Two years ago in Colombia on my way back from Inírida to Bogotá I discovered some small palm braids that reminded me of shrunken placemats. I was enthusiastic about the filigree work and the wonderful coloring, saw them combined with silver in my mind’s eye and imagined them as large, colorful summer earrings.
Here they finally are: I love them all. They are beautiful, put you in a good mood and decorate without weighing too much.
Now all you need is a white button down shirt, jeans and strappy sandals and off you go into summer :-).
Yesterday I took pictures of Melissa for the first time. I am so pleased with the result of these beautiful photos and I am thrilled how good my jewelry looks on her. Every single piece looks just amazing.
About a year ago I bought the notebook “Steal like an Artist” by Austin Kleon. After having done some exercises, I put it in a shelf and completely forgot about it -contrary to the explicit use instructions of the author-, who says, that you should always carry it around and do the exercises regularly. While searching for new inspiration and approaches for my work as a goldsmith, the book suddenly fell into my hands again and I was very surprised to see the exercises I had already done and couldn’t remember at all.
“OK. I’ll try again,” I said to myself and started the next exercise! Cross out the words, until you have written a poem, was the instruction for this new exercise. “I can not do that!”, flashed through my head! And certainly not in English! Somehow I then hang onto the words and took different approaches and went several times mentally in different thematic directions.
At some point, a special combination of words prevailed, and it is hard to believe, at the end of the exercise there was left kind of a poem. This was completely surprising for me, because I had never written poems, except maybe once in school when I was a teenager. Something had happened by staring at the words, as if the words had suddenly come out of the context and made up their own story. I was so excited about this exercise that I decided to carry the notebook around with me from now on.
Austin Kleon, “Steal like an artist, Journal”
On this day I went full of energy to my workbench and tried out a technique that I had had in mind a long time, but I had repeatedly postponed. The “playing” with words helped me in other ways to solve my blockage.
Creation process of “folded”:
I’m working on a new series inspired by the aesthetics of folded paper. You can easily fold paper to create three-dimensionality. That’s exactly what I wanted to create in the following series, though you can not bend metal easily and it takes multiple, cautious steps to bend the metal. By sawing and filing with a triangular file, you prepare a sheet of metal for kinking. You have to do this with the utmost care, because if you saw a bit too low or you file beyond a certain angle, everything falls together …
