Aluminum

History

In 1891, a Mrs. DeJones debuted a fabulous piece of living jewelry. She strapped a diamond to the back of a live beetle and trained it to fly around her neck, tracing the shape of a necklace. At least, that was the story in Entomological News[1]. This tidbit, snipped from some anonymous daily newspaper, might be best taken with a grain of salt. Even if it wasn’t true, it was certainly on trend In 1863

The Victorians tend to be remembered for doing things with enthusiasm and style, and their fondness for wearing entomological and ornithological specimens was no exception. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century: 'The explosion of such adornment in middle-class life belied an increasing disconnection from nature brought about by the industrial revolution… Providing an opportunity for women to reconnect with nature'.[2]

Women would embellish their dresses with beetle carcasses and colorful feathers; hats were fashionably arranged with entire birds stuffed and poised amidst their natural foliage, while goldsmiths tended to make use of smaller birds to add the finishing touches. With the opening of natural history museums on either side of the North Atlantic, women's journals of the day encouraged women to skin and mount their own creations, while established goldsmiths and jewelers manufactured bespoke items.[3]

The fashion was the reflection of an ongoing Victorian obsession with natural history. As urban Victorians grew more and more detached from nature, they tried to reconstruct the wilderness in their homes: cultivating ferns under crystal domes, raising frogs in glass vivaria, and trimming their hats with piles of moss and bird’s nests. Taxidermy was considered a delightful domestic hobby. Victorian ladies learned to gut dead animals, douse their corpses with arsenic, and arrange them in lifelike poses for the amusement of visitors. In his 1884 guide Practical Taxidermy, Montagu Browne writes:

Society demands that objects of natural history should not be all relegated to the forgotten shelves of dusty museums, but live as “things of beauty and joys forever.” Hence the new alliance between the goldsmith and the taxidermist, resulting in a thousand ingenious combinations of nature and art. It was fashionable to have brooches made of hummingbird heads, beetles hanging from each ear, owl’s claws, tipped with silver, serving as coat-clasps. [4]

original from National museum collection

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brooch

Designed by: Unknown

Material: Hummingbird, ruby

Size 5 x 3,8 cm

Year: 2008

Photo credit: Nationalmuseum

This brooch is a outstanding example of a taxidermized hummingbird brooch from England, made in the second half of the 1900 century. The hummingbird in itself hold a lot of jewelry qualities. It has a jewelry scale with fine level of details that remind me of the piece of jewelry. The hummingbird has a lot of colorful feathers that give it a that extra sparkle.

Hummingbird jewelry does not have as long and as varied history as other styles of jewelry such as butterfly jewelry, since hummingbirds only live in the western hemisphere and Europeans were only introduced to these magical birds since explorers and settlers came to the Americas. Hummingbirds were only popularized in the mid nineteenth century when Objects de' art were being produced from imported hummingbird skins and artists and naturalists began making art and lithographs of the many hummingbird species.

Another interesting thing about hummingbird jewelry is that most styles are very realistic in design, unlike other jewelry styles where many pieces are representational. Most of our hummingbird jewelry are beautiful cloisonné enamel styles which have solutions of glass enamel hand applied on a silver or silver-plated hummingbird which is then fired to a lustrous, permanent colored design.[5] 

 re-designed brOOCH

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RE-DESIGN

The redesign of this eccentric pieces is not made of feathers and beaks, instead it takes its inspiration for the bones of the hummingbird. Their bones are hollow, but how do hollow bones really help birds fly? Contrary to popular belief, it's not because it makes them lighter. It's because they need so much oxygen to fly that their lungs actually extend into their bones.

Thin, hollow bones are more fragile, so they'd need to be made of much denser material to keep from breaking all the time. That density also helps with flying, and as bone density increases, so do bone stiffness and strength.

This notion has inspired this design. As the first step, CAD drawing of the geometrical shape of the original brooch was created. The polygon shapes were converted in the meshes and saved. This base mesh shapes were altered in MeshLab by creating a “Voronoi” mesh. This generated a mesh that had a perforated surface similar to the structure of the hummingbird’s bone. The mesh shapes were later 3d-printed in a steel that was oxidized.

process picture

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3d-model of redesign

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