Clearly Shimmering

So, this week we recover from Christmas, get gifts returned and exchanged (if we are brave enough to stand in those long customer service lines!), and prepare for the New Year. It’s quite a shift from the family-focused holidays the rest of the season. New Year’s eve is usually for our friends more than our family and the parties or dinners out or drinks at the house are what’s on our mind about now. What to wear?! I know that becomes an overriding concern for many, so I thought I’d look for some blingy-ness that could help dress up any basic outfit. With the right jewelry, you can skip buying a new dress and just have everyone transfixed by your adornment, second only to your vivacious self, of course.

I was looking for shimmery and sparkling when I came across this lovely resin dominant bracelet. Hélène JeanClaude is a polymer artists who is big on transparency, but I am unsure just how much of this is polymer, if any. Not that it matters too terribly. The colors and reflection she is getting off the fabric texture buried in the resin and the shimmer of the colors make it quite eye-catching. You can see how, even with a lot of shadow around it, the colors and resin reflect and magnify any light that hits it. The flat space and angles of the resin help with this effect as well as distorting the pattern beneath, which adds to the variation of the blended and bleeding colors.

Hélène has been experimenting with this technique for the last two years, creating pendants and earrings with a more obvious use of polymer. If you could get your hands on either or both, that with the bracelet would be all you’d need to dress up a little black dress or even a shirt-and-jeans outfit. I know there isn’t enough time to get a hold of one of Hélène’s pieces, but maybe these can inspire some new pieces of your own you can whip up in the studio this week; bury shimmering clay treated with mica powders or foil leaf under translucent clay, liquid polymer, or resin if you have that on hand. There’s still time!

For further shimmery and translucent inspiration, you can find her other pieces using this technique and her explorations with translucent clay on her Flickr photostream and here on her blog.

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