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

Inspired by heritage

I have finished off one of my pieces for my Inspired by heritage residency project today. This bracelet is inspired by a number of objects from the museum collection of Whitby Museum. The patterns on both sides of the pieces are made using photo polymer plates. I have made the plates from photographs of objects in the museum collections.

On the underlying surface the patterns are created from photographs of spears made from wood and shark teeth. On the top or outer curve the patters are from pressed flowers preserved in the herbaria and not usually on display. The design of the form used to make the shapes is inspired by this beautiful shell necklace from the Pacific which is part of the ethnographic collections and currently on display in the Cook and Scoresby room of the museum. The very textured inner curve also has gold applied using the tradition technique of keum boo.

The piece has been oxidised and then highlights polished back up.

Preparatory design work

I have spent most of the day trying to adapt some of the photographs I had taken of the herbaria in Whitby museum into black and white images to make photopolymer plates from. I am quite pleased with the results but somehow working at the computer doesn't feel like I am being creative, even though it is all part of the design process. The pictures I took are of very delicate pressed flowers and are such beautiful graphic images.