This week Majella Beck tells us what inspires her.For tengirls tencolours, she is exploring the colour RED.
Majella Beck is a jeweller, object designer and teacher based in Sydney.
She combines precious and non-precious materials and sees her work as a constant exploration and evaluation of what makes jewellery precious.
She currently teaches a variety of courses relating to contemporary jewellery and objects. Majella participates regularly in exhibitions and has work held in private collections.
What materials inspire you?
Working with metals is very challenging and inspirational to me.
I enjoy combining precious metals with everyday non-precious materials. For me a lot of enjoyment comes from working with a material I haven’t worked with before.
I have used felt for my first piece for our upcoming show. When I starting working with felt I was so excited about my new material and the felting techniques. Followed by a short-lived period of hating it. As I was learning more and more I enjoyed felting again and have developed a great respect for the craft of felting.
Experimenting and learning about a material is very delightful to me.
Silicone is next…
What is your favorite tool in the workshop? Why?
I really love filing. I find it very soothing and I enjoy the control it gives in fine-tuning your designs. In saying that I also really love my jewelers saw and I get a great pleasure of using hammers for all kind of purposes from shaping to texturing.
Where do you think your creativity comes from?
(eg family? background? have you always wanted to be an artist/designer?)
I have always been creative, curious and inventive using my mind and my hands. Originally born in East Germany, I was lucky to have limited toys. I spent a lot of time reading and making things…I always have been (and still am) a bit of a bowerbird and find immense joy in things that other might see as rubbish…
As a child greatly enjoyed repairing household appliances, but I think you could say I was breaking them by taking them apart and re-assembling them.
In my family we always made presents for Christmas and birthdays.
I never wanted to be a designer, but as a child I dreamt of being an inventor.
Making jewellery and objects combines the head, the heart and the hands, it feels very liberating to me.
What is your favorite colour?
Funnily my favourite colour is red, which also is my allocated colour.
I love the primary colours red, blue and yellow, but seldom wear yellow, as it really doesn’t suit me. Working with the colour red was initially more difficult than anticipated, as I just wanted to make things in red, anything as long as it was red…
It wasn’t enough of a concept to start a body of work for an exhibition.
So for our upcoming 10girls 10colours exhibition I looked at red being the colour of blood.
We are all the same colour on the inside…
Who inspires you?
Passionate, curious, honest people who remember the child within.
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