Adi Toch
- Associate Lecturer
- Jewellery & Metal MA
Adi Toch is an artist, metalsmith, and educator exploring the sensorial and cultural dimensions of metal through objects and our close relationships with them. Adi’s work responds to both historic traditions and contemporary concerns, employing her material’s reflective and sonic sensibilities to evoke an embodied experience.
Adi’s practice and research have evolved over the past decade through international exhibitions, iterative collaborations, and teaching across leading cultural and academic institutions. She has been a lecturer in Jewellery & Metal at the Royal College of Art since 2019, where she developed and now co-leads the Resonating Matter platform.
Her work is held in major public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Crafts Council, Reading Museum, Birmingham Museum, National Museums Scotland, National Museum Wales, Ulster Museum Belfast, Turnov Museum, Czechia, and the Jewish Museum, New York.
Adi was a Loewe Craft Prize finalist in 2017 and later served on its international judging panel in 2019. Her work has been recognised with a Gold Award from the Goldsmiths’ Craft & Design Council and the European Prize for Applied Arts. In 2021, she was commissioned by the Gilbert Trust for the Arts to respond to the restitution of a historic gold ewer, resulting in Place to Place, now on permanent display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
More information
Research interests
A central thread in Adi’s current research is the provenance of things: where metals come from, how they are worked, how they age and transform, and the journeys objects take.
Her practice often involves iterative collaborations with museums and artists from other disciplines.
Blushing Metals is Adi’s ongoing workshop series exploring sustainable approaches to metal patination through non-toxic materials. The series combines surface experimentation with material enquiry, examining colour, and the transformative qualities of metal. Recent workshops delivered at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Selected awards
European Prize for Applied Arts, 2018
Goldsmiths' Craft & Design Silver Award, 2018
Wallpaper* Magazine Design Award, 2017
Finalist, Loewe Craft Prize, 2017
Makower Trust Silver Commission Award for National Museum Wales, 2013
Goldsmiths' Craft & Design Gold Award, 2013
Current and recent projects
By Association, 2026
By Association is a research project developed through engagement with Reading Museum’s Roman collection from Calleva Atrebatum, Silchester. The project takes as its starting point the relationship between a fifth century Ogham-inscribed stone column and a Roman pewter flagon discovered crushed beneath it at the bottom of a well. Through an installation of eight objects, the project investigates encounters between metal and stone, geological ancestry, and human intervention, reflecting on belonging and interdependence. Materials include flint and sandstone from Silchester, oolite historically used for pewter casting moulds, Cornish cassiterite and tin smelted from the ore, pewter and bronze incorporating Roman metal remnants.
Commissioned by Reading Museum, with funding support by Contemporary Art Society. Now on permanent display as part of the museum’s collection.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Books
Toch, A. (2021). Place to Place.
Exhibitions
(2025) Curator and exhibitor, UK Pavillion of the Jewellery Biennale, Puyuan, China
(2025) Tefaf, Maastricht, represented by Sarah Myerscough
(2024) FOLD(s) exhibition and Symposium, Pratt Institute, NYC Jewelry Week
(2025-2022) Frame, Schmuck Munich, represented by Galerie Marzee
(2024) Lost & Found Intervention at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London
(2023) Earth to Earth, solo exhibition, Sarah Myerscough Gallery, London
(2023) Between Presence and Absence, Galerie Marzee, The Netherlands
(2023) Cheongju Craft Biennale 2023, South Korea, Invited Artist