Lately...

I've been looking through a lot of piles of old jewelry throughout my house.
The problem is, the majority of it clumps up in large masses like so:

  

Earrings are an easy solution, you can pin them up to a piece of cloth and be done with it, but I wanted something more functional for all of these loose chains and baubles.

Initially I thought of those fancy jewelry racks, like so:

 You tend to find these throughout millions of little fashion boutiques and gift stores, especially in the affluential neighborhood of Rockridge Oakland. However....this tight-budgeted art student prefers to avoid the content of these stores.

Next best option? I decided to solder together my own wire rack, with a more mobile form.

One of the key themes throughout any of my design work is a focus on form, curve, and play on angle.

A fantastic example of all three of these shows up in a hand, the most dexterous limb I can think of...or the most dexterous appendage? Regardless, these are a few photo/materials studies I conducted for this rack.

This is a photo of a copper piece by CCA senior Emily Choi. Her metal-arts gallery, Bemusement, displayed countless flowing forms, perfect for the appendages of a finger, so I attempted to use the same methods she did to create my hand.

Each copper wire had to be softened with fire (annealed) soldered to each other at specific joints (which were rings made of more copper wires). I have never gained a deeper appreciation for metal than when working with these small and fickle wires. I'm hoping materials and manufacturing will give me a taste of large scale welding/casting metal works for my future projects.

The layout under the sheets of copper are specific measurements for each finger.

So far I've only got separate fingers, but the pieces will be mounted to a wall piece and patina'd black, hopefully adding a little more organization to the mess of jewelry in my house.