serendipitous

To very nicely round out my "jewellery year", my Apocalyptic work has been featured in Serendipity Magazine.

Brighton Rock

Off to Brighton on Friday for the festive holidays! Today I had hardly any students in, had finished the charms for the SCC show and have nothing that I can really be doing on my two big projects ("Fashion:Victim" and "Future Legend") so I picked up a nut from the old West Pier in Brighton, a beautiful Victorian pier which had a theatre at the end and which has been allowed to fall into disrepair following an arson attack by a company which didn't want it to be restored:

The nut was found on the sand under the pier at very low tide once and is heavily corroded, like the rest of the structure:

I made the nut into a ring, set with black onyx on the top and a haematite behind. The shank is made from a piece of steel found on a different beach and not from Brighton:

A friend of mine who used to live in Brighton pointed out that it is a kind of "mourning ring" for the pier. I like to think that Pinkie, the amoral gangster anti-hero from Graham Greene's novel, "Brighton Rock", might wear it with his sharp suit. One of my favourite books.

charmed iii

I received an email from Sharon Massey earlier this week, inviting me to submit some pieces for the third "Charmed" exhibition at the SCC in Pittsburgh, to which I happily agreed. Some time ago, Bob Ebendorf and I had been talking about me making a series of charm bracelets which I started but which never got anywhere as I couldn't get over the hurdle of creating a complex piece with essentially no "narrative". (The original plan was to create 10 bracelets and 100 charms which would be sold to order on the understanding that each bracelet would have 10 charms selected by the purchaser on a first-come-first-serve basis.) This means, however, that my "vague" WIP tray - projects started and abandoned to varying degrees of temporariness - has a fair selection of partially-completed charms. Thus I have managed to bring together five charms for the show in two days!
As the show is in Pittsburgh, I also incorporated some of the metal objects I found in the street when visiting over the summer:

 Natural blue zircon and polymer clay faux bird-skull by Dee Wilder.

 Spring washer, black spinel and freely-moving carved camel-bone skull.

 Nut, silver, amethyst and chrysoprase. I will clean the setting wax from the stone before sending!

 Obsidian skull set on a washer, hung with a garnet.

 Sawblade from Pittsburgh, needles from Clydebank.

leftovers (noli me tangere)

I made a piece today from bits left over from Supercollider and a boar's tooth:

Probably not going to get much done before the holidays now.