The Earth flexes its muscle, the applied concrete ‘urban skin’ breaks open and a microcosm of life is created in the cracks in the pavement.

Crack Flowers are a series of speculations on the persistence and insistence of life in an often hostile environment. A chain of connected brooches that climb vertically from the ground upward on a garment.
Signs of hope amid the despair of how the city refuses – or at least mediates – our connection with the natural world

Their materiality – steel – is of the modern city, and the abstracted, awkward forms are expressive of a hybrid botanical growth. They are recognisable as leaves and flowers and in their scale and position, play with the ubiquitous jewellery trope of floral re-presentation.

The work is a series of six separate brooches that can be worn separately or together. They are made with stainless steel, mild steel and vitreous-fired enamel, used in a painterly way that includes rubbing back to deliver a worn patina. Each piece is a hollow form, producing a visually chunky effect that is in fact quite lightweight and easy to wear. The image showing the brooches being worn is of them in their pre-application of enamel.