Recycled Experiments

I've been quiet lately, partly due to real life being rather busy and partly due to some stuff I've been wrestling with. Mostly the question of value - in this society, anything fancy and intricate is almost immediately viewed as more valuable than stark, simple lines and plain design. As my designs tend towards clean lines and simple aesthetics, I'm still sorting things out; that's another post in itself though.

In the meantime, I have, thanks to my wonderful father, obtained two saws - one with really fine blades for cutting plastic, and another ordinary one for metal. I've been experimenting with the fine blades on the clear CDs one finds as placeholders, since I'm trying to make at least a portion of my work from recycled materials of a sort.

The results are as follows:


Recycled Pendant: Black Sharpie, red permanent ink, recycled CD hand-cut into shape, recycled paper.



Modern Sunset: Recycled CD hand-cut into shapes, permanent ink, rhodium-plated chain.




For the recycled pendant, the pattern marks were made at the back of the shape by scraping needle files in various wave-like patterns. The inks take better that way, I've found, since the surface is rougher. The black Sharpie was smeared over the patterns before it dried out completely. I backed the entire thing with some paper leftover from a project, which had some blue ink printing on it, just so it would have more colour and allow the patterns to be more visible.

Modern Sunset was basically just cut and sanded into shape, using coarse sandpaper to make random marks on the underside. Then I hand-tinted the lot with permanent ink. It's a fairly simple design but quite labour intensive, due to sawing, sanding, drying times for inks and matte spray, and also for the Mod Podge I used to glue everything together.

All this is basically in preparation for a Bigger Project that I've been working on for a good friend. I think they turned out all right, as practice pieces go.

As to what artistic merit they have in comparison with more intricate wireweaving and wirework...I don't know. I'm still working it out, though I suspect that many people where I live now would go, 'Not worth charging for.'