michelle's jewellery

Monday, August 15, 2011

army men

I have been cutting out little silhouette army men and had an idea of making makume gane plate and cutting them out of there to make them camoflagued.

So nick guided me through this technique....

Step 1: fusing the silver and copper layers together

Step 2: rolling the layers once they were fused (one layer started to peel away as it was not fused properly and it created a beautiful pattern.

Step 3: starting to burr in the pattern

I learnt that it is better to use a wider burr than a small little one as more pattern comes out with the bigger burr

The pattern done with the smaller burr.

step 5: rolling out the pattern

Friday, July 22, 2011

Jack cunningham is a jeweller who creates narrative pieces of jewellery with personal meaning behind them and he uses objects as metaphors to do so. He uses visual imagery to tell stories and to make statements.

In his series love seeds, he creates brooches that are metaphors for the different seasons in order to convey his theme of the "sentiment of love"

Cunningham, Summer

This series can be seen on his website http://www.jackcunningham.co.uk/jack_phd/f.html

These brooches are similar to my trees that show different seasons.

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Sharon Church

Sharon Church is a jeweller who uses organic imagery and her works are rich in meaning. Her works show plant life in its different stages of life and the process of change that comes with these stages in it's cycles.

http://sharonchurchjewelery.net

Sharon Church- Foliate Harness

Silver, leather

This piece of Church's which I have taken out of the Metalsmith of 1999 is a piece which shows the cycles of life in the way in which the leaves grow and form a circle round the neck. It speaks of growth and renewal.

Art Jewellery

A while ago jewellery followed very traditional Functions and served as a method of expression for the wearer. There are about 4 traditional functions that Metcalf talks about in his essay "the nature of jewellery". Now days however, Jewellery has shifted its focus to include the maker aswell as the wearer. Metcalf talks about and Art jeweller who is not concerned with economic demands. She engages with the world around her and uses her jewellery to express her thoughts and feelings. Jewellery becomes a conceptual form of art for the artist jeweller.

Quickenden talks about the new functions of jewellery in his papers on the Virtual Gallery of Contemporary jewellery.

To Read Metcalf's essay on "The nature of jewellery", Click this link: http://http://www.brucemetcalf.com/pages/essays/nature_jewelry.html

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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

A few memories from my recent travels

Poland: Krakouw

In the mountains

Krakouw is a city in Poland which is full of history.

Above is the old city centre of krakouw and it is one of the biggest medieval square's in Europe.

Above is Auschwitz- A concentration camp.

London: site seeing

The Gold smith's company in St Pauls London

Taking the escilator at the tube station I was reading the adverts and saw an advert for an exhibition called "Mindfull of Silver"

I followed the directions which led to a beautiful old building where the exhibition was held. For this exhibition the goldsmiths had been given a topic of "vessel" and the exhibition showed their design process and how the silversmith got to the final piece. What I found the most fascinating was how each artist was given the same theme but not one of them's work was alike in any visual way.

If you go to this link you can see a few of the silversmith's works from the exhibition: http://http://www.modernsilver.com/mindfulofsilver/mindfulofsilver.htm

There were two silversmith's work that I engaged with : Lucian Taylor and Theresa Nguyen ( my next 2 blog posts will be about their work)

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

anglo gold continued......

Using the three dimensional Hydrangea silver ring as a design start for this bold and sleek category for anglo Gold.

Anglo Gold

There have been many competitions and exhibitions that have been on and i have been adapting my work or adapting the brief to fit into my work.

The first one was anglo plat. Because of the 2 entries required (an accesory and a statement piece) I had to pick wisely the theme so that I could carry on using my hydrangeas in my entries as the hydrangeas are still the area that I am working on in my own work.

I chose dual purpose for a statement piece and I chose accessory for bold and sleek.

For dual purpose I developed on sopmething similar I have designed before but changed it and improved it. It is a neck piece that turns into a hand piece.

here was the process....

Started off with this idea but the flowers needed to wrap more around the hand- needed to be more of a "statement piece"

This was the start of the piece around the neck. Not bold enough!

So i added more layers to it and this fuller feel was more what I was trying to achieve.

This picture below was when I tried to cover the neck more with the links and flowers but I feel the flowers look spare and there is not enough shape to complement the neck line.

I have been enjoying this process of designing by making a prototype and putting it together, then adjusting it etc and taking photo's on ther body to see what it looks like.