Cape Town born and bred, Lindsay Wills attended high school at Springfield convent and finished in 2005. Throughout high school she has always shown a passion for art. Her passion for jewelry begun and developed in 2006, when she did a part time course at Ruth Prowse. That was when she decided to make career out her passion and applied for a full-time course. She is currently a 3rd year student at Cape Peninsula University of Technology studying jewelry design and manufacture.
She has always enjoyed art and design, and during her time at Cape Peninsula University of Technology she got to explore and develop her own style of design. She does not follow a specific design philosophy. However she believes that form, function and proportion is very important to make a design wearable as well as aesthetically pleasing.
Her personal designs have a strong architectural theme. Living in Cape Town, surrounded by many different types of architecture she draws in many different types of architecture from Cape Dutch, Cape Malay to the new developments that were built for the World Cup Soccer 2010. She not only sticks to local architecture but also is inspired by many different architects worldwide. She likes structural lines with a twist of flair. She likes to manipulate structure by playing with the falling of light and shadow to make the structures more interesting. She likes to use a body of images that inspire her and extract structures, objects and patterns out of the images to add and relate to jewelry. She likes to use opposites in her jewelry, structural verses organic, even if subtle, as it brings in another facet of design into the jewelry. She believes that, although the jewelry she designs is very architectural and structural looking, it must still be chic, elegant, attractive and beautiful.
She demonstrates this beautifully in this pendant. It is bold and geometric, but has a femininity about it. These are three of the pieces she manufactured bassed on her Architecture inspired theme for her third year.
Her influences are jewelers such as Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Allesandro Mendini and Paola Portoghesi. These jewellers also use Architecture as there inspiration.
Lindsay Wills aims to become a well known jeweller and designer in South Africa, that not only produces art jewellery, but also very wearable every day pieces that are unique. Through her jewellery she would like to inspire others to take pride in there architectural heritage. She aspires to manufacture timeless pieces that would one day become part of her clients heritage and would past down to the following generations.
This ring box, she made in 2010, is a perfect example of how timeless her designs are. This is not only a beautifull design, but it is also well constructed.
To achieve her goals, marketing would have to play a very big role. Lindsay plans to market herself through blogging, social networking such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. She would like to exhibit a body of work once a year collaborating with other artists and jewelry designers. She is also planning on having a stall at Design Indaba 2012, collaborating with another jewelry designer.
She likes her jewelry to be dominantly precious metal, with other materials complimenting the designs. These materials consist African Blackwood, Purple Heart, Perspex, resin and enamel. These material would be used to complement the metal, and add dimention to her collections. In the future she would like to venture into more exciting materials such as material and incorporate objects such as coins, plastic toys; sand and random found objects that look like it could make a beautiful piece of jewelry.
She has covered a range of techniques from repousse to casting in her diploma from CPUT. She likes the feeling of jewelry being handmade and precious. Most of her work involves piercing, bending of metal, fitting of parts and soldering. She likes to use textures such as a rough sandpaper, matt look-by using platinum paper but doesn’t like the look of sandblasting. She strives for neatness in her work. These are some examples of techniques that she used in the past.
Lindsay Wills is a determined and hardworking student and I’m certain that she would maintain this excellent work ethic throughout her carreer. I am certain that she will be very successful and have a long lived carreer in the jewelry design industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment