Bird skeleton in glass dome

I recently made a new piece of anatomical/curiosity art. This is a bird skeleton made entirely of silver, housed in a glass dome with a mahogany base. I have to say I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out. My work at university was based on skeletons, but I was working in steel. It's very different to work with - the joining especially. The steel skeletons were mostly spot welded, with some gas welding. When I left university and had to work without the glorious workshops, I realised I had to work out new ways of making things. The problem with making complex things out of silver is that unless you're very, very careful when you heat the metal, you risk re-melting the joins you've just done and undoing all your painstaking work. I think the number of skeletons I'd made while at university helped, though, because I had an idea of what order I had to do certain things in. Clearly all the time I've spent fiddling around with little bits of wire and scratching my head while looking at drawings has helped!

I think my next anatomical project is going to be a little more difficult, possibly based on a horse. Bird skeletons are my comfort zone, in a way. I started my skeleton making with them, and whenever I have to work out new ways of doing something, it's to them that I return. So I'm going to force myself out of my comfort zone and do something that may go horribly wrong - which is why I think my experiments are going to be in copper. It's heartbreaking melting something which you've spent hours on, but melting something out of a material which has a relatively high intrinsic value is just a little more galling. I'm looking forward to the challenge, though!

An explanation of some of my recent work

I think skeletons are beautiful. I like bones for many reasons and a large part of that is because they are the most lasting part of a creature. I find it fascinating that some bones have lasted for millions of years as fossils and that so much can be understood about a creature from what has happened to its bones. I like skulls especially. They're so elegant, with such graceful lines. For the last few years I've been spending a lot of my spare time drawing skeletons from photographs, in museums and from the small collection I have. Part of this interest is linked in with my love of cabinets of curiosities. Museums grew out of these collections, and it's usually the museums which have been less tampered with that I find more interesting. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a cornucopia of strange and wonderful things that a reasonably eccentric man collected. I want my house to be like that, a goldmine of unlikely things gathered together. Some of my cirrent jewellery relfects that. I know people don't necessarily want a huge museum cabinet of oddities, but they might want to show their love of unusual things, like skeletons, with what they wear. So I'm providing a way of collecting things that's a bit more portable.