Estate

The knives have undertones of the bodily, of use, of everyday intimacy. They talk about violence and broken families. Estate becomes a reference to inheritance of property, possessions, heirlooms passed down through generations. Familiar and domestic, they ask to be used, but the blades bend and poison the food. Their heft belies a softness and vulnerability.

Cast, they become generations of themselves, reproduced with failings each time.

They sit as relics; fetishes of family life.

cast knife

Inheritance

Images of the piece on display for RCA Show 2012 (open until next Sunday -1st July) along with the etchings.

new work

Lead pieces which will be on display in the Interim Show. On from 12th-18th January.

Curses

I am making a series of brooches, un-wearable and cast in lead.

They are a group or part of a collection and they speak of Roman lead curses, lead votive pilgrim badges, war won (war worn) medals, souvenirs and mementoes. As amulets for modern living or literal burdens to be worn and carried about. I am thinking about invested objects and their verisimilitude.

Lead with its connotations of the industrial, the poisonous and toxic, and its weightiness; and brooches, too, with their history of being pretty, decorative and way of marking out the wearer

I am using traditional casting methods with cuttlefish bones and silicon whose transparent supple skin yields hard metal shapes.

The lead will be made precious with additions of pearls and coral; coral with its supposed ability to keep away the evil eye and its associations of ‘life blood’.

Blanket, cotton bandage, soft woollen fabric or silk might be attached. Silk for striped medal ribbons. I like the mixture of textures and there is already something soft about lead.