Skip to main content

new year - new ways to see: a crafty peek into making tasty “plique-a-jour” enamel jewellery

The Herring: Pre- and Post-Mortem. Champ-levé enamel
pendants in copper, fine silver, sterling silver.
I loved learning to enamel - the instant wow factor as I stepped into a world of colour - fusing glass to metal. Right now, I am working in champ-levé and cloisonné, and exploring surface effects when the enamel powders are spread directly onto flat metal. it's going to be a very colourful experience.

Enamelling appears to date back to at least the thirteenth century BCE(1), with a more modern history boasting master metalsmiths, jewellers, and designers like Fabergé, Lalique, Tiffany, and Cartier. We’re likely more familiar on a daily basis with our enamelled iron pans, kitchen tools like colanders or bread bins, the traditional enamelled cast iron tub, or ubiquitous “white goods” - so-named for the white-enamelled steel panels. There are even obsolescence - and maintenance-defying - enamel-clad “Lustron” houses built in the US for returning WWII vets(2).

“You’re a Lifesaver…” - cookie becomes wearable art (again). Cookie by Emily Evans. 
Bronze casting of plastic spout from a fruit juice container (ReFind Collection),  white evening gloves circa 1950 (courtesy of Kathleen Pedersen), 
titanium necklace.

One of my most valuable learnings from the Jewellery and Metals Program at ACAD was the now habitual root through the mental toolbox to find multiple methods for achieving the same result… It encourages me to be flexible, try to solve problems with what I have, maybe discover new ways of working. And so when Emily - a young neighbour and budding artist - showed me one of her latest craft projects at her Christmas party, I couldn’t stop smiling: here was the toughest of the tough enamel jewellery techniques - plique-a-jour, where glass enamel particles bridge and fill a space in a metal design so that light can travel through the glass - recreated in a cookie! Given my predilection for edible jewellery (see "For The Girl With Everything: A Snack"), and my lifelong obsession with Food Science (half of my under-grad), this was the best of both worlds: melted, coloured, sugar - Lifesaver candies - embracing the central hole in a cookie, creating a stained glass window, lit by the glow of the Christmas tree. Just lovely.

Thank you Emily for loaning your fabulous “Lifesaver” cookie - truly inspirational. And happy craft new year!


Lifesaver cookie by Emily Evans;
bronze casting and photography by author. 

 (1) Tait, Hugh. 7000 Years of Jewelry. Richmond Hill Ont.: Firefly Books, 2008. Print.
(2) “Lustron House - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.” Web. 8 Jan. 2013.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

narrative jewellery: tales from the toolbox book launch

For every piece of jewellery I make there is a story. It can be simple, just a note on the “why?” that led to the forms and textures, or the feeling that I want to remember. Sometimes the single idea that could become a piece, conceived way before the act of making, can become so over-whelming that I need to write a whole new reality for the jewellery to exist within. That’s how it was for “Pull”, the first piece of jewellery in a body of work that became the ReFind Collection *. It caused me to look at materials in my home, especially the things that were routinely thrown away, very differently. It was like waking up to realize I just hadn’t been paying the right kind of attention to all the “stuff” in other areas of my life; realizing that maybe jewellery could be linked to something as obscure as industrial-scale food-processing and packaging—if I allowed my mind to receive the information, differently. I am very honoured that my necklace has been included in Mark Fenn’s new ...
Post a Comment
Read more

will you...?

Artists write stories about their work all the time, and the greatest joy is when that story becomes important to another person.  This project was about creating a piece of fan-art for a client (DP) based on their love of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. DP approached Jeff de Boer because he needed to commission a very special golden snitch sculpture: the body would become an opening engagement ring-box. DP had a very special proposal in mind, and the snitch was to play a key part. Jeff and I do not usually make snitches. Jeff is a renowned metal artist and teacher, famous for creating armour for cats and mice , and collected world-wide. Jeff also has an ever-increasing body of large-scale public art projects (…with lots of news to come in 2016!). His web-site is a magical place, full of stories made real. I am an emerging metal and clay artist whom Jeff is mentoring - particularly in the skills of chasing and repoussé - and these skills were to be at the core of makin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Artist talk on March 28, at North Mount Pleasant Art Centre, Calgary.

Excited to share I’ll be presenting an artist talk on March 28, 7pm, at North Mount Pleasant Art Centre, in Calgary. I started clay classes there in 1996, a year after I emigrated from England to Canada—it was that education and community that helped me develop the skills to set up my home studio. I’ll be diving into my process, doing some demos, and generally obsessing about all things clay (with a bit of metal sneaking in). Thank you to the Mount Pleasant Potters' Guild for the invitation--hope to see you there!
Post a Comment
Read more