Re-construction Time Again

What a few weeks! Ever since Madelyn Smoak reminded me that some years ago - 2009 - I had started to make a set of Chimæric cutlery, I've been working furiously to finish all the work which, over the years, has been started and left incomplete. I am determined that there will be no unfinished work by Christmas!

There were a few projects which I knew about, having put them aside to work on commissions or exhibition work - the Coco Chanel-inspired piece, for example - but most I had completely forgotten. As I mentioned in the middle of August, I used the visit of the painters to the workshop as a good reason to tidy and organise everything which had the knock-on effect of making it fairly easy to find all the boxes and drawers into which I had tucked the work. What surprised me most was not the number of pieces but the age of the earliest ones. Yesterday, I found this:

I have tried to work it out, but I think that this is nearly 20 years old, dating from the mid-1990s. Certainly, it is entirely made from precious materials with none of my now indispensable corroded iron or found objects. It was tucked into the bottom of a box along with this sheet of notes:

What really pleases me about this piece is that it prefigures a lot of the forms and "signature" elements which were to come. The little spikes in the drawing were made for the original "Mace" pendant which dated from about the same time-period and which I re-made for myself in 2006 (and have made again for a customer this week!) and have persisted into my current work; the form of the box, however, recurred in much more recent works, such as "Cold Genius", "A Forest" and "The Eyepod".

With a bit of work, I completed the piece today. What is surprising to me about it now - now that I use Rhino and a microscope at the bench - is the inaccuracy of the marking-out and cutting.

Tucked alongside this delicate piece, I found a chain made of silver and lumps of rough quartz:

I had absolutely no idea what these were going to be used for. I don't even remember buying them or making the chain from them and I can't be bothered going through my receipts from the gem-dealers to find out. Anyway, I combined them with a cast-iron finger-guard from a doorknob, an amethyst, some labradorite and a pink quartz for which I had already made a setting and came up with this:

The finger plate was a piece I bought from "Construction Junction" in Pittsburgh for $1 in 2011!

As noted above, the "Mace" pendant was also finished this week:

Other pieces I cleared out and dusted off, sometimes finishing elements and sometimes just re-making bits of them to suit included these two pieces I made for a theatre performance in Edinburgh in the early 2000s:

Both of these are a bit the worse for wear, having been used on stage and then stuck in a toolbox in my workshop, presumably with the intention of breaking them up and re-using the materials. As I quite like them, they are on my Etsy shop in a new "clearance" section, selling for a small consideration more than the material costs.

The upper pendant is entirely silver with paste stones (the smaller stone chipped) and the lower pendant is made from two white-brass trophy handles, silver, quartz, titanium and amethysts. The pendant quartz is a bit chipped too but not badly.

I also found and cleaned up a piece which, when I made it, I really disliked, "The Alembic of Hermes Trismegistus: Inrō":

Now that I see it again, I have no idea what I took against when it was finished.

What I like about this project of finishing projects which are almost complete is that it makes me feel really productive!

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On Sunday, having a day of mostly leisure to myself, I tackled photography again, this time photographing some of the works from the previous week, including "Twisted: For Annie Ross" and "Deep Sea Sketch" then trying to produce submission-quality images from them:

I also photographed my own piece from last year, "14th Century Nightlife" which had also been started some years ago and left unfinished, though in that case it was to do with my inability to deal with the electronic components in it:

I'm not sure if the second image looks like the nut is glowing or not, but I've convinced myself it does.

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FINALLY, don't forget to have a look at the online exhibition curated by me and Jeff Zimmer, "Scotland the What" at Crafthaus.

"Twisted" - A pendant for Annie Ross

Continuing with my resolution to clear the workshop of unfinished projects, I finally completed my piece "Twisted: For Annie Ross" today:

Made from a piece of cast-iron which I found on a bit of derelict land in Glasgow, when I found it, the song "Twisted", written and famously sung by Glaswegian jazz legend, Annie Ross, was in my head.

The silver elements at the top of the pendant were designed in Inkscape and came from an almost freehand doodle around the shape of the iron. I transferred them to Rhino to scale and refine them then cut them by hand. Set with green quartz, amethyst, tsavorite garnets, aventurine, peridot and labradorite.

The catch on the chain is especially "Twisted"!

If any of my students are reading this, I demand you look away NOW. Close the browser and look at something else...

While looking through the drawers and cupboards in the workshop for unfinished projects, I am ashamed to confess that I found a commission which I started - nearly 2 years ago - and which is also unfinished: thank goodness for amenable clients!

A copy of my original "Mace" pendant but with Shibuichi spikes instead of gold. Will try to finish this soon now, too.

To finish, here is the song which inspired the first piece.

 

My analyst told me that I was right out of my head
The way he described it, he said I'd be better dead than live
I didn't listen to his jive
I knew all along he was all wrong
And I knew that he thought I was crazy but I'm not
Oh no!

My analyst told me that I was right out of my head
He said I'd need treatment but I'm not that easily led
He said I was the type that was most inclined
When out of his sight to be out of my mind
And he thought I was nuts, no more ifs or ands or buts
Oh no!

They say as a child I appeared a little bit wild
With all my crazy ideas
But I knew what was happenin', I knew I was a genius
What's so strange when you know that you're a wizard at three?
I knew that this was meant to be

Well I heard little children were supposed to sleep tight
That's why I drank a fifth of vodka one night
My parents got frantic, didn't know what to do
But I saw some crazy scenes before I came to
Now do you think I was crazy?
I may have been only three but I was swingin'

They all laughed at Al Graham Bell
They all laughed at Edison and also at Einstein
So why should I feel sorry if they just couldn't understand
The litany and the logic that went on in my head?
I had a brain, it was insane
Don't you let them laugh at me
When I refused to ride on all those double decker buses
All because there was no driver on the top

My analyst told me that I was right out of my head
The way he described it, he said I'd be better dead than live
I didn't listen to his jive
I knew all along he was all wrong
And I knew that he thought I was crazy but I'm not
Oh no!

My analyst told me that I was right out of my head
But I said "Dear doctor, I think that it's you instead
'Cause I have got a thing that's unique and new
It proves that I'll have the last laugh on you
'Cause instead of one head... I got two
And you know two heads are better than one"

Lyrics, Annie Ross; Music, Wardell Gray.

Completion Fever!

In case anyone didn't see my little conversation on Twitter, I have decided to complete all the partially-completed projects in my workshop, including the Alexander McQueen tribute piece, the Chimæric cutlery, the rolling teapot, the piece for Annie Ross, 20000 Leagues and all the rest before even thinking about starting anything new, commissions excepted. I started today with this:

This is "Deep Sea Sketch", a kind of outline piece I started before beginning on "20000 Leagues Under The Seas" and another piece made around porcelain faux corals by Lisa Stevens. The idea for using the screws like little shells came from one of my students in Turkey who curled up some longer ones to great effect. The stones are natural blue zircon and tsavorite garnet.

Kicking Myself - Photography!

The new edition of Metalsmith, the annual "Exhibition in Print" is fantastic. Susan Cohn curates "As Seen By Others: Photography As Strategy", an exhibition which I didn't enter as I didn't really think that it would be very interesting, nor did I think that it applied to my work. Now I am kicking myself for being so short-sighted, especially after the day I have just spent in my house... more on that later.

In the presentation, Cohn talks about the way in which images of jewellery - and other crafts - do not necessarily reflect the reality of the object but can often reflect the maker's intentions about the object. I am not going to go into any depth here about the issue - read it; it is worth seeking out if you don't subscribe - but suffice to say, I hadn't realised that I actually had any sort of strategy for presenting my work photographically but realise on reflection that I do.

My own practice for photography has always been to "Leave it to Andrew". Andrew Neilson is my photographer of choice for photographing my work without props or models, the images I use to submit entries for shows and competitions and the ones which make up the majority of my portfolio images. I discovered Andrew by accident, a chance meeting between him and my friend and colleague, David Webster. When we talked, he was interested in photographing my work and I was interested in seeing what someone more used to photographing "classic" fine jewellery would do with my work. The results are, if I may be immodest, amazing. Without the collaboration of Andrew, or someone very like him, I would not have been able to get the exhibitions and shows that I have done.

This was brought home to me especially in the spring when I was preparing for the SCC "Enough Violence: Artists Speak Out" show. I realised at that point that my own work was not enough and I chose to work with photographer Simon Murphy on a collaborative project which saw him contextualise the work I had made by taking environmental shots using the pieces and the people they were made for.
(I will be posting photographs of this project after it has opened at the SCC on 27th September.)

Andrew has taken a couple of shots of my work on models, work which he did out of his own practice rather than commissioned by me and I really like them: he has captured something of the spirit of the pieces depicted...

Photograph Copyright Andrew Neilson, 2008; Model, Lynn Docherty; used with permission.

Photograph Copyright Andrew Neilson, 2008; Model, Anita Neilson; used with permission.

Simon photographed my "Empire State Human: A Post-Industrial Codpiece" with me as the model, again catching the spirit of the piece:

All of this has set me thinking about how my "regular" photographs are reflections of my intent and I think that it  has something to do with the way in which my jewellery often references traditions of fine-jewellery, which may be why using Andrew's fine-jewellery, Bond-Street-Quality images works so well for me.

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Which brings me to today. As I've mentioned before, I am entering "Suspended in Green" and have spent the week making "L'Heure de la Fée Verte: A Post-Apocalyptic Cocktail Ring for the Sipping of Absinthe" from a piece of corroded iron pipe, a broken Victorian hand-made glass bottle-stopper and lots of gemstones. Unfortunately, because the entries have to be in by tomorrow and because I left it so late to apply, Andrew hasn't the time to photograph my work. Undaunted, I decided to set about copying the work he does for me and I'm very glad I did. Not because I think that my images are as good as his - good they may be, but they are not stellar - but rather because I have now spent nearly eight hours producing five images. I have never complained about the prices he charges for his work and am even less likely to do so now!

I started off having to learn about my macro-flash.

The lens is the excellent Panasonic-Leica 45mm f2.8 Macro, which I do know very well and which I use a lot but I had bought the flash ages ago, second-hand from a camera shop in Glasgow and have never really used it very much, largely because the times that I've used it, I've not been very impressed with the results. Today, due to the time-constraints, I was forced to read the manual: what a difference that made. I also decided to shoot in RAW format so that I could produce print-quality 300dpi images and as I have a new Linux computer running GIMP, I couldn't rely on my Photoshop skills to win the day. All-in-all, not very auspicious.

The light-box was improvised from four chairs, a broom handle and a bedsheet and produced these less-than-dazzling results:

With these RAW shots, I went to the computer and this was where the real work began, first of all with the 'developing' of the RAW files into something usable. Unfortunately, GIMP doesn't handle this format, so I had to install a new programme, UFRAW, to do that and then learn how to do that. Once I got the images into GIMP, I then had to learn how to make the changes I needed, using what I had learned in Photoshop and trying to emulate that in the new environment.

My aim was to produce some images which fit in with the ones which Andrew has taken for me in the past, something suitable for an application, so better than a "snapshot" and, as such, I rather stole his style. I know that he doesn't use a softbox - largely because someone once emailed me to tell me to sack my photographer for not using a softbox! - but found that the images I took without diffusers were too harsh. In order to emulate the controlled hard-edge quality of his work, I used a lot of digital tools, probably more than he does. I am actually fairly pleased with the results but I am also sure that Andrew won't be losing my custom any time soon.