colours

In my explorations to capture the appearence of fragility I found that sterling silver was not the best option for these delicate fragile flowers due of many reasons so I decided to use fine silver because:

1. Fine silver created a soft white when left in the acid whereas sterling silver created a dirty white or a harsh white depending on the state of the acid.
   

Sterling silver links and unpolished white fine silver flowers. The thin burnished edges of the flower allows for a delicate feeling because it shows how thin the flowers are.

To keep the flowers unpolished whilst making the links highly polished I had to protect the flowers surface as seen below. I felt that this black colour was such a contrast to the white flowers. It reminded me of when I was thinking of contrasts and contradictions for example my soldiers and flowers with the contradiction or the contrast being in the subject matter. This time I created a contrast or contradiction using colour.

The black flowers ( a very harsh and un-natural colour for a flower) sharing one necklace with the white soft feeling of the unpolished silver flowers. The pure, uncontaminated, delicate flowers become whiter as the black, dark and harsh flowers move in. It shows dark vs light. The dark being the realisation of the real world around me that is swallowing up my pure, fresh, uncontaminated view I have on life, as I get older and start to understand what is going on around me. The black contradicts the meaning of the flower which is a meatphor for life.

I am wanting to explore making different coloured hydrangeas with different methods. I have tried the enamel which gives beautiful bright colours.

Hydrangeas

For my hydrangeas I am focusing on these aspects:
1. the white colour of the metal
2. creating one stylised shape that could repeated and grouped to gether to look like a bunch of hydrangeas
3. delicacy in the thickness of the flowers
4. choosing a few of the elements out of the bunch of silver ones and gold plating them
5. producing different sizes of the 'hydrangeas' to see what size is most effective in a bunch or a collection

Below is a brooch that I made for a customer Jacaui. I tried to get the flowers as white as possible and smaller than usaul to see what a circular shape lined with hydrangeas would look like.
I slightly domed these shapes, in doing so I feel as if there is a slight uniformity in the group of flowers and I am wanting to explore different ways that I could create this uniformity without taking away the 'individual" aspect of each flower. I could create this uniform aspect by adding something to the shape of the flowers or using colour ect.


I decided to try use the circle shape to represent hydrangeas and to group them together in different ways to see how they look.
Just experimenting. I know they far from looking like hydrangeas at the moment.

Why Hydrangeas- my subject matter

I have been working with Hydrangeas for the last 3 years and using objects and flowers that I have a connection to through memories or experiences. 3 years ago it was my last sister to get marrieds wedding and her main theme was hydrangeas and I held hydrangeas most of the day (my bouquet). From then on I have been experimenting with hydrangeas in my work, colourful ones, delicate ones, big ones, small ones, cast ones, electroformed ones... (There is a lot more to experiment with and find out) but there is something/a few things that create this bond between myself and the hydrangea flower. One of the bonds is the significant memories it holds for me but there is more to this flower that I need to capture, I need to find out what about it keeps me designing and making around it.

there are two main aspects of the hydrangea that intrigue me:
1. its fragility-
a) the way the flower looks
b) how it has to be handled and the conditions it grows in

2.looking at the hydrangea flower as a whole, all the little flowers on the bulb all look the same -until you come down closer and look at each flower individually. Each flower has it's own shaped petals, different amounts of petals ranging from 3 to 6, each petal twists or turns in its own direction.

After speaking with Tony, Chirs and marlene, Tony we came to the conclusion that the way in which I view the Hydrangea flower is a metaphor for something and I need to think about what it is.

In working and caring for my hydrangeas I have found that once you pick them if they are picked too early and it is a hot day they whilt and you cannot even tell what they are a few hours later but if you pick them at an older stage of their life span, they dry out very nicely and keep their shape although their petals become more twisted and they can fold back on each other. They are beautiful whilst they are young and the petals are still alive and colourful as well as soft but when you pick them their beauty changes to a different kind of beauty and they become more fragile in their handling.

For the last year of my Btech I have been trying to capture the hydrangea as it is in real life. So I cast some and electroformed others and tried to make the duplicate of a hydrangea in metal but as if it was real. I enjoyed this process and learning this new technique of electro forming but however I still felt like there was an aspect of the hydrangeas delicacy missing. I felt like I needed to capture the real flower as close as i could in metal because the flower in real life is so beautiful and i needed to capture this beauty. I went through my old journal from last year May 2010 and after casting a whole lot of flowers I wrote a thought or question to myself in my journal and it said "is there beauty in a captured moment or is the beauty lost due to trying to capture it; is it not that the essence of beauty is that it can only be experienced in a moment and cannot be reproduced or easily captured."

This links into my work as I have been using memories in my work and trying to capture moments/feelings from moments in my life. I find when I try to capture and save these moment and feelings I loose part of their beauty whilst trying to do so. This makes me aware of the impermanence of time and the fragility within this. After speaking with marlene and chris the word transience came about.

I would also like to use certain pieces of jewellery or little sculptors I create with my hydrangeas to symbolise the past the present and the future of my life with the realisation that beauty of memories and moments is that they dont last forever but this is what makes them beautiful and worthwhile trying to capture them.

Dyed plastic

I died this plastic with a dye that was purple and a dye that was green. The photo is unclear so I will have to take a better one but the colours came ot soft purple and soft green. It depends on what plastic you use

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Plastic sample

The hydrangeas that I cut from the plastic were from this bottle.

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Plastic hydrangeas

I am trying dying plastic and recording which plastic I used to keep a record of it for future use! I enjoy the way that i can see through some of the plastics.

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