Intention project finale

Here are some of the last pieces I made.  They came at the end of the project and are less illustrative of my intention but I was having so much fun with the wood that I couldn't help myself!

a brooch which was an exercise in composition. It's about 120mm across.

three views of a neckpiece (and another three awful photos of me)

Here's a close up of how I strung the "beads". I drilled 2 holes about 15mm deep into either end of the 'bead', then strung two drilled 10mm lengths of dowel onto the thread and tied knots at either end, and then glued them, knot first, into the drilled hole.

The glue is still wet in the photo but as it dried, the plugs of dowl blend into the plywood much better
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Happy Birthday Stephen

Stephen was the indispensable tech guy at the summer academy. He got things when you needed them, he fixed things when they broke, he provided the entertainment at the afternoon openings at the academy and he knew where to get the best pizza in Hallein.

He also had a birthday in the last week so we all made something for a chain that was put together by Manuel...

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Intention project part 3

After discovering the beauty of plywood, I went on a bender. And I was still able to incorporate elements of steel. The following are the compositions that finally made it within the "frame" of my intention (Manuel used this term a lot and it was very helpful as we all tended to get carried away and move away from our orgininal intention).

I never would've thought I'd be using wood. It started as a means to make quick models but it turns out that it's materiality was perfect to communicate my intention.

a brooch - 300mm long

a neckpiece (fittings not yet attached) - 300mm long

another brooch - 300mm long

another neckpiece - 300mm long

another brooch - 300mm long

and another brooch - 300mm long

fun with the linisher

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Yes. I'm a tourist

On our final weekend in Hallein, Elisabeth, Lucia and I jumped in Anje's car and drove to Vienna.

I think I deserve some congratulations on my bravery in sharing such an awful photo of myself.

Here's something we saw on the way...

Austrian Aldi

And some things we saw when we got there:

SUNSHINE!!!

and the view from the Leopold Museum

My favourite Schiele from the collection at the Leopold Museum

The Hundertwasser house

a giant moth

a miniature jeweller's workshop in the window of a jewellery supply shop

and Dick files

Unfortunately Austrian shops very strictly observe closing from Saturday Afternoon to Monday morning so I couldn't have a better look around. It was interesting to see a jewellery supply shop at street level though.

Elisabeth lives in Vienna and she and her fella Philip (and their dachshund, Gonzo) very kindly put us up in their beautiful apartment in the 7th district, which is a very interesting and creative part of Vienna. I want to live somewhere with a staircase like this...

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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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