Bronze earrings with a marquise shaped panel, hand carved with tribal patterns
£42.00
Product Code: 32162f
Shiny yellow bronze earrings in a long drop marquise shape and hand carved with a geometric tribal design. The marquise bronze shapes hang from hammered scroll bronze earwires and swing freely in wear, with the facets of the carving catching the light.
The inspiration for these earrings came when watching the appraisal of some old tribal art on an antiques programme on TV. I suddenly had the urge to carve some repeating geometric patterns. I just worked directly onto the pieces without planning the design, hoping that they'd come out rather random (something I find tricky for some reason, my mind always wants more control), but muscle memory or something ensured that the two earrings are almost the same as each other.
The patterns were hand carved into dry metal clay before the pieces are fired at very high temperature in a kiln. The bronze used for the carved shapes is called Sunny Bronze, which suits the colour perfectly.
The earrings hang 50mm (2") overall from the top of the hand crafted scroll earwires and are around 10mm (0.4") at their widest. Please note, due to the design of these earwires, they're in a heavier gauge of wire than I usually use for earwires.
What is metal clay?
Metal clay (now available in base metals like copper, bronze, iron, steel and brass and precious metals like silver and even gold) is a clay like medium made from tiny particles of metal, combined with an organic binder and made into a pliable clay or paste with water. After working with the clay-like medium to form the article, it is thoroughly dried to remove all of the water, the shape is further refined and then fired at very high temperature in a kiln to both burn off the binders and to cause the metal particles to fuse together as solid metal - this firing takes a full day to complete - at which time I tend to work with crossed fingers, hoping that the kiln gods are smiling on me that day and it fires successfully. Not everything does.
