Major necklace

Almost a year ago, I told you about an art collaboration that I did. Along witht that, I made some jewellery pieces incorporating quilted and embroidered panels in silver frames that I call my “Portholes on Immunity”. A series of four brooches, a pendant and a large 5 panel necklace, these mostly (but not entirely) are an homage to different cell types of the immune system. When I was thinking about making this series, I was reminded of various sci-fi films where you see people shrunk into miniature, along with their little submarine, journeying through the blood. So, these are how I imagine cells would look from the porthole window on a teeny tiny vessel in the blood.

Sterling silver frames the embroidered panels. The panels are little quilts with a base of oakshott cotton, using trapunto to emphasize some areas of the panel, and quilted using mainly embroidery techniques.

Left - Right: monocyte/macrophage, T cell, extravasation in blood vessels, B cell, granulocyte

Legend: quilt = 3 layer sandwich secured with stitching; Trapunto = a technique where you use added batting to highlight or give further dimension in quilting; oakshott cotton= fabric that has different colour threads in the warp and weft.

Interested in knowing more? Drop me a line, and let’s talk!

Something’s Still Cooking

I started last week telling you about a new project I was working on. I’ve made a bit of progress on it, and I’m still working on custom work I can’t really show yet, so I thought I’d share a bit more about this project with you.

These guys have progressed a little - I’ve cleaned them up and done a preliminary polish on them - you can see that they’re slightly domed much better now. Normally I’d add a backplate so I could stuff some colourful felt in those cutouts, but not this time! They’re going to have colour, but I’m going to use glass enamel instead! Haven’t quite decided what colours, but the biggest one will definitely be blue!

Make it stand out

So, I’ve made a start on the second metal elements I’m going to use - these will eventually be some of what I call my “L units”, inspired by lymphocytes, the “smart cells” of the immune system. When they’re in their nascent or naive state, lymphocytes are almost all nucleus with very little cytoplasm. So, I like to texture the surface of the discs before I dome them, and then attach them to a backplate. For this project, I won’t use all the units here, but I like to make extras so I can do other things with them (economies of scale!). I also decided that I wanted to use several different sizes, to go along with the variation in size I used for the “M” units.

Have I piqued your interest yet? Watch this space to see how things progress further!

New Rings are almost here!

Stacking Pearl Rings

I’m a bit obsessed with stacking rings - I think it relates to my love of all things Wendy Ramshaw (I’ve written about here before, you can follow the link to find out more about this iconic British woman goldsmith). This is my latest iteration of elegant stacking rings in sterling silver - with pearl. You can see some of these in person at the Craft Ontario Shop, but I’ve been working on some new ones that are coming to Jewel Envy soon!

In the spirit of waste not, want not, I use the cutouts from my M cells to form the pearl cups on the rings, so I like to think of them as my “nuclei rings” :). It’s a little secret story that you don’t know about unless you know about it! Yes, it makes my little geeky science heart happy! And each one is different from the next one!

I made a thing-- with a friend!

I was sad to miss the Living Room Show and Sale (I ended up having the dreaded Covid and couldn’t attend).  My friend and colleague Carolina and I unveiled an art collaboration that weekend that we have been working on for a number of months, and I’m sharing a bit about it here .

I first met Carolina over a year ago, and one of the things that I noticed about her work, and our conversations was an interest in networks and I thought, hey!  immunology is all about networks.  I'd been wanting to do a collaboration for a while. Carolina’s sensibilities appealed to me, and I really admire what she does with thread.  A lot of my work is based on the systems, cells and concepts of the immune system, and with the pandemic, it seemed rather timely to work out some ideas about the pandemic through a nice collaborative project.  So we did. The final result came out of conversations, and some experimentation with some ideas about some new jewellery work I wanted to undertake.  So, I present to you ImmUnity.  I hope that if you haven't seen it in person yet, at some point you will be able to!

My contributions explore three different elements: some of the major player cells of the immune system,  how some processes within the immune system work, and some explorations of the way in which people behaved during the pandemic in various situations, and how that relates to our perceptions of public health in general. Overall, we are all interconnected, whether we wish to be or not, despite our differences.

Carolina created crocheted cellular shapes that representf the concept of herd immunity from an intuitive approach. We're constantly in contact with invisible-to-the-eye organisms and our bodies work relentlessly to neutralise them, to keep us healthy. The dynamics of cell populations in the body mirrors what happens at a large scale in human populations. Each unit neutralises the pathogen and with the knowledge of this process, works towards protecting the community whether they are made of cells or humans.
 
Binding the shapes into a cohesive whole simultaneously shows the strength and the fragility of coming together.

I feel tremendously privileged to have been able to work with Carolina on this project, and it really fed something creative in me this year, as well as helping to process some of my thoughts and feelings about what happened with the pandemic over the last few years.

I made the fabric discs using different quilting and embroidery techniques, and it needs to be seen in person to really appreciate the 3-dimensional nature of the panels and the crocheted elements!

Macrophage/monocyte infected with fluorescent bacteria, B cells and their antibodies (which can be secreted from the cell, T cells with their unique receptors, Blood cells(Left bottom, left top, right top, right bottom).  The brooches are 5cm in diameter.

In parallel with the art collaboration, I had started working on a new series of work, which I am calling the Portholes on Immunity.  They follow a similar theme, in that they are all about cells and systems in the immune system, but in a smaller, wearable format.  I've started with four brooches.  They're 5 cm in diameter, with sterling silver frames and a handmade brooch back, with quilted, embroidered, and trapunto'd aspects (trapunto is a quilting technique where you stuff extra layers of batting in small areas to create a more raised effect-- it's quite fun!). I used plain oakshott cotton for the base, quite deliberately. Shot cottons are formed of two colours- 1 in the warp, and 1 in the weft, giving them a characteristic sheen, and appearing, sometimes quite startlingly, different colours depending on how the light hits them.  This really is congruous for me with the way that the immune system has many different facets, and you get different results depending on the situation.

New SciArt Necklace

As I’ve said before, I like to challenge myself to make a new major piece at least once a year. This year’s piece is entitled In the Blood, and it appeared for the first time as part of my offereings for the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair in July. It incorporates some of the elements that I have been using, in a new way, and on a bit of a larger scale. My thoughts were about blood circulation and the movement of cells through the body via the vessel “highway”, particularly red blood cells and the prominent role of macrophages in the landscape of immunology research at the moment.

An early stage of construction

I love green tourmaline, and the colour green in general, and it’s been a while since I used any cabochon gemstones (flat bottom, usually no facets) recently, so when I came across these little beauties, I decided green it was!

The final piece: an off-shiny finish on sterling silver, with the central hand-cut hollow form filled with green needled felt and two green tourmaline cabochons.

I’ve used a bit of artistic licence here, the tourmaline set dishes are meant to represent red bloods cells, but of course, human red blood cells don’t have nuclei (although , fun fact, chicken red blood cells are nucleated!).

some sense of the scale, modeled by my lovely colleague Alexis!

A closer look at the central pendant

I was really pleased with how it turned out. Of course, I’ve already started thinking about my next large piece—I think it’s going to involve a LOT of hammering, and I’m thinking bangle……so, I should get on that!

If you love this piece as much as I do, just pop me a message to find out more. Also, if you have any questions related to immunology, I’m always up for a chat!