Category: Art

Lifting Jewellery!

11/11/2016

Love to lift?

I love to lift. The heavier, the better.

You'll know that feeling. Sweating, shaking, having almost been beaten by the iron, you walk away victorious. You fought your own weakness and excuses. You showed up and did the work. No matter the numbers on the plates that you lifted, you won.

You know you're stronger than yesterday.

I made this piece about that feeling.

Buy it here.

Because no matter your level of competition, you are always lifting against yourself. It's about what's going on on the inside.

The blacksmith shapes hot metal with hammers on an anvil. I use these tools in my jewellery work to shape my metal, and it is like what we do with our bodies and minds in the gym. Hard work, heat and a certain amount of pain are the tools we use to shape our bodies into the vehicles we want to live in.

This pendant is based on a barbell weight plate. 3D printed in stainless steel, it features the words "INNER STRENGTH" and a barbell on the front, and my insignia of an anvil and two jewellers' hammers on the back. The cord is durable rubber, and the adjustable length toggle and crimps are sterling silver.

As it's costly and time consuming to get these made, and I need to wait for the stainless steel to ship from the US, at this stage I have a very limited amount of Inner Strength necklaces on hand. The best way to get them is to pre-order from my Etsy shop. If you get your order in before the 20th of November I will be able to get it you in time for Christmas.

Making jewellery is my home-based business. Besides helping to support my family, it's how I fund the costs that come with competing at a high level in a minority sport that receives little or no government funding. By purchasing this necklace you are helping me chase my physical limits on the international stage.

Comments

More Wellington (cos I love it)

7/7/2015

Comments

But That Was Ages Ago!

Yeah it totally was. I'm a sloooooow writer but I still wanted to write about it, and this blog post about the Bad As 6 Women's Weightlifting Competition in Wellington was getting way too long. Some more Wellington coolness below.

Quoil Gallery

From Quoil's website, some of their works in the current exhibition 'Matariki' See my pieces? See? See? See? (Shameless self-promotion cos I'm stoked to have these up there, and it's my blog.)

I want to give a shout out to the best Contemporary Jewellery Gallery in Wellington - Quoil Gallery, run by the Aotearoa Jewellery legend Phillipa Gee. On the Friday afternoon on our drifting around Central Wellington I hauled Mel and Veronica in to the Gallery to see where my ambitions lie. They were patient with the little fits of excitement I had with seeing every display box and opening every drawer, full of imaginative pieces of tricks and dreams that percolate out of artist jeweller's studios around New Zealand. I was chuffed to see some of my stone necklaces up in one of the main display boxes.

The Dowse

Loved catching up with my cuz Prue at the Dowse in Lower Hutt on the Sunday after the Bad As 6. Mel, her and I had a hot lemon and ginger drink at the cafe and then immersed ourselves in art. Bronwynne Cornish has a large collection of good natured ceramics on display in Mudlark. We puzzled out the huge folded cardboard Pou (marker post) contemporary Maori artist Reweti Arapere made called Rangimatua, and were humoured by the quirky, wistful works in Cut + Paste: The Practice of Collage.

'Scuse the over-filtering. Something about The Dowse made me feel all Instagrammy.

A figure in Bronwynne Cornish's Mudlark. Brought to you by the Dowse Art Museum and my iPhone.

I have always loved Neil Dawson's sculpture. It looks like what I see in my head.

The Dowse Art Museum is a hero institution to Contemporary Jewellers in New Zealand. The Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa has done their job by collecting and displaying contemporary jewellery, but The Dowse champions it. They have a significant collection of culturally prominent neckwear, much of which is currently on display in The Bold and the Beautiful exhibition.

I almost teared up seeing some of the classic pieces of modern New Zealand Jewellery. These objects are dramatic, engaging artworks by themselves, but have meaning in a much wider context than as art pieces in a museum.

Image guiltily pinched from the Dowse's website. I took some photos but they came out crap. You gotta go see this stuff for yourself.

If New Zealand Contemporary Jewellery was a coastline, these pieces would be the headlands. They jut out as landmarks, significant in the practice of the artists and as cultural markers. When I'm plodding along the beach of my own practice, head down, picking through the sand and pebbles, I look up and recognise this jewellery. I aspire to be as substantial as an artist as the makers of these pieces. Seeing their work gives me hope that I can.

The snuggly living room in our gorgeous little Airbnb homestay, home for three nights. With internet, of course, because we would suffer terribly without it.

CrossFit FRF

It was Queen's Birthday Holiday on the Monday, and we had to be at the airport 11am. CrossFit FRF (Functional Results Fitness) had a class at 9am and are close to the airport so Mel and I packed all our stuff and went. They've got a nice big gym with good facilities. Gerard and Jane were coaching that day. The workout was here on their whiteboard >>

I chose to half-arse the workout - I jogged the runs, swung the kettlebell calmly and my only real effort was doing all the pull up sets unbroken. In hindsight, I would have been better sitting on the mat and mobilising seeing as I was sick, but just couldn't bring myself to miss out. They are a friendly bunch of people with a wide range of fitness levels, but everybody (except me) was going hard out at a level suited for them.

Gerard took us through some stretching and the end of the workout. He was doing a downward-dog stretch with both feet and hands on the ground, and this random wee kid ran up and climbed up onto his back! It was super cute and proof that this is a relaxed, family-friendly environment. People told us afterwards that Gerard often watches the little kids at one end of the gym while parents do the Mums and Bubs classes, and that's why this wee guy thinks that Gerard is a climbing frame!

We took a photo with the CrossFit FRF crew, as CrossFitters do when they are travelling, and the very kind Kirsty (front row, second from right) gave us a ride to the airport on her way home.

Do you love Wellington too? What do you think I should do and see next time I'm there?

Comments

The Blacksmith and the Weightlifter - My New Logo

27/5/2015

Comments

It's a year and a half since I moved to Arrowtown and I still had not updated my business cards. I liked my old ones and still have plenty, but almost all my contacts have changed from the old cards. About time I changed them up.

A brooch I made on commission for a friend. The photo I took of it made a nice background for my old biz cards.

I sort of already have a logo. Must be about 12 years ago now I had Regal Castings jewellery supply company make me a hallmark stamp. For this I needed something unique, but it needed to be simple, so that it could be milled out of hard tool steel in tiny profile. I made this little design below out of my initials. I made the original using the Microsoft Paint program.

My initials are A.C.T. I put them together in this little design to make a hallmark stamp. On the stamp, it's in reverse to come out the right way around on the jewellery.

The inside of the ring is curved so doesn't take the whole ACT stamp. I've also marked it with my 925 stamp, which stands for sterling silver - 925 parts silver, 75 parts copper.

I reckoned I could do better than that logo now. Not me personally of course, I'm a jeweller, not a graphic designer.

I engaged Finnbar Glover, one of my many creative cousins, who recently graduated from Otago Polytech's Communications Design degree to do the job. He spent a bit of time reworking the ACT logo. That stamp cost me over $400 to have made so I'm not changing it in a hurry. The plan was to incorporate it into a new design, but when Finn showed me the cool ideas he had for the anvil logo, the ACT logo just distracted from the effect so it got turfed off and removed to the back of the business cards.

I had searched up a bunch of images online of the sort of look I was after to show Finn and tried my best to describe it. Finn listened hard and came back with some ideas showing exactly the sort of look I wanted. This one went through a few little changes but is very much like one of the initial designs. What a good listener.

The big heavy looking shape is an anvil. I wanted an anvil because it's relevant both to my arts practice and to my weightlifting.

I love metalwork, and the thing I love the best is forging. I learnt how to forge steel and iron in the sculpture department at Art School, using a coke-fired forge, an anvil, hammers and tongs. I love the beauty of the process, the fire, the rhythm, and the feel of shaping hard metal blow by blow. It's hot, heavy, dirty work and I would be overjoyed to do it all day.

For various reasons I ended up being a jeweller rather than a blacksmith. I still forge silver, using hammers and an anvil, but everything's a bit smaller and not quite so exciting. In the photo below is one of my anvils. It's a bit beaten up, but it serves my purposes well. My good friend and jewellery artist Brendon Jaine gave it to me.

One of my jewellery-sized anvils and the two hammers used in the logo, the ball-pein hammer and the watchmaker's hammer.

As for my strength training, my garage gym is already called "The Forge". The hot, heavy, dirty work of getting strong is like both being the blacksmith and being the metal in a forge. I hammer my body, rep by rep and week by week in all seasons, slowly getting into the shape I need to be to do what I want to do. This analogy has not escaped other people. CrossFit.com's tagline is "Forging Elite Fitness". Mine isn't the only gym that references the art of the blacksmith in it's name either.

One of the hammers crossing the anvil in the logo is a ball-pein hammer. It's a robust, all purpose hammer with one flat and one rounded face. It's used to bash stuff into shape in many fields of craftsmanship. The finer hammer will be recognised by jewellers as a watchmaker's hammer. They come in different sizes. Mine is actually quite big for this sort of hammer. The watchmaker's hammer is for precision work, such as riveting and forging delicate wee pieces of precious metal.

The line in between the words is a barbell, the primary tool of an Olympic Lifter, a CrossFitter and a Powerlifter. The barbell is a tool I use to forge this body to make it as strong as possible.

Here's the finished cards! It actually didn't take much (well not from me, Finn put in plenty of work) to get the logo right, but it wasn't ready for printing yet. Figuring out exactly what information I wanted, deciding on a font, and then balancing out the possibilities and the costs of what sort of printing on what sort of paper took a whole lot more mental energy.

I actually wanted silver foil printed onto black card, but this was going to be very expensive to print, if possible at all. Because of the nature of the silver foil, apparently cards can only be printed on one side if this technique is used. The metallic grey card is very 'me' though, and I'm happy with it.

On the bottom right of the back the card you can see the old A C T logo in slightly sleeker form than I made it in Paint back in the way back when. As this is still hallmarked on my jewellery I'm holding onto it and want it on my cards. You might notice, annact.com has ACT in it, and so does my Instagram handle, act_ion.

How To Get as Awesome a Logo as Mine

Finnbar Glover, the designer can be found at www.finnbar-glover-design.com. He can make you an awesome logo too.

To see and even have a go at some real blacksmithing yourself head on down to Dunedin to the Gasworks Forge.

You can catch Brendon Jaine, buy his wonderful glass jewellery, and have a good yarn at the Queenstown Markets every Saturday in downtown Queenstown.

If you love tools like hammers, get onto the Regal Castings website and have a drool. Just don't use your precision-crafted jeweller's tools to try to make big sculptures. you'll wreck them. I learnt that the hard way.

Comments

A Pendant for Heather

21/5/2015

Comments

Here is another of my progress photo sets from a special commission I made this last summer. You may have seen some of these photos on my Facebook page, but here they are in one lot, enjoy!

The client, Heather, has three sons whose names start with A, J and K. The brief was to incorporate their initials into a piece of jewellery in a similar style to other pendants I have made, using green stones. Heather had helpfully done some drawings herself so I had a good idea of what she wanted. This was one of my interpretations, getting there but not final form yet.

After a while we both settled on this design, with each letter clearly defined in silver strip. The extra metalwork takes more time and materials, and therefore cost a little more than other designs, but it's well worth it to get exactly what the client wants.

I only started taking photos at this stage in the metal construction. I was using great big chips of solder (bad jeweller) but this surface with the solder puddles will not be visible in the finished piece. Lots of solder in this instance saves the hassle of cooling, inspecting, finding gaps, resoldering etc. until there are no gaps in the solder seams.
It was pretty fiddly getting the letters just right. Teeny tiny faults in the quality of line or shape make the whole thing look awkward, so I took my time getting the shapes perfect.

The metal is all soldered well in place. Here the top surface has been sanded off flat to inspect for faults in the solder joints.

This photo is taken through my jeweller's loupe held right up to the lens of the camera on my iPhone. Here I'm rounding off the ends of the letters ever-so-carefully with the tip of a needle file.

The obsessive part of the process starts. I have a collection of tiny green stones, picked one-by-one out of sand. Here I'm figuring out where to put them in this pendant. The base layer is garnet sand from off the beach at Orepuki. It's mostly black but with some other colours and tiny little natural garnets.

I've poured in the resin and while it's still liquid, I use a saw blade (jeweller's size saw blade, of course) to poke around to release any bubbles and put back any stone or sand that have been disturbed by the resin pour.

After a few days sitting in the warm sunlight on the windowsill in my studio, the resin is set hard. I sand it off flat using wet and dry emery paper with a little water in reducing grades of grit.

Oh dear, a fault has shown up. Even though I had the metal perfect before the stones and resin went in, sanding off the top of the resin takes the metal down a bit further and sometimes irregularities are exposed, such as these. It's annoying, but I keep sanding until it disappears.
The surface is sanded down to 800-grit paper and then polished on the bench polisher. To see what that looks like, go here. (This page I have doesn't let me put videos right in posts yet.)

I have a collection of bigger green stones. Here I'm figuring out which one or ones to put in the gap.

I've chosen stones for the gap and a bigger one for the toggle. Here I'm drilling through a stone underwater, using a diamond drill in the handpiece of my flex-shaft, which is fixed into a drill press. The water is essential for cooling, lubrication and carrying away the ground-up stone.

Check out this amazing stone. It's naturally heart-shaped green argillite with fossil worm casts all through it. I *think* (please let me know if you know more than me) that is from the Permain Brook Street Terrane, laid down as sand and mud 250-280 million years ago. The lighter green streaks are from where ancient worms who had ingested lighter coloured mud pooped it out in the darker green mud before it was metamorphosed into rock.
Carving a hole and groove into an ancient, fossil-bearing stone initially felt sacrilegious. But I've decided that they are better being used in jewellery, even if it means altering them such as I have here. Fossil worm casts in argillite are actually quite common among the beach stones at Orepuki. I have a another couple of stones like this in my collection currently, and I have used a few more in jewellery. They are out in the wide world being loved and appreciated right now, rather than stowed away in a shoebox being too precious to use.

Plaiting the cord, at night, as usual.

Attaching the toggle stone and making a loop in the plaited cord using a technique called "whipping."

The finished pendant, photographed on some of the the concept drawings.

Heather, the client with her new jewellery. She told me she loves everything about it. I love my job. (Photo used with permission)

Comments

My Jewellery on TV! (sorta...)

21/4/2015

Comments

Steve and Amanda Nally own a pioneering craft brewery in Invercargill. I'm not so much of a beer person, but I like what I've tasted of theirs, and I can tell you that their cider is fantastic. And as a bonus it's only 0.5% sugar! Much less sweet than the lolly-water cider brewed by bigger companies and good drinking for athletes.
They have an extra special cider project going on right now, though: they're asking people to bring in their heritage apples for that special taste that old-fashioned apples make when fermented. In around six month's time they will have a limited edition 'Taste of Southland' cider. You can read more about the project on Invercargill Brewery's website.
Even better, Amanda and Steve are active supporters of local artists and craftspeople. In this clip last night that was on Three News, you can see a pendant I made proudly worn by Amanda. It's a one-off design that I made just for her some years ago, based around some paua pearls that Steve had found.

Paua Pearl Pendant: Natural paua pearls, sterling silver, resin and nylon cord.

You can see more one-off commissioned jewellery on my Commissions page, and contact me to talk about getting something special made for you.

Comments

<<Previous

Lifting Jewellery!

More Wellington (cos I love it)

But That Was Ages Ago!

Quoil Gallery

The Dowse

CrossFit FRF

The Blacksmith and the Weightlifter - My New Logo

How To Get as Awesome a Logo as Mine

A Pendant for Heather

My Jewellery on TV! (sorta...)

Author

Archives

Categories