I made a brooch recently for an exhibition. It was a 3 week project based on the work of Martin Boyce. He is a Glasgow based artist who creates installations which contain many different concepts at once. They have been criticised as being too ambiguous. His work looks at creating a kind of stage set atmosphere. It is not real and the spectator is always aware of this, but it has been custom built to reflect reality. It contains various juxtapositions such as those between the natural and the man made, geometric and natural, cold and hard, human and not human, dark and light, heavy and light. His also incorporates his love of the romanticism of our urban environment.
The brooch is supposed to also reflect all these things. It is based on industrial fans and the idea that the breath required to make the fans work adds the natural and human element to the otherwise man made and human-less piece. There is a balance of dark and light through the oxidisation and also between weight through the different thickness' of silver sheet used to construct the piece. The 2 dimensional quality of the brooch is supposed to be met less than subtly with the sudden 3 dimensions of the protruding fans to create the sense of symbolic representation of a real thing, and a sense of the object being a stage set, something that represents something real but is clearly a mere pretence.
Making the brooch itself gave me a little trouble. The protruding tree parts may have been a little too little to be soldered onto such a big sheet, as one has since fallen off. (the bottom one) Despite this, I have sold it for £170 Woo It would be nice to here your thoughts or any questions regarding the piece or it's development process.
