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Elegant Sculptural Rings
Take your ring making skills and designs to new heights. In this workshop participants will fabricate a completely unique, dimensional, cage-like ring with surface ornamentation of fused, sterling, wire granulation. The ring project’s concept lends itself to both organic and geometric design styles. These rings can then be further embellished in numerous ways on the inside or outside of the structures using techniques such as keum boo, stone setting, or pigmented resins. Students must have beginning jewelry skills and know how to solder with a torch.
Meet the instructor
Victoria Lansford works across multiple artistic media and is best described as a “one woman, big city, symphony orchestra.” Lansford has spent over 40 years working in the visual, literary, and performing arts to paint with fire, forge with words, and choreograph with color, line, and texture. Her award winning and genre busting art and fine craft combines centuries old techniques with cutting edge technology to create artwork that ranges in scale from wearable to hangable to architectural. Her painstakingly intricate art is made from precious metals, gemstones, ink, paint, skins, paper, hammers, punches, pliers, gravers, brushes, pencils, pens, or quills and takes many forms including art jewelry, craft objects, miniature paintings, calligraphic artist books, and metal screens. All of her designs revolve around the interplay of negative and positive space, the origins of the universe, and mythological archetypes to bring forth external displays of feminine power.
Lansford’s art has has been widely exhibited in galleries, museums, and publications, including the Lark 500 book series, Metalsmith and Jewelry Artist magazines, Repousse and Chasing (Brynmorgen Press), and on Home and Garden Television. She has created a world-wide renaissance for many, old world, fine metal techniques through her sold out workshops, videos, books, articles, and apps.
Lansford’s most recent large-scale commissions were for one of the world’s largest, bespoke, superyachts: a floor to ceiling, etched copper screen and Eastern repousse double doors, both depicting oceanic scenes. She won a 2019 Independent Publishers Award for Best Design and a 2020 e-Lit award for her ground breaking, animated ebook Giving Voice (Spiral Publications) with introduction by best-selling author of the Griffin and Sabine trilogies Nick Bantock.
Lansford lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband Chris, son Skyler, and two Shelties Boudica and Elizabeth
Materials & Tools
There is a $60 materials fee for this workshop that is payable upon registration. The materials kit includes sterling silver sheet and wire, as well as saw blades, and various flex shaft attachments necessary for finishing projects.
If any student would like to incorporate Keum Boo or Stone Setting into their proejcts, they should consider bringing the following:
- 24k keum boo foil
- 4-6 mm round cabochon and fine silver bezel wire (Note: If you choose to incorporate a stone, it will save time if you make the bezel before class. The bezel wire should be fus ed closed or soldered with hard solder. It should not have a shelf or back, just the bezel. If you need to wait and do this step in class, that’s fine.
Metalwerx has these tools available for sharing, but students are welcome to bring their own if they have them:
- Flat, small round, and chain nose pliers
- Delrin flat pliers
- Curved nylon forming pliers
- metal ruler
- scriber
- course, med, and high shine 7/8” silicon knife edge wheels and screw top
- mandrels for the flex shaft
- Mask and safety goggle for using the flex shaft