After our usual feedback session about the previous week’s homework, the series of five rings, we were straight into inquiry through making. Estela had us return to the material that we conducted numerous experiments weeks earlier. I returned to steel signs my grandparents had printed. Our inspiration for making (under a very limited time) were words that embodied our homework ring iterations. For me, the word given to my series was “shapeless”. My challenge was to make a ring that was inspired by the idea of shapeless, whilst I kept the ring series in mind.
Despite our very short making time, I took a moment to look up the definition to get some inspiration. Shapeless: having no definite shape. That did not inspire any ideas. But what was the actual definition of shape, I could draw one, but could I put words to it? Shape (as a noun): the external form, contours, or outline of someone or something. As time ticked on I decided to come at it from a different angle.
In class “shapeless” object
I played with the idea that a force came onto the material and moved it into a shape. Originally, it was just a flat surface barely three dimensional with it only being a couple of millimetres thick. To hark back to the original ring series I used circular cuts in the sheet of metal. I was so focused on the time I had to make, I broke many, many saw blades in the process, but I also missed a large part of the brief. The aim was that the object was meant to be a ring! After class it would mean heading back to the drawing board.
In class object remake in its flat state.
In class object remake in its shaped form.
For our homework, we were asked to make iterations of the ring in different materials (for me it will be remade to the human scale). As “shapeless” felt like such an abstract concept (almost everything has a shape) I decided to lean into the more conceptual side making, leaving the literal interpretation behind. Firstly, I remade the metal piece into a ring, scaling it down, and refined it a little more. Whilst making it I was pondering about what a “shapeless ring” could look like. The first question was shapeless compared to what? For me I leant into the idea that “this is shapeless, this is not”. There was a comparison involved. I could do an action that would either make the ring into a more obvious shape, or I could do an action that would make the shape less obvious. Now we were getting somewhere!
The “before” and “after” of the Shapeless Rings activations. Materials: steel signs (yellow objects), paper, flour, ice, string.
Through the series in each iteration I tried to push the idea further until I ended with a pile of flour and a puddle of water. Not the usual materials in jewellery making. What began as a material exploration evolved into thinking what a jewellery is. Some questions included: Is it jewellery if it is in a ring-form, but not wearable or that the form had a limited time as a ring before it began to be unwearable? What does a ring have to look like? How long does it need to last? As played with the blurry line of what is and is not jewellery. I came away with more questions than answers.
Below are some stills from the videos that I took of the process of the objects being activated into a ring shape, or loosing its ring shape.
