Hey guise! This is the second part of the write up for the final project of Mnemosyne’s Scent, which I did with the freshest salmon in the bowl, Sihui!!

The first part, done by Sihui, can be found here, with the analysis of the final piece and it’s properties plus the connection to the previous part of the projects:

Project III: Mnemosyne’s Scent

[ RESEARCH ]

Sihui and I were particularly intrigued by the concept of folding and bending of planar forms that took place in origami and thus wanted to incorporate such forms into our piece. We found some inspiration on Pinterest, many of which were modern forms of origami as well as paper sculptures.

We thought about incorporating paper bending and folding into our final necklace, but we also wanted to have a metallic element in our necklace, so we also visited the websites of popular jewellery stores to look for trends in planar jewellery! The choker was a particularly apt form of using planar forms.

 

[ PROCESS ]

The first piece that we made out of the entire necklace was the origami strap! It was made by folding alternating triangles, and we made a few of such strips before attaching them together:

However, as we intended for the strap to be the dominant piece in the necklace, we felt that having the necklace as a choker would look too small when we would start adding other elements in the necklace. Thus, we started to expand into the idea of attaching another origami strap to make a longer necklace. Here are some of the design ideas that we came up with for both the choker and long necklace:

We felt that the wire that connected the straps would be the most effective as it would interact well with the strap through piercing, but we also had the shape and amount of wire to think about. Using too much wire could potentially overpower the strap, whereas using too little would make it almost unnoticeable. Furthermore, we still had to think about how we could make a plane using the wire.

Eventually, we settled on a design similar to the one above, but with two parallel lengths of straight gold wire attached across.

However, funny enough, when we tried to place the necklace over Sihui’s head to get it around her neck, it got stuck around her head and we looked at it and realised it worked better, aesthetically, as a headpiece rather than a necklace!!

However, even after settling that, we had the final element of our headpiece we still had to think about!! We went to our Pinterest board to search for inspiration for the final element.

We decided to emulate the almost piercing-like structure of the model here, and used a piece of gold wire as the middle strip connecting all the parts together. Piercing strips of gold paper on the wire, we then overlapped and curved the paper to create a series of small planes, and then added blue ribbon as another form of plane that complemented the gold-blue colour scheme of our headpiece.

With that, our piece was done!!!

As you can see there were quite a number of challenges in our process, including lack of clarity. Furthermore, we didn’t have a lot of time and so we couldn’t focus on making two pieces or pieces that were large scale in nature. 🙁 But luckily our research process and experimentation helped us to find our footing and we managed to come up with a good final piece!

Here’s some alternative configurations of the piece that we did with comments from Cheryl. By removing a component of the necklace and turning that into a bracelet, we created a necklace and bracelet set.

Big BIG shoutout to Sihui for being such a kawaii bumblebee model and for being able to work with my horrible schedule haha <333

See yall next post!!!

• Niki