PDE student
D&T: Silvia Weidenbach
Jewellery Art Design
Silvia Weidenbach is an artist, silversmith, and jewellery maker. She makes the perfect combination of digital modelling and handcrafting and makes good use of a wide variety of gemstones and 3D printer material to create gorgeous and intricate jewellery artworks. During the lecture, I found out that she really prefers to try new things and builds virtual prototypes by using new technology, like CAD software. After that, she told us that she often applies 3D printing to make complex shapes to proceed with the gem cutting and setting process and then does the further polishing.
As a designer, Silvia is so creative with enormous curiosity about materials and manufacturing, which makes jewelries designed by her is full of symmetry, bright colours, and exaggerated structures. And this reminds me of one of my favourite silver jewellery brands: WERKSTATT: MÜNCHEN, which is a German brand. All jewelries are handmade by the designer in Munich, Germany. The craftsman engraves words, marks, scars or patterns on the transfer tool and then stamps these on silver or gold materials. Some of the products, like bracelets, look extremely unique and wild because the designer uses a mix of different links and chains for hammering. Silversmiths of this brand use polished hammers to shape the products and all the procedures mentioned before can only be made by hand rather than with a machine.
From my perspective, Silvia and Werkstatt adopt two distinct ways of jewellery making: one by digitally simulating the setting of jewellery, and the other by hammering and handcrafting the material with a hammer. Though the method of jewellery making differs a lot, they both create fantastic works of art and focus on the thinking process of materials and production methods. Just as James Kingman said, ‘Don't stare at a blank page for too long, be bold, and make the first incisive stroke. The rest will come naturally.