The inspiration for jewelry design can come in many different areas. Nature, architecture, even the human body itself can offer ideas and forms for creating a piece of jewelry. Because the jewelry is usually an expression of the person wearing it, design is as varied as individual people.
The nature of wave forms and my visualization of the way they travel through water and air has inspired much of my work in recent years. Doodles and sketches in the margins of my notebooks end as a labyrinth that grows organically to eventually take over a the entire page.
Once these ideas are transferred to a sheet of metal and the lines are cut, the real fun begins in expanding these two dimensional ideas into three dimensional wearable forms. I call these sketch models because I make them in easily malleable copper and I use them to analyze the patterns and how they work in three dimensions. They aren’t yet ready to be worn, but in handling and manipulating them, I can plan the final piece of jewelry which will be created in precious metal. The following images illustrate a little bit of the process.
