Creating Wooden Jewelry. Sarah King
burr pin
Transferring images or text onto wood
Chapter 6: TOOLS AND MATERIALS
Cutting, hammering, and bending
Index of project difficulty and variations
Foreword
Within this book, I have aimed to reflect the scope of the use of wood in contemporary jewelry. It is written very much from a jeweler’s, rather than a wood specialist’s, point of view.
For beginners, there are some easier projects, and for those with jewelry experience, there are ways of adding to the scope of your work with small additions to the usual hand tools. Large topics—woodturning, working with willow, gilding, and laminating—are just touched upon All of these techniques could be explored and expanded into whole bodies of work. With a combination of imagination and exploration you can transform humble woods into striking pieces of jewelry.
Alongside the four studio jeweler profiles on page, page, page, and page, that show more examples of what can be achieved using wood, I urge everyone to research the list of wood jewelry makers’ websites on page, where you can find a wider range of wonderful work.
In my own practice, I work with wood, bio-resin, and precious metals to make sculptural, contemporary jewelry. Playing with spatial structures and sensual forms, they range from a relaxed, everyday collection to large transformative statement pieces. I am interested in the visual qualities of different materials and the technical possibilities they allow.
A selection of rings in wood, silver, and bio-resin.
I developed the Oak Strata Necklace on page, adding a bio-resin setting using the technique on page.
My early work in silver was influenced by the work of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Japanese aesthetics, and African jewelry. Searching for contrasting materials to use in my work with which I could control the shaping led to experimentation with wood and resins, and I became a pioneer of the use of bio-resin in jewelry. Bio-resin is an eco material of sophisticated chemistry, made from sunflower seed oil. It doesn’t have the yellow tinge of epoxy resin, which is important for my frosted clear pieces. I have replaced the exotic hardwoods I used in my early work, such as African blackwood, with woods such as ebonized oak and bog oak, as they are more local alternatives. I have often combined precious and non-precious materials such as wood and pearls, or silver with wood or bio-resin.
My solo Light Constructions exhibition held in Tokyo in 2003 began a new body of work in silver, white, and translucent bio-resin, and explored ideas of space and transparency, partly inspired by the artist Robert Ryman. The display was an installation creating a white world, with the pieces lit to accentuate their shadows. The jewelry was limited to rings and large bangles, often displayed in series of repeated shapes to focus on their sculptural and relative