Anita Van Doorn, 2014, Sweden

Saving for a rainy day

Silver engages my senses… Sight, touch, sound, smell, even taste, come alive through heat. Sometimes like a writhing animal, sometimes like a glinting star. With silver I can create material mystery, I can disguise it using oxidation and surface reduction, giving it color that you don’t normally associate with silver, and so you get caught up in the mystery, you look closer, you try to figure it out. It’s easy for me to get lost in the detail I can create, of rippling surfaces or forms that are as hard to grasp as reflections.

The jewelry I create in silver have their conceptual origins in an emotional connection to the ocean and water. An heirloom, a locket, is lost at sea and found many years later. What has the sea given and taken away?

Sterling’ silver, enamel