Mass Production

The next project i had was based on mass production and we were asked to use casting and pressing techniques to produce two pieces of jewellery. I looked back over some old photographs from an art trip to Amsterdam in 2001 (wow that was a long time ago!) and came across this photo of a sculpture at a modern art museum outside Amsterdam....

After playing around with a few other images i settled on this one to use as my influence on my casting and pressing pieces. I experimented with aluminium and foam board after doing a few drawings, to get a more 3D affect.

Bridget Riley at the time also had an exhibition on at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where i saw this painting;

I believe the painting is called "Study in Crimson" but it is the asymmetric heart that I circled in black that I was influenced by.

This helped me settle on a design for a ring (for the casting) and a pendant (for the pressing).

This is my ring, it weighs 30g!

The ring is solid sterling silver and was hollowed out when made in wax to help reduce the weight of the ring and therefore the cost of the silver to make it! The photos are not very good quality - sorry! - but you can get an idea of the heart shape. The hollowed part of the ring has also been oxidised.

This is the pendant I made from pressing,

The pressing process requires a lot of metal and I thought this would be quite expensive in silver so decided to make it out of guilded metal (I like the gold colour and it isn't too flexible, like copper). As you can see there are two different sides to this pendant, but what you may not be able to see is that they are held together with jump rings. I then wound ribbon through the pendant to make a web like pattern that echoes the design i made out of the aluminium and foam board. One side of the pendant has more horizontal lines, and the other has more vertical lines (I emphasised this fact by rolling binding wire into the metal before pressing and then oxidising the recesses to pick out the lines). To add a little more detail I attached small black water pearls by drilling a hole through the metal where I wanted the pearl to be, then threading a head-pin through the hole (the head of the pin on the inside of the pendant) and attaching a pearl with glue to the end to hold the whole thing in place - rather ingenious I thought! The chain I think may be brass but I have incorporated into it, the ribbon from the web in the pendant. This idea was influenced by a necklace by Lanvin.

Lanvin Swarovski crystal strawberry necklace

I was very pleased with my pieces as neither piece of jewellery required any soldering, which is very time consuming when things need to be mass produced. That reminds me, I need to get a mould of my ring made so I can get selling it!