To con­tinue with the theme from Thursday’s post, there are a cou­ple more Brits who seem to be blaz­ing new paths: Lynne Kirstin Mur­ray and Disa All­sopp. Both of the exam­ples I’ve selected from their col­lec­tions are rings. What I like most about them is their unex­pected shapes, tex­tures and vibrant color combinations.

Disa Allsopp’s jew­elry show­cases the organic nature of metal. By ham­mer­ing, bleach­ing and oxi­diz­ing, she draws out its organic beauty and inher­ent abil­ity to caress light in a fas­ci­nat­ing way, even after all that manip­u­la­tion. By her own admis­sion, Allsopp’s aes­thetic is influ­enced by Etr­uscan, Eqypt­ian and Medieval gold­smithing tech­niques. The ring illus­trated is a clear exam­ple of these influences.

Lynn Kirstin Mur­ray explores a new tech­nol­ogy called rapid-prototyping. To explain it quickly–and as I under­stand it (and if this expla­na­tion is miss­ing some­thing, some­one please cor­rect me)–CAD or Com­puter Aided Design works with rapid-prototyping which takes a vir­tual design and trans­forms it into cross sec­tions and then cre­ates each sep­a­rate cross sec­tion as a layer. The com­puter reads the data from the CAD draw­ing and builds the entire model in these lay­ers which will then be sol­dered together to make the final prod­uct. Murray’s spon­ta­neously hand-drawn inspi­ra­tions are given a dig­i­tal trans­la­tion and an entirely new lex­i­con is born. When you ana­lyze the ring below, note how the warm glow of the pearl and the sooty black­ness of the mount­ing have a ying-yang exchange that brings out the lyri­cal qual­ity in each element.