Dee Magee
Quirky but Fierce
From raven-sized lockets and reclaimed silver to animation and community, Dee Magee uses Quirky but Fierce to make room for the ideas that refuse to stay in one lane.
Dee has a habit of giving herself more to do. A wedding cake for a friend, an unexpected market, new jewellery, the beginnings of a mail club and another YouTube film can all find their way into the same month. Instead of narrowing the list, she looks for the deadline that will hold it together.
“I need something to kind of anchor me,” she says, “and then other things swirl around that.”
That image suits Quirky but Fierce. Magee is a silversmith and jewellery designer, but the work around the jewellery keeps expanding into ceramics, animation, fiction, food, workshops and fundraising. Her collections move from sea glass and broken plates to forest creatures, Korean heritage and a rejection of hustle culture. The connection is Magee herself: curious, politically engaged and unable to leave an interesting possibility alone.
An Anchor for Ideas
Magee began silversmithing during the Covid furlough period, while working from home for a charity. There was not enough work to fill her time, so she found something else to learn. Five or six years later, she is still drawn to the scale of the subject.
“There’s so many different avenues to go down that you can’t really get bored with it,” she says. “I think I could be doing different forms of silversmithing for the rest of my life and still not have explored all of the avenues.”
She has worked with sand-casting, hand-forging, wire-drawing, and recently established her own in-studio lost-wax casting set up. Online demonstrations can make a new technique appear deceptively accessible. Magee admits to watching a video and thinking, “I could do that,” before discovering how much more complicated it is in practice.
For many silversmiths, the answer is to specialise. Magee’s answer is to move. She may focus intensely on one method, step away when her attention needs something different and return later with more skill or a clearer purpose.
“It’s the theme of my life,” she says. “I can’t stay in my lane.”
The movement is how she sustains her commitment. Silversmithing has lasted because it keeps asking new things of her.
Something More Than Crisps
Her move into YouTube came partly from frustration with what social media asks artists to produce: more clips, quicker edits and another post before the last has had time to settle. Magee compares short-form content to junk food. It is satisfying in the moment, but a poor substitute for being properly fed.
YouTube offered the chance to make an elaborate meal instead.
“For me, YouTube was kind of an opportunity to almost cook this elaborate meal for people,” she says, “with all the ingredients I could get my hands on and all the skills I possess – and also don’t possess, but would figure out in doing it – and serve it up to them.”
She wants to give viewers time to digest something or follow an idea into their own imaginations. If somebody dislikes the finished meal, at least Magee made what she wanted rather than another handful of disposable content.
The films also combine forms that do not ordinarily fit inside a jewellery business. Writing more was one of Magee’s goals for 2026. She has short stories to develop and a novel at the back of her mind, but neither comes with an external deadline. A monthly film requires a script, scenes and transitions. It makes her practise storytelling rather than wait to feel ready.
Magee scripts carefully and plans some shots, but leaves space for experiments. A camera might end up wedged in a tree or placed inside a bowl. If an angle fails, it can disappear in the edit. A small audience gives her freedom.
“Maybe no one will even see this, so I can do whatever I want,” she says. “There’s no pressure there, and I think that’s a really lovely and important thing for creativity.”
A Locket for a Raven
The first film centres on a commission for an unusual client: a raven in need of a locket.
The idea began with Magee’s wish to make pieces more ridiculous, absurd and specific than the commercial side of her work normally allows. She values the customers who buy smaller objects, but recognises another appetite beside that practical exchange.
“The artist in me wants to make weird things,” she says.
A detailed locket for a bird is unlikely to find the perfect buyer at a market. Its labour and specificity resist ordinary calculations of stock, price and demand. The film gives the object another reason to exist: it can carry a story and become the centre of a small invented world.
The raven appeared almost by accident. Magee remembers seeing the birds in the car park at Sainsbury’s. Conversations with Jo Pearson about puppetry pushed the thought further. Magee painted separate body parts, scanned them and animated the character digitally. A trial established that she did not yet have the patience for stop motion.
Once it arrived, the raven felt at home in her work. Jewellery is made of little treasures: bright metal, stones and twig-like forms that might catch a curious bird’s attention. The character allowed silversmithing to meet something funny and theatrical.
The raven was not the original plan. Magee had researched shrews after repeatedly finding dead ones on her walks. Their unusual biology sent her into a new trail of reading. The shrews have been postponed, not abandoned.
Quirky but Fierce Before Silver
Quirky but Fierce did not begin as a jewellery name. After moving from the United States to Northern Ireland in December 2017, Magee established Quirky but Fierce Bakery from her home in rural County Down. She made celebration cakes and opened her living room each Saturday as a small doughnut shop.
Financially, the bakery worked. Personally, it became untenable. The hours were long and unsociable, the work physically demanding and everything seemed sticky with buttercream. A successful business was making Magee deeply unhappy.
“It was a very good business in the sense of numbers,” she says, “but I was so unhappy doing it.”
She eventually stepped away, although the equipment remains in a cupboard she built for it. Now the tins come out when somebody she loves is getting married, or when food can contribute to something larger. Magee used them for a cake picnic raising funds for Palestine, returning to the skill without returning to the business that exhausted her.
The experience sharpened a distinction that continues in her jewellery. Commercial viability matters, but good numbers cannot be the only measure of whether a practice is working. Before accepting an invitation to a Vault market this summer, Magee had taken a sabbatical from the business side of silversmithing. Even with little spare time, she wanted to arrive with something new.
“I tend to make my life more difficult than it needs to be,” she says.
Living in the Middle Ground
The Koreanish collection stands apart from Magee’s other work, and she is comfortable with that. Combining experiments in ceramics with silversmithing, it is a way to approach her Korean heritage without pretending that her relationship to it is simple.
Magee is half Korean, born and raised in the United States by a Korean mother and white father. White classmates treated her as wholly Asian. In Korean spaces, including a church she attended with her mother, she was not always seen as Korean at all.
“I’ve always kind of landed in this middle ground and felt I didn’t really belong anywhere,” she says.
Her mother was not encouraged to speak Korean to her children. In the United States of the late 1980s and early 1990s, immigrants were pressured to assimilate and speak English. Magee never learned Korean, has met only one uncle from her mother’s family and has never visited Korea.
Those absences produced a sense of not being Korean enough. The collection begins with Magee deciding that she cannot alter her childhood, but can decide what she does with the access she has now.
“I can either spend the rest of my life feeling a little bit ashamed, or a little bit unsure of who I am,” she says, “or I can take responsibility for the resources I have at my hands now, and I can research and dive into that culture.”
The “ish” in Koreanish matters. It leaves the mixed, partial and ongoing nature of the connection visible.
Beyond the Korean Corn Dog
The collection arrives as Korean film, television, music, food and beauty products have entered the global mainstream. Magee appreciates the interest while recognising how quickly a culture is flattened into saleable fragments.
The change brings its own whiplash. The food that drew insults when she was young is newly fashionable. After encountering racist gestures and slurs, Magee is now expected to explain kimchi or share in the latest K-pop phenomenon.
Magee would rather use that curiosity as an invitation to go further: not just a Korean corn dog, but the whole spread, with its side dishes, work and histories intact.
That approach shapes the kimchi workshops she sometimes teaches. Kimchi may be sold through the language of probiotics and gut health, but Magee places it within a longer account of survival and collective labour. Traditionally, families and neighbours gathered at one home to prepare enough for winter, then moved on to help the next household. Food preservation was also gossip, knowledge and care.
“It is about community health,” Magee says, “and about a survival story of a very resilient people.”
Koreanish will grow as she learns. It may never match the look of every other Quirky but Fierce collection, but uniformity is not the aim. Business advice tells her to repeat one recognisable aesthetic until the brand can be explained in three words. She knows that will not be enough.
No Separate Set of Values
Magee’s refusal to divide things into tidy categories extends to the politics of making. The environmental and social commitments of Quirky but Fierce are not intended as a charitable layer added after the jewellery is finished. They begin with the object itself.
Her work uses recycled precious metals, locally collected sea glass, reclaimed gemstones and broken ceramics. Magee avoids newly mined gemstones where she cannot trust the conditions behind them, uses recyclable or home-compostable packaging and favours second-hand tools. Her studio runs on renewable electricity, and ten per cent of profits have gone to charities since August 2025.
Materials do not arrive without people or consequences. Human hands mine precious metals and extract materials for technology. The woods, shorelines and creatures that feed Magee’s imagination are affected by the same economic systems.
“I don’t think there should really ever be a separation between what a person would do and what a business would do,” she says.
Jewellery cannot take priority over whether people are fed, housed and safe. A small maker cannot repair every supply chain alone, but Magee rejects the argument that responsibility belongs either to corporations or individuals. The better conjunction is “and”. Companies are responsible for exploitation, and customers have collective power in deciding what they support.
This is why fundraisers, social causes and scrutiny of materials belong within the same practice. Magee jokes that it may make her a bad businessperson and, perhaps, a decent human being. She will not create objects while treating the lives and resources behind them as somebody else’s concern.
A Library of Stories
Quirky but Fierce makes more sense as a library than a single shelf. Sea glass carries imagined journeys from the coast. Broken plates retain older patterns. Forest Fiends turn attention towards snails, mushrooms and easily missed lives. Koreanish follows an interrupted inheritance. A locket for a raven makes room for work that does not need to justify itself as stock.
Storytelling gives these collections continuity. Magee’s mind begins making narratives from whatever she notices. Three apparent cherry tomatoes on a footpath can prompt an elaborate explanation before revealing themselves as fruit fallen from a hedge. The ordinary world readily offers an entrance into invention.
Magee wants jewellery to retain some of that charge. A piece can be decorative and still act as a talisman: a prompt towards a memory, a more generous possibility or a detail in the world that deserves another look.
“If I’m going to take my time and use the resources to make jewellery,” she says, “I’d really love for them to be almost talismans for people to conjure up ideas of what the world could be.”
The stories, materials and methods may change. The constant is an invitation to remain curious – about who made an object, where its substance came from, what history has been compressed into a fashionable image, and what strange creature might be waiting for its own film. Quirky but Fierce does not resolve Magee’s interests into one answer. It gives them somewhere to gather.
Dee helped coordinate artists and makers in raising funds for Anaka Women’s Collective’s emergency response following the recent racist attacks in Belfast. Follow and support their vital community work:
@anakacollective
Explore Dee Magee’s collections and discover more of the stories behind Quirky but Fierce:
quirkybutfierce.com
Follow the latest news via their social media:
@quirkybutfierce
Watch Dee combine silversmithing, storytelling and animation on her YouTube channel:
@QuirkyButFierce
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