Photography: © RMIT University, Melbourne 2008 >
Wedding ornaments for another time 1: Drought (Inari Kiuru 2008)
shower cable, brass taps, 925 silver, 18ct gold, found objects
fused, soldered, fabricated
Please click on the image if you want to see detail clearly - here the photo condenses into a very pixelated one for some reason!
While still photographing work from this semester and the year gone, this is something from the recent past, one of the four pieces designed and made during the traditional "fusion" project at RMIT, on our first year 2008, then taught by Mr Robert Baines. The idea was to create a neck piece which incorporated gold embedded in silver (we learned the whole process from melting granules to gradually rolling the sheet of gold and silver into a thin layer), fused sterling silver pieces (= no solder, metal joined by heat only, at the right melting point), mixed with modern materials.
My work for the brief evolved into a four piece collection of rather large "wedding ornaments" (this was the semester preceding my own wedding, hence perhaps the theme … :), imagined to belong to a future time where environmental or another catastrophe might have changed our living conditions, circumstances, and available resources significantly.
The first piece is titled "Drought", something I had been thinking about a lot at the time, after a move from Perth to Melbourne – here, we faced serious water restrictions for the first time in our lives.
Amen to that! For both making work on the drought - I didn't do it, but I know what you mean - and for the wedding jewellery. I made mine after the fact, not before.
ReplyDeleteYeah. It's strange being here after growing up and living close to so much free flowing water.
ReplyDeleteThe only jewellery I made for the occasion were our simple wedding bands, almost similar to each other (so of course they were mixed up in the actual wedding ceremony! : ). Robert Baines made the gold alloy and spent a day with me & husband teaching me how to make a gold ring, instead of making rings for us as originally asked. I thank him for that.
On the wedding day, I only wore the ring and my late Grandmothers Finnish spectrolite (http://www.luxonia.com/spectrolite.html) earrings.
And a dress!! : D
ReplyDelete