Castle-in-the-air

Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: 20ct gold, carved blue-green opal, polished opal, chrysoprase, coral, 18ct white gold pin

Imagined castles, it seems to me, are always pictured from afar: we look towards them as an ideal, a ‘place of safety’, but we are seldom invited within their protective privilege. I recall a half-remembered school-days poem in which an organist built, from the accumulated but fugitive sounds of his improvisation, another invisible edifice, a ‘castle-in-the-air’.

height (without pin): 60mm width: 30mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 411.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 210-11

To build, and build monumentally, upon a cloud remains a compelling wish, and my finding a bubbling cumulus nugget of opal, which I could further shape to my needs, gave me a foundation for my labours. Here, the towers and turrets of gold, coral and chrysoprase were also inspired by remembered fragmented images of journeys through the landscapes of Europe, but more recently through the background of a maiolica bowl, [C97], held in the Wallace Collection. It was painted in Florence in the mid-16th century, depicting in the foreground a classical scene of selfdestruction, but also recording an ‘ideal’ of renaissance Tuscan landscape.