

They are not something to disguise.

They are part of the work.

I want you to be able to look closely and discover that this object once had another life entirely.

A denomination.

A date.

A monarch.

Hands that spent it.

Pockets that carried it.

Then, many decades later, it arrived at my bench.

Money became material.

Material became landscape.

And somewhere amongst the branches, myth returned.

Made by Hand, Not Reproduced

There is no casting mould behind The Last Unicorn.

No machine stamps the woodland into existence.

Every opening requires the saw blade to pass through the silver and be guided around the design by hand.

The mane is worked line by line.

The face is engraved.

The flowers are formed individually.

The woodland is pierced into the second coin before the two layers are assembled, oxidised, polished and finished at the bench.

Bright silver is allowed to catch the light while darkness remains deep within the forest.

That contrast is deliberate.

The unicorn should appear almost illuminated against the old wood behind her.

Because each shilling has already lived a life before I begin working on it, no two examples can ever be absolutely identical.

The history of the coin becomes part of the finished jewellery.

The Second Look

From a distance, you see a unicorn.

Come closer and the piece begins to reveal itself.

The engraved mane.

The tiny flowers.

The branches behind her.

The darkness between the two coins.

The surviving marks of the original shilling.

Then comes the final discovery.

The thing you are looking at used to be money.

That second look is where much of the Hairy Growler story lives.

Remembered Silver

I have never been particularly interested in making old silver look new.

Its previous life matters.

The small scars, softened details and surviving fragments of the original coin are evidence that the material existed long before this piece of jewellery did.

I call it remembered silver.

Instead of erasing the past, the new work grows out of it.

That philosophy feels especially appropriate here.

Because myths survive in much the same way.

They change shape.

They acquire new meanings.

But something ancient remains underneath.

For Those Who Still Look Into the Woods

The Last Unicorn is for the person who never entirely accepted that growing older meant abandoning wonder.

For those drawn to old woods, forgotten stories and objects that carry traces of another time.

For the collectors of strange things.

For the believers in things glimpsed rather than explained.

And for anyone who has ever walked beneath an old canopy of trees and thought, just for a moment, that something might be watching from beyond the next branch.

Hairy Growler Prestige Canon

The Last Unicorn belongs to the Hairy Growler Prestige Canon.

These are not simply designs within the collection. They are pieces that express the central language of Hairy Growler: old British silver, hand piercing, folklore, landscape, transformation and the survival of the handmade object.

The Last Unicorn brings those threads together in a single work.

Two old coins.

A dark wood.

One impossible creature.

And many hours at the bench.

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THE LAST UNICORN
Hairy Growler Signature Work
Hand pierced from two old British silver shillings
Individually pierced, engraved, layered, oxidised and finished by hand
Made slowly in England

Once she belonged to the old silver.
Now she belongs to the woods.

Made from something old. Made to outlive us.

Size : Approx 24 mm diameter.