Beauty & The Beast
Recently I decided to submit my Minotaur rings into a local art exhibition at Seventh Circle gallery which is the first time I’ve ever displayed or put my creations out there alongside other works. The brief called to local creatives and/or those with a fondness for the brutal city of Birmingham to connect and interpret the coexistence of both beauty and beast within this landscape.
This called to me; refinement from industrial grit underpins my creative process at Second Spring so I decided to refine a previous design that I felt would fit perfectly; the Minotaur Ring.
Inspired by the bull-headed minotaur beast that guarded Dante’s seventh circle of hell, the bull is a local symbol of Birmingham’s resilience and more subtly a nod to my own personal strength formed through struggles in my own life journey.
I begin each ring intuitively hand shaping beeswax (from local hives), a reminder that amidst a cityscape as brutal as Brum’s, another resilient creature coexists within pockets of nature, the humble bee. We’d be ruined without them.
I use the wax forms to sand cast a metal version of the piece, which when raw from the mould, is rugged and reminiscent of freshly unearthed treasure. Hours of refinement by hand later reveals a wearable piece of art that contrasts gnarly organic textures with smooth highly polished surfaces, reflecting the existence of beauty and the beast within the city as well as ourselves.
Displayed within a glass dome as a soft nod to Disney’s reimagined version of the famous fairytale.
(Did you know that in Villeneuve’s version of the tale, Beauty’s sisters request jewellery as gifts from their father while Beauty requests a simple rose. She later uses an enchanted ring that enables her to wake up in her own home after months of being held captive in the Beast’s palace).
The live showing of this exhibition has now finished, but if you’d like to check out the exhibition brief and brochure of art works, visit Seventh Circle’s website here.