The Poison Project was a series of 3 pieces designed and manufactured for my last year TAFE project. Each year the class picks a topic that they all have to design to, and our year chose ‘Poison’.
The first thoughts that sprung to my mind was the typical things; spiders, snakes, poison ivy etc. I found these ideas to be cliched and boring, so I drew my inspiration from chemistry. Think Jekyll and Hyde, mad scientists, charts, chemical structures and glass vials.
Toxicity
This piece is called LD50 – The Toxicity Scale. The concept is that anything can be poisonous in large enough quantities, even water. The LD50 is measured as the amount of a substance, given all at once, which causes the death of 50% of a test group. Anything that has a toxicity of less than 100mg/kg tend to be called poisons.
The piece is two toned – the yellow gold framing the white (silver) section. The stones set in the piece graduate from light (topaz) to dark (sapphire).
The Peoples Poison
I wanted to incorporate the chemical structure of something into a piece of jewellery. The difficulty of this task was finding a structure that wasn’t too complex. I found the solution in the structure of ethanol (alcohol)*.
I used silver to represent the hydrogen atoms, as white is typically used as hydrogen in representations of chemical structures. The lone oxygen atom is represented in gold. The stones in this piece are black onyx and ruby.
*Pun intended.
Little Drop of Poison
Mercury! Its a poison. Maybe I can incorporate that, contained in glass vials held in a cage….. Ok, not the best idea. Mercury slowly vaporises at just 25°C.
But the concept idea (minus the mercury) is sound. Instead I used various substances to simulate different poisons. Not to worry, none of the contents are actually toxic.
The earrings are in silver, with glass vials filled with various (non-toxic) substances.
