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.

Flora and photo polymer plates

I have been experimenting with some of the photographs I have taken at Whitby Museum recently and trying to make them into photo polymer plates for using to texture art clay silver. This is all preparatory work for the jewellery I will be making as part of my Inspired by Heritage residency at the museum. I have used a variety of different types and thicknesses of plates but eventually decided that I like the thin plates with a steel backing. These seem to produce the delicate and still crisp image I am looking for. It has taken me quite a few days work though and lots of pieces that are not quite what I was looking for. Here are some of my photos converted to black and white together with some of the finished plates. There are quite a few steps to the process including printing high density images on ohp film so that they can be used as negatives when exposing the sensitive plates.