Dovetail Jewellery

Dovetail Jewellery is an exploration into taking an object out of usual context and representing it within an extraordinary context.
The making process is rooted in a self-developed philosophy inherent within Barrett Ratcliffe’s Art of Utopia Folio. A navigation of conscious and subconscious creative endeavour echoing the Zen Art of Wabi-Sabi.
With this work Barrett Ratcliffe explodes the concept of fabricating dovetail joints and pieces back together the component parts in an alternative format arriving at dovetail joints never before seen and in the form of a proposed piece of jewellery as example. The work is both controlled to a perfect finish whilst control has been relinquished where the material process of lost wax casting takes on its own unique and imperfect form. In this sense there is an apparent interplay between two poles of aesthetic value. In this there are undertones in that there may be questioning as to what we feel we are visually, even morally willing to accept as beautiful, right, wrong, out of place and so forth.
The work is finished to presentation in accompanying Spalted Beech and sun bleached cotton lined box with laser engraved trademark. Completing an inter play between hand crafted and machined processes, imperfection and perfection.