Experiments dividing up surfaces, laser cutting the panels and linking - creates textiles with an interesting look and feel.
next step - investigating these types of assemblages as generative systems….
I lasercut some 2mm acrylic triangles to link together to create an icosahedron, but then quickly started finding other interesting ways to link the pieces up…
Experimenting with the rapid prototyping machines ability to print linked objects all in one.
Images below of the installations in Tiffany&Co’s windows as part of the ‘Street Lights’ project in conjunction with Vogue magazine and Royal College of Art alumni.
The theme for my installations was optical effects, placing the jewellery in chambers which reflected and enhanced their beauty, which rotated slowly casting out colored light and patterned shadows.
More images on my Flickr……
New processing sketches…
Decided is was a good idea to get to grips with Processing and make a simple shape grammar generator. These are some of the results from these rules:
My work featured as part of LabCraft in local London newspaper Times http://bit.ly/iUZDdu
My work is featured in Frame magazine this month as part of an article on the LabCraft exhibition. And above all very pleased to be described with the adjective ‘young creative’!
My large neckpiece is featured in an article about craftsmanship in the Walpole yearbook - an organisation that promotes the British luxury industry.
When I began my research a few years ago in my BDes Jewellery degree I was surprised to find the complex ideas and connotations associated with ‘craft’, shifting with the different contexts in which it appears. I teased out from the broad ranging literature on the subject what rang true with me and the way I had been conducting my practice - that craft is a set of principles, a way of working or approach to the production of artefacts, as craft writer Glen Adamson also purports.
What I loved about making (rather than ‘designing’?)) was the application of tools and their associated processes. I had been swayed into jewellery design by a visit to the workshop, excited by the equipment and the animation of the place. The first year of the jewellery course we simply learned and practiced the basic techniques of metalworking – soldering, hammering, rolling etc. I embraced these and thought incessantly about how I could use them, manipulate them and combine the in new ways to create objects.
This is what I love doing - learning about techniques and tools and applying them. It is also what I admire in other designer’s work – the beautiful and elegant application of these to solve problems and create intriguing artefacts.
It was natural to me to use the computer as part of my work as a jeweller. A computer in the house from an early age and a first degree in meant their presence was cemented in my daily life. The characterisation of the computer as a kind of toolbox was and important for me and probably galvanised by Malcolm McCullough’s book Abstracting Craft. This idea is what allowed me to link the way I worked in the workshop and the way I worked with computers.
As I finished my degree and heading to the Royal College of Art ideas had started to formulate in my mind. For my final degree work at Duncan of Jordanstone I had developed jewellery from repeating patterns abstracted from drawings of insects. These patterns had involved a lot of repetitive work on Adobe Illustrator – moving a shape around at a repeating angle and trying out different combinations of shapes and angles until I arrived at something I liked. I knew from previous experience that this was something that could be automated by a computer program. Around the same time researching around the internet I stumbled upon examples of generative art – first on the blog Generator X. I enjoyed not only the aesthetics of much of the work it exhibited but more importantly the way it had been made – computer programming as a process of generating the visual.
The rational behind the work towards the end of my MA was looking at processes and their manipulation to create jewellery and objects. I was doing this is in parallel in the analogue but also digital realm, growing copper sulphate crystals and casting their forms but also trying to mimic such processes digitally. McCullough’s idea is that each programmed process of a computer is a tool to operate on various symbolic media. At RCA I began to use programmes such as Jenn 3D (to generate polytopes) as my tools to create the forms I wanted to reference in nature.
It is also generally accepted that to make your own tool is a right of passage for the crafts person. To me this signified the route to true originality – and original tool for original application. I started out using other peoples generative tools – but my ultimate goal became to making my own tools, something I began to do and is my aim for the future. To do this you have to be skilled (skill is another of the cornerstones of craft) and have a deep understanding of what you are trying to model in a programme and also the language or platform you are using.
Initially I thought using generative techniques would speed up my searches for pleasing compositions of the patterns I was making and take away the repetitive and time consuming work of producing them myself. However what was more exciting as I started to use them was the capacity to be surprised by some of the outcomes; despite setting up the rules sometime things were produced that I could not have fathomed.
I like pushing the tools to extremes, exploring constraints and affordances as the crafts person would, and so finding the ‘tipping points’ where things flipped into different entities with different characters. I also found joy in the mistakes I made; happy accidents and surprises were again what I liked about craft in the material world. Oversights in a code sometimes gave serendipitous results that were pleasing
Finally digital fabrication technology completed the reasons for using generative approaches. It allowed all these things to become tangible and material. The abstract and symbolic structures were brought back into the material world; the world of craft. To then exist or to undergo further traditional analogue processes. This technology also carried with it its own set of processes, with affordances and constraints ready to be explored and harnessed.
To me generative design practices go hand in hand with craft – the application of processes and tools to fuel creativity. In my opinion this is (one of the ways) craft is going to endure and even burgeon in design in the digital age.
The Crafts Council Lab Craft exhibition has been getting an excellent response all round, including coverage on the Guardian website and also here, here, and here.
It is about to start is next leg at Plymouth College of Art, so please visit if you are nearby.