Jeanne's delightful panel of Victorian Reticules attracted many favourable comments from delegates to our conference last year at Keele. Here she writes about her -work and inspirations.

A few years ago I became enthusiastic about the potential for making art-work using the techniques of the enameller. My painting and drawing skills pushed me in the direction of creating panels in enamel on copper with figurative rather than abstract designs. I experimented with free-hand painting with various types of enamel. In particular I found that there was a lot of scope in the creative use of fire-scale in pictorial panels and found that some stunning effects can be made in that way, see Figure 1. (Treeline -10 x 8 inches, enamel on copper.)

Fig. 1

Later, I experimented with wire mesh. Copper and steel wire mesh is available in various forms; woven mesh, welded mesh and expanded metal, each with different properties. They can be folded, pleated and crimped to get different surface textures or stretched out-of-plane for three-dimensional work. When fully or partly coated with enamel one can get rich and varied effects, the potential seems endless. I combined different meshes with copper foils and single wires to assemble three-dimensional objects which were partly joined by the adhesion of enamel coatings.

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