Jeweled touch

No buzzing or humming to be heard, but striking winged creatures to be seen: Bee and Dragonfly, created in bronze and antique glass by the hand of an artist, prepare to ascend.

Bee

The artistically designed bee has a body made of bronze and wings of grey antique glass. With measurements of 19 x 4,5 x 15 centimeters, it alights beautifully on furniture, as well as in the palms of hands or on walls. Optional extras: a stylized bronze twig or bee wand for decorative presentation.

Bee

Dragonfly

Poised in bronze: The small work of art, made of turquoise patinated bronze and grey antique glass, has a wingspan of 22 centimeters and overall length of 27 centimeters. A small glass tube, inserted in the body, enables use as a vase. An optional extra: stylized bronze twig for decorative presentation.

Dragonfly

On the wings

of fantasy

Mrs Klarner, your work is full of whirring and scrabbling: there are rings, earrings and pendants in the shape of bees, insect brooches, stag beetles, spiders ...

Sabine Klarner:

Evidently bees – nature’s little gems – are especially appealing to me. I feel they are lucky charms.

What inspires you to create these works

My imagination is stirred by everything around me. Whether I am walking in the woods, watching a film or studying the façade of a building – many of my impressions find their way into designs. Coming as I do, from the sphere of metalworking, initial ideas and sketches appear to me in the form of metal. In the case of the dragonfly for Garpa, my thoughts turned to the futuristic films of the 1920s. What would a mechanical dragonfly look like ? Well now, its body is formed by sections of tubing soldered together. For the bee it was immediately clear – furry bits and smooth bands should alternate. My aim was to highlight characteristics, rather than aspire to naturalistic depiction.

Your lavishly decorated jewelry is usually made of gold and silver, diamonds, turquoise, and agate, rose quartz, rock crystal, coral, pearls or amber. However, the bee and dragonfly conceived for Garpa are fashioned of bronze and antique glass.

I love old, elaborate goldsmith techniques. That is why I initially modelled the bee and dragonfly in silver, in the traditional way. Then at an art foundry, the method of lost-wax casting began: from the two models, primary moulds were created with silicone and the resulting negative forms were injected with hot wax. After cooling, each of the wax positives were covered in an embedding material and enclosed in a metal cylinder. Later, under heat and pressure, the wax was melted out and molten bronze poured into the cavities of the hardened shells. After undergoing an artificial ageing process, the finished metal shimmers in delicate nuances of colour – the dragonfly in turquoise, the bee displays characteristic black stripes.

Individual

flight plan

The grey antique glass for the insect wings – chosen from hundreds of colours – comes from the glassworks Lamberts in Waldsassen. It is the only manufactory in Germany that still produces blown and manually crafted flat glass. It is superbly suited for artistic workmanship, historical monument conservation, and modern architecture. With air bubble inclusions and slightly irregular surface, every sheet of glass is unique. The antique glass was cut exactly to size for the intricate mountings by a specialist glasscutter.

Sabine Klarner was born in 1957 in Istanbul. She qualified as master goldsmith in 1988 in Hamburg and has her own studio since 1992 in Hamburg.

Her jewelry has been exhibited in Germany and other European countries, Japan and the USA. It has received numerous awards and can also be found in public collections – such as, the Museum for Art and Crafts Hamburg, the Bollmann Collection in Vienna, the Swiss National Museum, Zürich, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, the Kestner Museum, Hannover and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.