Shards

As you may have seen on my website and instagram I have recently made a couple of small fragmentary shards. This feels like something of a new direction for me - exciting. Instead of engraving drawings into the wax I have engraved a shallow relief onto the surface of a piece that I carved to mimic a ceramic shard.

I wanted both shards to feel like they came from the same vessel, one pictures a mouse head and toes next to a bunch of grapes and the second shows a small mouse hand reaching out to grab a grape.

The initial inspiration for this was a shard of ceramic I found on my walk to the studio that I subsequently made a claw setting for. London is such an old city it isn’t unusual to come across old broken objects whether by the thames shoreline or unearthed elsewhere. This piece has been on my studio wall for a while and made me think about the time I spent on an Archeological dig in Uzbekistan.

I spent a month in the summer of 2022 in Bukhara, Uzbekistan on an archeological dig. I was tasked with drawings the most important finds to 1:1 scale. It was a painstaking experience trying to counter the parallax error of our two eyes to document the objects as accurately as possible before they were packed into storage. I loved looking at the fragments of objects that came out of the ground and imagining what they would have been a bigger part of, what they world might have been like when they were whole and how they broke and were buried.

The silver shards I’ve made hark back to this feeling of wonder - the wearer of the piece can imagine the world it might have come from.