"My subject is the natural environment. I live and work in rural Herefordshire in the UK. My studio overlooks orchards, hills and woodland. Walking is an essential part of my day; looking at the landscape and the details within it, the changes through the year, the constant fragile cycle of growth, decay, renewal.
I make objects using re-cycled precious and non-precious metals and ‘found’ materials. I work intuitively and experimentally, allowing and encouraging the innate characteristics of the medium to emerge. The materials I work with are chosen and combined to evoke and challenge the relationship we have with the natural world and our perceived values of the resources we use; as ‘raw’ material I value a tin-can as much as a sheet of silver.
Central to my practice is to make my work in as an environmentally and ethically responsible way as possible."
Metalsmith Claire Malet finds her inspiration in natural forms and landscapes, and in the exploration of the relationship between the metals with which she works and the environment from which they are sourced. Through her on-going work with ‘found’ metal cans, she is exploring ideas of production, transformation, renewal through decay and reuse. She is also interested in perceived value; taking a throw-away, manmade, mass-produced food-can, Malet ‘transforms’ it into a ‘precious’ vessel.
In contrast, when working in silver, Malet makes pieces which focus on vessels and objects discarded by nature: a curl of split bark, a seed pod. In doing so, she makes pieces which – in contrast to those made from manmade tin-cans – transform and draw attention to the value of a ‘throw-away’ object from nature.
