100 HITS
Project mad in 2016, that investigates the effects of one action: the strike of a hammer.
100 HITS
This project was developed in 2016 during the 5th International symposium of artistic jewelry and sculpture in Bratislava, Slovakia.The residency was focused on metal and it was divided into big and small objects, sculpture or jewelry.
During my stay in Bratislava, I was influenced by the minimalist’s way of thinking. One can say that minimalism describes a movement in various forms of art and design, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism uses repetition of identical shapes and Geometric abstraction
As a maker, I wanted to react to the space that surrounded me, during this time I had access to a fully equipped metals workshop and a limited jewelry equipment. I was surrounded by tools of all different kinds, the were cluttered on the tables and they were hanging off the walls. Everywhere I looked there was a tool all different serving the diverse needs of production. A tool can be seen as an extension of the body that bridges a border between the maker and the material. A tool can allow the worker to touch a material with high temperature and even though there is a physical distance between the material and the worker the tool can translate the tactile experience.
The hammers hanging on the wall caught my attention, they all looked so similar and yet they all that their special purpose, to hit, forge or demolish. As a craft practitioner I wanted to explore the essence of one tool and action:
The strike of a hammer.
The workshops lend themselves towards metal production and it felt natural to use iron as my material for this project. I chose to work with a 70 x 70 x 1 mm stainless steel plate that had been laser cut. I chose to laser cut the material since it was important to me that I the pieces was identical to start out with. I wanted to see the impact that a hit with the hammer had on the pure metal. I started with one hit, next piece 2 hits next piece 3 hit and so on up to 10 hits. The next sequence was 10 hits, 20 hits 30 hits and so on up to 100 hits.
At 100 hits the metal got so thin that a hole started to appear in the middle of the square. I wanted to change the hammered metal square as little as possible in the process of turning them into pieces of jewelry. I therefor sawed out small squares on the sides that I bent up and I used them as the construction for the brooch back. The full series contains 20 brooches.