::blossom::
:: Blossom was made for Ana [fictional name]. It is a piece to be worn cradled in the cupped hand, made from wood, glass, silver and vintage postage stamps. The form and digital potential of the piece refer to Ana’s love of nature, precious relationships with her grandmothers, and connections to family and family land in Cyprus. It is made to act essentially as a connection to human relationships and to place, a feature resembling the status of much jewellery traditional or otherwise; a feature that the digital aspect of the piece may strengthen and extend.
The jewellery object, residing with Ana in the UK, is connected to a rain sensor, planted on Ana’s family land in Cyprus. At the heart of the jewellery piece is a structure holding vintage Cypriot postage stamps. The stamps date from the years when Ana’s grandmothers lived in Cyprus and have been sent on letters from Cyprus to the UK. Printed on the reverse of the stamps is the photograph Ana took of her icon. The authenticity of the stamps was of great importance as a physical connection to both geographies; objects that had actually travelled the digital journey proposed by the piece and as fragments of a form of communication used in the past.
The old Cypriot postage stamps begin closed like the petals of a flower inside the glass dome, attached to a mechanism, waiting to receive a signal sent initially from the rain sensor. Once the rain sensor had registered a predetermined quantity of rain in Cyprus, which may take months or even years a signal would be sent to the jewellery object and the mechanism would be activated; slowly opening the postage stamp petals like a flower blossoming. The piece sustains the flower metaphor further by blossoming only once. The role of nature in the digital interaction was highly significant to reflect Ana’s appreciation and value of nature and I hoped would give a feeling of an organic force within the piece rather than just man made and digital elements. Ana had described her attachments to her grandmothers as nourishing and I wanted to extend this idea into the piece; the jewellery is nourished by rainwater and blossoms in another geographic location because of rain fall on family land. It was also suggested to me that the piece could be powered by solar batteries, so the jewellery would be influenced by both rain and sun.
The object acts as a memory trigger through its form and materials to past relationships Ana has experienced and as a connection to a specific place as the events of nature in one geographical location influence the internal physical form of the jewellery object in another. Again the form and digital potential of the piece are sufficiently ambiguous to allow a personal interpretation and interaction for other people who see it.
The jewellery piece similar to Sometimes… involved a passive interaction and an ambiguity of function. The piece was about time, and emotional preciousness. It offers a way of viewing objects with digital capabilities in an atypical way, one that echoes and values the fleeting quality of many of our experiences and the lasting quality of many of our feelings for other people. It used digital technologies as a way to harness the ephemeral characteristics of a flower blossoming, rather than for the more common uses of digital technologies of repeatability and immediacy. The piece occurs only once and only after a considerable build up of rainfall over time. The digital connection to another place acts to contribute to a metaphor of feelings of closeness to another person and to another locality ::
