Project Overview
These were the first experimental pieces I made after leaving uni, the first time I had full control. They became an intuitive group, one that emerged as a strong group on its own.
These four forms do not describe a single body in a single state. They describe what happens when pressure starts to change behaviour. One opens. One reaches. One braces. One loses control. Mutation Quartet is about what a form becomes when it has to adapt, defend itself, or give way. The rings read like small bodily fictions, each one holding a different response to stress, intrusion and survival.
They are still structurally rings. Each keeps a finger opening, a relationship to the hand, the scale and expectation of something wearable. But the jewellery has been infected by another logic, and rather than decoration growing on a ring, the ring itself appears to have mutated. As the surfaces mineralise and bloom, the objects begin to read as relics: excavated rather than manufactured, things you ask what happened to before you notice they were meant to be worn. The category is still recognisable, but unstable, a ring caught in the act of becoming an artefact.
Mutation Quartet : Artefacts in Transition
Material: Electroformed copper with hand-painted mica patina
Technique: Forms built with Ferris wax, lacquer wax, hot glue, embedded beads and wire; completed through mould-making, electroforming and hand painting
Size: Various (approx. 3.8–7.9 cm high × 5.2–6.3 cm wide)
Description: What if jewellery could mutate like flesh? Mutation Quartet stages four behavioural states, Entryform, Climber, Guardian and Sprawl, each caught between adaptation and loss of control. These forms do not just hover between body and artefact, they test the boundary itself, turning threshold, intrusion, defence and overgrowth into sculptural identity. The texture carries the evidence of what the body has been through, and the enlarged scale pulls each piece out of conventional jewellery and closer to specimen or relic. Together the quartet reads less like four separate rings than a single sequence of transformation.
Entryform: First Breach
A threshold form where mutation first finds purchase. Entryform reads as the beginning of alteration: an opening thickening into structure, vulnerable but already active. It does not simply receive change, it lets it in, making breach the first condition of growth.
Sprawl: Overrun
A form at the point where expansion outruns control. Sprawl pushes outward past balance and containment, letting clustered growth overtake the structure until spread becomes the dominant logic. It does not defend or negotiate. It consumes space and keeps going.
Climber: Invasive Reach
A form built through attachment, creep and upward insistence. Climber advances by gripping the surface and using structure against itself, turning ornament into a route of ascent. It feels opportunistic and persistent, as though mutation has learned how to move by clinging.
Written Project Companion
Forged in Pandemonium is a companion text on the four pieces that started Mutation Quartet, expanding on what it actually took to make work with nobody else’s opinion in the room: wax, heat, scavenged texture, and no one marking it. This is not a graduate showcase. It is what full control actually looks like.
Guardian: Held Under Pressure
Size: Approx. 7 cm high × 6.3 cm wide
A weight-bearing structure forged in resistance. Guardian holds internal pressure and restraint in the same body, balanced but visibly straining. Its looped form reads like adornment hardened into armour, a tactile defence bracing for impact and refusing collapse.
Bloomed Crown: Guardian from Above
Seen from above, the strain gathers at the crown, where fungal clusters bloom across blistered surfaces and patina settles into lesions, scars and crusts. The growth does not soften the form, it records the strain of holding. What looks ornamental is really pressure made visible, hardened into structure and still resisting release.