Intention project part 2

After working with paper models, I decided to try making some of the forms out of steel. This is where I ran into problems.

What might suggest serenity and calmness in paper...

becomes thunderingly clumsy in metal. This is mainly due to the folding technique I employed but also because of the shiny surface of the metal. For those of you who haven't tried it, soldering mild steel is more difficult than soldering non-ferrous metals, it requires a high heat but it also oxidises very quickly and the gold flux we had in the studio burnt out much faster than the ezi-weld flux I'm used to. I also wanted crisp corners, not folds, and I wasn't prepared to score those long lines in the steel. So I cut through most of the line and folded the rest but I still didn't get crisp lines.

Back to the drawing board.

Manuel very smartly pointed out that even though my stated intention was to make jewels that elicit feelings of serenity and calmness in others, I was being steered by my unspoken and unacknowledged intention to use steel in my jewels. He pushed me to work more three dimensionally and to work more quickly and emotionally rather than intellectually. Emotionally is the wrong word but the intention was to make jewels that elicit a feeling rather than making jewels that are "about" something.

So I picked up some soft plywood scraps that were hanging around the workshop and played around...

Cool. I thought. The soft straight lines of the linished ply are quite calming

what happens if I exaggerate the lines by burning and painting the surface of the wood...

and then add the steel back in...(I had made one nice crisp edged steel form before giving it up as a bad joke!)

And then, an 'in-progress crit' threw up the suggestion of making them bigger...

and bigger they became...

(more to come)
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