For those who are already familiar with my earlier work, I have collected some of my latest creations here. I am still fascinated by optical effects, and I found that jewelry provides a wonderful platform for expressing somewhat bizzare ideas. As before each of my pieces comes with an short explanation or a little story.
The «Antenna» is a long-standing jewelry motif of mine. It consists of a little concave mirror with a colored plexiglas rod in the center. The mirror produces a distorted reflection of the plexiglas rod that changes as you change the viewing angle. Learn more under Antenne (--> press Back Button to return). The Australian artist Lincoln Austin has created a 60 cm square installation with an array of 9 x 9 large Antennas ( 5.5 cm dia. each) (see link below). Based on Austins work I have constructed a ring with not just one Antenna (as previously) but with 7 mini Antennas (12 mm dia. each) in a hexagonal array. The axes oft the concave mirrors deviate by 20º from each other such that to an observer each antenna exhibits a different reflection.
Pendant Silver 925, partly sulphide blackened, glass eyes, cat wiskers, diameter 30 mm, length c. 15 cm
Cats shed some of their long wiskers from time to time. My daughter Maja has collected those of her cat for several years. I have mounted about 150 of them in a brush-like fashion in a cone-shaped silver socket. That piece is suspended from a silver sphere fitted with two cat glass eyes testifying the origin of the white wiskers.
Mimicking its gigantic siblings in the universe no light can escape from this handy Black Hole. But locked inside the silver globe my black hole is absolutely harmless. The strongly light-absorbing effect is due to «Black 3.0» lining the inside of the sphere, the blackest and mattest black paint on the market.
Object Silver 925, black resin Developed in collaboration with Eric Meyer (3D print)
Insects have so-called compound eyes that consist of a large number (c. 100 to 10’000) of light-sensitive modules (so-called ommatidia). Each one of them looks in a slightly different direction and in this way provides the insect with a mosaic-like image of the environment. In Eye Glow 2 a 3D-printed calotte of black resin (the compound eye) with a hexagonal pattern of openings (the ommatidia) simulates an insect eye. The calotte vaults a silver concave mirror that reflects the light entering through the openings back through those very openings. Since the axes of the openings diverge, just a small group of them appear bright, a group that wanders across the eye as Eye Glow 2 is turned. The interaction between the ommatidia and their mirror images produces some sort of a twinkle effect. The phenomenon can be observed in bright daylight as well as under crepuscular conditions. Eye Glow 2 is one of two different interpretations of the eye glow phenomenon in night-active insects. Learn more under Eye Glow . (--> press Back Button to return)
A blackened silver dome, that is perforated by bore-holes in a hexagonal pattern, vaults a concave silver mirror. The mirror images of the bore-holes are visible through those very bore-holes producing an optical interference effect. This leads to an intriguing blinking display when the ring is rotated. This motif is an alternative interpretation of Eye Glow 2 (--> press Back Button to return).
Object Opercula (lids) of eucalypt flowers, styrofoam ball, gold acrylic, black emulsion paint, diameter 4 cm
When we visited Australia some years ago, I have collected a bagful of the cone-shaped opercula (lids) of the flowers of an eucalipt tree (probably Eucalyptus bancrofti) after a storm. Years later, I was playing around with them glueing them on a little styrofoam ball, eventually covering it completely with around 200 of the little cones. This was a slow, quite contemplative process I enjoyed greatly. To avoid too close a resemblence of the product with the Corona virus (raging at that time) I painted it with bright gold paint: you might regard it as an little sun. The pointed cones vary somewhat in shape which softens the somewhat threatening shape oft the object. Later, I modified my approach by turning the cones around, producing little cone-shaped dips instead of spikes, and combining the shiny gold with a deeply dark flat black.
The air vents in the housing of my external hard disk have always puzzled me. Viewed from close-by they form an unremarkable array of slits of different lengths. However, when viewed from a distance they seem to form a number of elegant arcades: The eye (or rather the brain) connects the separate openings to a higher-order shape. You can easily verify this phenomenon by looking at the differently sized photos of the pendant. To produce the piece, I have molded the slit pattern of the hard disk housing with Fimo and used the mold as a template for a sand cast in silver.
Ring Silver 925, yellow plexiglass, diameter 30 mm
Restlessly the wild lion (the yellow plexiglass ball) moves around in his shiny cage and in doing so produces an ever changing specular reflection. Thanks to the firm grid the lion cannot escape, and, thus, wearing this ring is completely safe.
A red plexiglass bead orbits the widely open silvery arena, and the little thorn in the center alone prevents it from escaping. The movement oft the bead produces a constantly changing specular reflection.
As quick as a ball of mercury the silver bead moves around in its lens-shaped housing, and the just a bit too small diameter of the round window alone prevents it from escaping.
