Underwater Love

This set of pendants, named Underwater Love, was created for the Art Clay Silver Accessories Contest 2015, organised by Aida Chemical Industries and Art Clay Japan. I am very grateful that this piece won a special award in the contest. An overview of all the winners can be found on the Art Clay Japan website.

The theme for this year's contest was 'My Favorite'. Of course I choose the underwaterworld. I love freediving and I love to be in the sea or the ocean. :)

My goal was to create a set of pendants that, when you hold them together, show 1 underwater scenery, but that can be worn separately. By using the underwater theme in my art work I hope to create awareness for the beauty and fragility of our oceans and reefs that are slowly being destroyed by overfishing, plastic and garbage dumped in our oceans, global warming, …

I choose to combine Art Clay Silver with different materials. In the 1st pendant I used a small glass cabochon that I melted myself with a torch. In the 2nd pendant I used a little shell that I made with Art Clay gold. The 3rd pendant has a cubic zirconia. I used a bezel because this color of zirconia could not be fired in place. The last pendant has only Art Clay Silver. The bails are made using Art Clay Syringe around a straw. The texture on the pendants is made with silver paste and a paint brush. All pendants are oxidised with liver of sulphur. I also tried to play with the character of the pendants. Some of them are rather sober while some of them show a lot of movement.

 

As you can see on one of the pictures, there were supposed to be 5 panels instead of 4. To be honest, I completely messed up one panel by overfiring gold paste on it. It was the evening before the deadline and I did not have the time neither the energy to fix it again.

Even though throught my eyes the set was not complete anymore, I decided to send in the 4 remaining panels anyway, but I never expected to win an award. Imagine my surprise when our distributor called me to tell the happy news. 

So important lesson learned: Never give up on a piece. Even if you only see the 'mistakes', other people can still see the beauty of it! ;)