My latest project..

Well this 'project' started a few years ago when I made the first of these guys.
The family is slowly growing, as you might imagine it takes a while!

Over my life time, I am 43, the cycle of making paintings has been of 7 years of high production and 7 years of low production. A tutor actually mentioned the same for him many years ago, and it has turned out to be the case for me. The switch between the cycles gets punctuated by some change or event in my life.

Currently I am in year 5 of a lean period of making my own paintings. I do continue to paint for my work, although it is usually a bit of a different story, it is creative however, maybe that's a good thing or a bad thing. A bit of both.

So my wire weaving projects have been great to keep some semblance of productivity that I don't beat myself up for not producing. The inspiration it has imparted has been as if the 7 year period of high production had started.

While there is a slow period in my actual job, I have been sitting down spending time in growing the family in the hope of making enough of them to present on a wall somewhere.

Some of you may recognise them as New Zealand tiki designs, if not, this is one of my favourite catalogues of some old Hei-tiki. https://viggorlijah.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/kalimantan-book-1v6.pdf

Included here is a group photo of the family, 2 in progress. The eyes are ruby, the noses and tongues are New Zealand jade (Pounamu) and the wires are copper and sterling silver. The biggest one there is 300mm in length and weighs 330grams. They take me between 50 and 70 hours to make, there is about 30m of fine wire and 12 meters of under wire in the top left one, which was the first one I made.

These are still in a process of being refined, their presentation is still to be decided, they work fine as is on a wall, but I have also hung them on a backing of native timbers or a cobble of uncut Pounamu. Who knows I may even end up making others into more practical things like lampshades?