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Welcome to my blog. This is a place where I think out loud, show you what I’m up to in the studio, share impressions of inspiring events or everyday moments that moved me. Some entries are carefully curated essays, others are just a few thoughts, sometimes written in English and sometimes in German.
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Enamelling Workshop: A glimpse
When I hosted an enamelling workshop in my Berlin studio last month, I allowed outsiders an intimate glimpse into my creative enamelling practice for the first time.
Preparation: Each participant received all necessary copper and sterling silver parts to create their own Pearlcatcher pendant.
When I hosted an enamelling workshop in my Berlin studio last month, I allowed outsiders an intimate glimpse into my creative enamelling practice for the first time. Previous workshops were always at outside locations such as the University of Stellenbosch or Studio San W in Shanghai.
The workshop included demonstrations, ample time for experiments and trials, lunch, many stories, and the completion of a variation of my Pearlcatcher pendant design. The finished piece and all experiments were the participants’ to take home, of course.
I attempted to convey – apart from my own love for colour and an enthusiasm for playful experimentation – how I feel a sense of a physical space (the studio) and a process (the act of enamelling) merging, where the doing becomes a real space in time. It’s a capsule, an entity, a ritual even, a togetherness that is caught on that day between those exact hours in that exact human setup.
Fierce heat emanating from an open enamelling kiln.
I use a solid granite slab for the hot steel tripods coming out of the kiln to cool down.
Workshop setup in the studio’s front room.
We worked with prepared enamel powders - washed and sifted - as well as small glass ornaments, blobs, and splinters that can create fascinating speckled patterns as they melt into the enamel surface.
A participant working on her first outside layer in light forget-me-not blue.
A workshop participant setting her enamelled piece into its silver setting, with a large cream-coloured pearl caught inside.
A memory of this space will capture the mood in its entire complexity – the light on a grey January afternoon, the smell of roasted lemon-pepper brussel sprouts for lunch, the heat of the enamelling kiln, the texture of sand-like enamel powders, the subtle differences in colours, the stalling of time as it is swallowed by deep concentration and effort.
A glimpse of our studio kitchen almost ready for our communal lunch, which formed part of hosting the workshop.
A scattered display of different enamelling techniques, tools and a tea tray.
I am definitely planning on repeating this experience soon, so keep an eye out for news and dates on my calendar.
It’s winter. I cherish this white and noiseless time between the bustle of our Christmas season and the start of the new year. Since moving to Europe, it’s taken me a few years to learn to fully appreciate winter. Now, I know it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move here in the first place: I needed a real winter, I needed its pause and reflection, its going-underground, its gathering-of-forces, its quiet stripping away of the unnecessairy, its gestation for new creativity to emerge.