Memento for the plant collector's wife

I have at last got a photograph of this big necklace 'Memento for the Plant Collector's wife'. It is one of my pieces for my residency at Whitby museum and is inspired by the collections of herbaria. The herbaria are very beautiful and fragile collections of Victorian pressed plants and flowers. Earlier in the year I spent an afternoon with the Curator of this collection and she showed me a selection of the plants and allowed me to photograph them. I then converted some of the images into black and white and have used them to inspire various pieces of work since then. This is by far the largest.

To create this necklace I printed out a selection of the images in black and white; stuck the print outs onto sheet silver and sawed around them. I then constructed a chain to link them together. I then spent quite a bit of time polishing the whole thing but didn't like the very flat polished surface so went back over it to produce a scratched finish