Naomi Davies

When the country first went into lockdown at the end of March, amongst the uncertainty my focus and passion for jewellery making remained a constant. I felt helpless in terms of being any practical help with supporting others in the progressing pandemic as I was helping to care for my elderly mother, so I decided to pay my own tribute and capture the mood of the moment in the only way I knew in terms of making and design.

As I work with a degree of precision and geometric accuracy I realised that to achieve a perfect semi circular rainbow I would have to make complete concentric circles and then divide the piece into two to create two identical rainbows. For the rainbow colours I had little access to obtaining many materials during the first part of lockdown but managed to obtain small pieces of acrylic in all the spectrum colours, kindly donated by Abbey Plastics in Newton Abbot. I have previously used clear acrylic in my jewellery and my previous experience as a Design and Technology teacher gave me the experience in using heat forming acrylic so it was just a matter of finding the right size cylinders to use to achieve exactly the correct size arcs to inlay. Each arc of the rainbow took many hours of filing to fit it exactly in place. All soldering and silver work to be completed before inlaying the plastic pieces.