Dana (J288)

Dip-coating was something that I had played with already during my BA, but never found a real reason to use. During my time at the Royal College of Art I began to create large scale mixed media brooches and I needed to create a structure for the different, mostly textile, components to attach to. The structures drew the brooches together and I decided to create these pieces from plastic dip-coated metal. By using the dip-coating I had a versatile material that worked with a range of different brooches and it also gave me good scope for using colour. As I began to make the structures for the brooches I became surprised by how well they worked as pieces of jewellery in their own right and decided, for my MA exhibition, to exhibit some of the brooches that had textile and dip-coated elements together with the 'naked' versions, as pairs. The 'Dipped' pieces got attention from galleries and they took on a life of their own. Lesley Craze Gallery wanted me to exhibit purely 'Dipped' work for an exhibition at the gallery of six of the graduates from my year. For this exhibition, and subsequent inclusion at collect 2007, I created 'Lesley'. 'Dana' came about from a commission placed by a British Council curator, involved with the touring exhibition Alchemy - Contemporary Jewellery from Britain, where a selection of my work from graduation was included. The title of the final piece purchase by the Crafts Council 'Large Silhouette' hints at the visual language behind all the three pieces purchased. The outlines of the brooches comes from drawing the silhouettes of overlapping images of jewellery, the rounded shapes of beads, cameos and pins. These silhouettes combined with the original 'essential' forms to fit the different components together create the visual impact of these pieces.