Cerambus

Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: 20ct gold, green opal, found stag-beetle head (Lucanus cervus), abdomen case (Chrysochroa purpureiventris), 18ct white gold pin

height (without pin): 74.5mm width: 34.5mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 417.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 214

Much of my work deals with metamorphosis: indeed, Ovid has long been my ‘Desert Island’ book, seldom far from my reach. The story of the shepherd Cerambus, however, is not fully dealt with by Ovid, but is found in Pliny and in Liberalis. Like many of my chosen subjects he, too, was a musician – a virtuoso of the pan-pipes – and inventor of the Lyre, which of course is a clue to his fate in myth. The double-fault of ignoring good advice and of defaming the honour and reputation of nymphs led to his punishment: to be reduced to the existence of a Stag-beetle. The clue I mentioned earlier is surely his change into a creature whose characteristic antlered mandibles so resemble the ‘horns’ of his beloved lyre. The eponymous Cerambycidae is an extensive group of large insects and long-horn beetles, which ironically does not include the stag-beetle itself. That is Lucanus cervus, and it was a beautiful head of this genus, found and preserved by my gardening mother, which, many years later, has inspired and joined this not-so-little jewel. The ‘antlers’ (found only in the male) frame and echo the lyre, set with iridescent opal. They in turn are framed and protected by the upper metamorphosing limbs of the hapless Cerambus. His legs, as they change and double, are pushing through the iridescent abdomen of another beetlepart, a more traditional jewellery material: indeed, this fragment had survived from an unused 19th century source.

Even when his metamorphosis is complete, and Cerambus becomes wholly stag-beetle, he will not easily pass unnoticed upon the lapel...