A bit about my Splash project

For my splash project I wanted to explore creating flowers out of silver, but only flowers that held my personal memories within them. In doing this I wanted to create fragile, delicate pieces of jewellery which is symbolic of the fragility of these memories as well as the characteristics of the flowers. The memories were a trigger point for the creation of the elements which were to make up the piece of jewellery. I explored different techniques such as chasing, fold forming and enamelling and found that it is very difficult to create a flower out of silver that will have the same feeling as the real flower. This is an area which I still need to resolve and do more experimentation with. But in saying this I wore the neck piece out on Friday night and this piece which was created with inspiration from the Petria flower (examples on my blog) and was pleased when a friend looked at my neckpiece, examined it and then said “oh we have these flowers in the back of our garden and they spin like propellers when you drop them from a height”. I had not told him where my inspiration had come from. I was pleased that I had got the general feeling of the flower in my piece of jewellery across to the viewer as that is what had tried to do when creating it. For the neck piece I got the overall delicate feeling that I wanted but if you look closer at specific areas of the neck piece there are still many unresolved aspects, such as the way it is linked (although I like the “twig” like look), the catch and the fragility of the flowers which I am not convinced was successfully captured.

I am pleased with the overall delicate feeling that was captured in the flower ring I created. I need to find a way to keep the petals of the flower at the top of the stem and to stop it from slipping down the stem. My next pieces of jewellery I create will be a series of these rings where the flowers petals are propellers and they spin in the wind. There are two aspects of fragility I focused on in these pieces created:

1. The visual aspect of the piece (it looks delicate, the thickness of the metal, the way it is joined etc)
2. The handling of the jewellery/the display on the body (it can be easily deformed or broken or damaged.)

I am unsure of my theory at the moment as I am still researching and trying to find out more about memories and about what aspects make up a delicate piece of jewellery and how delicate can a piece of jewellery actually be. These questions are going to be what I am going to research and try answer in the next few weeks.