It amazes me how interconnected art is with life. How one seemingly insignificant event will leap forth and demand a specific creation process in one’s art. For me, one such event is reading- and I love to read.
When I read, the words don’t stay on the page, they leap about and spin themselves into a full-technicolor reality that totally consumes my entire attention. Even after I set the book down, I can clearly remember the way the sounds and images of the story surrounded me with vivid intensity. For extremely well crafted stories, I will have ‘flashbacks’ of colorful imagery and characters for months after reading the original story.
I also have a tendency to amuse my fidgets with a story while I’m working on something repetitive or time-intensive.
All of which combines to explain my musings on the nature of space and time travel while I was creating these earrings. Not explained you say? Well, as I sculpted the wrinkles of sterling silver with my torch, I was thinking about the Tesseract method of space travel in Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time which involves folding space and time to cross unimaginable distances.
So the physical wrinkles of the reticulated silver explain the space portion, but the time? That’s entirely due to the process of creating the reticulation which I talked about in my previous article on reticulating metals. Time practically disappears when creating reticulated metals- you look up, and hours have passed. If that’s not folded time, I don’t know what is!