RMIT Year 3, Semester 1, Silversmithing

Third year, first semester, Silversmithing: Scale

The objective was “to build a (one) or a series of larger object/s that engages with the notion of scale“.

My immediate thought was maps. I love maps. Especially contour maps.
And what are maps without scale, if not a representation of scale, yes?

The first page of my visual diary has the phrase: “flattening the earth“.
I find it so Interesting that I came to the idea so quickly.
I decided to make a three-layer representation of three contours of the head of the Murray River, in the Kosciusko National Park.

image not to be reproduced without permission

It’s A3 size; the layers are stainless steel(2500m), aluminium (2000m) and monel (1500m).

detail; image not to be reproduced without permission

Part of the project’s objectives was to make a connection with professional manufacturing processes – I used software (the name of which I cannot remember now – maybe something like Rhino?) to transfer my pencil contour maps into a file that I then forwarded to a laser cutters. So yes, the metal is laser cut … the metal sheet is so large, the process would have been very unlikely to have been cut by hand.

detail; image not to be reproduced without permission

In retrospect I don’t like how I secured these layers together; I improved the technique on a future project (to be written about soon).

… last post in this series: RMIT Year 3, Semester 1, Jewellery #5 …
… see more projects from RMIT Year 3 here …