Stripes, 2020

This series of pieces was made during the Covid19 lockdowns of 2020. Having to juggle home-schooling of my children and work commitments, like so many other parents, time was restricted. During the many walks to a nearby field and wood, I was struck by the the shapes of the leaves against the sky and the idea of the ‘space between things’. Sometimes the space actually stands out and comes into the foreground, whilst the object travels into the background. The negative and positive are related, influence each other and even exchange places.

This idea led on to lots of drawings - mainly of circles and lines. Lines developed into stripes and stripes remained there for a while and were translated into stripy pieces of jewellery.

Some time later I researched images of stripes - somewhere I had seen something stripy that had really impressed me. Then I found this image: the tent room at Schloss Charlottenhof, Potsdam which I visited as a teenager. There it was - exactly what I had had in mind. Those blue and white stripes, thin and thick.

Materials

Continuing to make my practice more eco-friendly, I am taking a break in this series from using Argentium Silver. Whilst I still believe that Argentium has many advantages, such as its greater tarnish resistance, it good fusing or heat hardening properties, unfortunately only a proportion of the silver used in creating this alloy comes from recycled sources. As such, I have decided to switch to using recycled silver for now in the hope that Argentium will at some point be produced entirely from recycled silver.

The pieces in this series are therefore made from recycled silver and recycled 24ct gold. The gold originates from a Japanese smelting company that is recognised as a Conflict-free Smelter and which conforms to international guidelines set by CFSI (Conflict Free Sourcing Initiative). They extract the gold from scraps of industrial use (ie. electric parts, plating), jewellery and dentistry. It is not sourced from conflict mines.

The gold is applied in the Korean technique of Keum-boo. This is a beautifully clean process of heat-bonding 24ct gold foil (13 microns thick) to silver – a practice which avoids the use of any harmful chemicals.

In some other pieces of this series I also combine these materials with re-used HDPE plastic from old, single-use bottles.