Silver Pieces

During my final year at Stanford, I took ME298: Silversmithing. The class focuses on developing fine art skills and aesthetic design sense through crafting silver artwork. Most pieces in the class are completed through hand-carving of wax that are then investment cast through a lost-wax process, while a few were created using piercing metal sheets with a jeweler’s saw.

I completed a number of projects in the class over the 10 week long quarter. Most of my pieces sought to leverage the beautifully intricate nature of lost-wax casting in order to create sweeping organic forms. Investment casting is not subject to geometry constraints like other casting methods are, making it a perfect medium for expressing complex shapes.

I took this class during the time that quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic passed its one-year anniversary. With so much time spent outside of my typical lab spaces where I could work, I had felt frustrated and creatively stifled. Silversmithing offered me a chance to work with my hands once again, and challenged me to create beauty even with very simple tools. I found the experience to be meditative thanks to the patient dedication required to painstakingly file small artwork, as well as a wonderful exercise in developing soft design sense.

This piece began its life as a flat piece of sheet metal. Desiring to create something with dimensionality despite its humble origins, I plotted out the final shape onto the original sheet, and bent the metal to achieve the form that I wanted.

This piece expressed my frustrations with the nature of the ongoing pandemic. The arms of the ring reach out in an embrace, but never quite touch, instead circling around each other and creating a sense of tension.

Our landlord doesn’t allow us to own pets, so I crafted this small dinosaur friend as a substitute for a real one.

This ring was made as a gift for my mother. There’s a saying in Mandarin that a mother’s blood flows through her children, and this ring was meant to capture the spirit of a heartbeat. As a result of quarantine, I have not seen in my parents in over a year, but I wanted to use this piece to communicate that despite the distance, we remained together.