A grain of rice

‘Of all the people in all the world’ was the very first exhibition I went to see when I moved to Birmingham. Five years later after touring the world it came back to Brum and I was very excited to go back and take another look. Piles of rice signify statistics, give weight to mass numbers and show comparisons in scale, each grain representing one person. Upon entering the exhibit you become just another grain of rice.

The rice was piled on sheets of white paper and the statistic it represented was simply written beside it in printed text.  From population stats, to showing the numbers of people killed in disasters or effected by conflicts, with a few light-hearted ones thrown in too, one of my favourites being the ‘people who left their copy of ‘Fifty shades of grey’ in a Travelodge Hotel room last year’ and that you are more likely to be bitten by an angry New Yorker than by a shark.

Also nice to note that the rice was all recycled!

You had to tread carefully

The view of the city from Snow Hill Two

I found myself in a few of the stats, one of those grains show thats I’m an immigrant in Birmingham

Showing the changes in the Jewellery Quarter during the industrial revolution

You are safer in the sea than New York?

Fifty Shades of Grey

2013….Spirograph = Happy

Well my new years resolution certainly wasn’t to blog more……. Although I did come to the obvious conclusion that for 2013 I needed to spend more time enjoying all those ‘little’ things, the notions and ideas that niggle quietly at the back of your mind; the voices you get after something self-indulgent like, having a massage, that say ‘you really should do this more often’. And so I did. My father bought me a spirograph in my second year of uni. I loved it, I used it as the basis of a uni project (or two) and since then the box has lurked under my bed unused……no more!

While I don’t think this amazing pattern making machine has directly influenced my work, it most definitely expresses what I love, lets call it my design aesthetic; pattern, geometry and line, all of which are present in my jewellery.

A bit of knitting calm in a jewellery storm

Well I have been a jewellery making machine lately. The Christmas season is here and it is keeping me on my toes and in a constant state of methodical stress relieving list writing. The Christmas fairs (more about them later) are almost behind me, just Warwick Arts Centre  to go on the 1st and 2nd of December, but there are plenty of exhibitions where you can now see my work from down South in the New Ashgate Gallery to up North (soon-ish) in The Craft Centre and Design Gallery and right in the middle too! at Centrepiece a Christmas exhibition held in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.

However what my mental health really needs is a balance of healthy fruit and veg (cheesy knitted related jokes may be a result of the Christmas stress) They are full of fiber….ah ha I mean wool!!!

From radishing radishes, fun-guys and hap-pea peas!!

My crop!!

July 27th was some time ago….

Right well I have been busy! In the not so distant future I shall be launching a brand new collection of jewellery,  my new orbital range. (points for any guesses of what it might be) I have also relocated to Birmingham School of Jewellery where I will be an ‘Artist in Residence’ for the HND Jewellery and Silversmithing class, in exchange for one teaching day a week, I will get a free workshop space and access to the school impressive range of tools and machinery. I’m looking forward to the challenge while also being quite excited about taking full advantage of their kilns to try my hand at some more enameling! Which brings me right back to finally showing off my finished enamel experiments!!

(two months late but hey who’s counting)

Actual enamelling

So when all the preparation was completed the exciting enamelling bit could finally begin, the enamelling only took about an hour…..the cleaning up afterwards however was an epic undertaking, nine hours of constant sanding (carborundum-ing !?) (stretched over three days) and then my work was almost finished

As the piece cools the colours get lighter!!! DONE

Just out of the kiln with the darkened hot colours

The enamel changes colour as it cools, you never know quite what you’re going to get

All set up and ready to go

To re-polish the glass it is put back into the kiln for a final fire-ing

nine hours later…..

and continues

and continues

So the endless grinding begins, removing all the excess glass with my carborundum stones

Second fire-ing of the circular piece….to fill some gaps

The paste is left to dry out before it is put in the kiln…..to stop it exploding!!

the view inside the kiln, with a circular piece cooking nicely!

steady hands and a few colour changes later

The enamel paste is then, slowly ‘pen-ed’ into place filling the squares

For my ‘plique a jour’ enamelling I needed to make a paste with the ground glass mixing it with water

The final pumice (just to be sure)

The kiln kindly donated to me for the day by http://www.pollenjewellery.co.uk

Just the final touches left!

Preparation is key

First things first, I needed something to enamel! And here’s what I did

If enamellers had a mantra (and well maybe they do) its, that everything must be spotlessly clean, so a lot of pumice later and I am ready to enamel (with the added benefit of nice soft pumiced hands)

All finished! And ready to enamel…

Some very pretty pictures as a result

annealed before doming some more

Half way there

Next I used my doming block to slowly shape the pieces

squares and circles ….. I was never going to do anything too out of my comfort zone, pierced to size, then some filing and emerying to smooth the edges

Also just a quick plea for votes!! I am apart of a Great British Makers competition, if you have a spare second to vote for me by clicking the like button I would be very much grateful and thank you to those who have already voted

 

Breathing space!

I find myself with a gap in my self-employed year. I’m taking a break from all craft fair activity untill September, when from then untill Christmas my schedule is packed with jam.

I thought the ideal thing for me to do in this two month gap was to experiment/design/create and most importantly, enjoy working with some enamel and hopefully learn a thing or two along the way.

I was first introduced to enamelling 6/7 (ok 8) years ago, I have never mastered it and was never really happy with any of the results, something I hope to rectify while documenting the processes and outcomes, beautiful and otherwise here.

For starters I thought I would bask in the enamel light of others peoples work!

Jasmine Watson’s Mandalam Brooches

Lydia Feast’s beautiful Chaos and Calm

and Jessica Turrell’s script series

A life time of inspiration

Self employment has taken over my life!

  http://www.mrsite.co.uk/usersitesv40/CHRISTINEDAVIESJEWELLERY.co.uk/wwwroot/page11.htm  ,

I’m not sure I will ever get that work-life balance quite right and while I love what I do, I can sometimes forget to ‘stop and smell the roses’……or in relevance to myself, forget what inspire’s me to design and make.

While at university one man’s beautifully illustrated scientific images were a huge influence in every one of my projects, sometimes I need a reminder to look back on the things I love!

Ernst Haeckel

The festival of Irish design

The exhibition is apart of the festival of Irish design, at Project 51, South William Street, Dublin, and it is now open to the public untill the 31st of March. I am so happy to be one of the 15 designers picked to showcase their work. The exhibition has an eclectic variety of crafts, from furniture to glassware and of course jewellery, this wide range of mediums has one common trait however, they all showcase the quality of Irish design and craftsmanship (even if I do say so myself…cough…)

While setting out my work I got to meet two other exhibitors, fellow jeweler Janice Byrne and Furniture designer Cillian Ó Súilleabháin. Janice’s caillte collection captures the etherial and delicate beauty of seep-pod structures.

Caillte collection

while Cillian’s work is simplistic, structural and gorgeously elegant.

tea table

To see more of their work visit http://www.jlbjewellery.ie/index.html  and http://www.cosfurniture.ie/

To find out more about Project 51 visit http://project51.ie/

MineralART 2012

I love gem stones and rocks, I find them fascinating and the more I find out, the more I realise how much there is to know.

During my degree I completed a foundation in gemmology with  The Gemmological Association of Great Britain, this also gave me an excellent excuse to splash out on some beautiful stones, they unfortunately go un-set, un-used and un-loved untill a competition like MineralART comes around and I am motivated to try do them justice.

The brief, simple put, was ‘inside quartz’ to look at a diverse stone that has an abundance of fascinating inclusions. While my brooches didn’t make the awards (sad face) they still made it onto the online exhibition alongside many other artists submissions. It is a testament to human imagination that the varied nature of such a beautiful stone can be matched by such a wide breath of artistic interpretation.

Quartz with one single tourmaline inclusion

 

Rutilated Quartz

 

Check the other submissions out on http://mineral-art.de/mineralart/weitere-teilnehmer/namen-a-d/