Kate Bajic

When creating a new piece of jewellery, Kate Bajic usually begins with looking through design sheets of lichen forms and patterns that she has built up over the years from photographs and drawings of lichens in situ. Kate traces these elements onto paper and plays around with working them into different compositions; transferring the individual sections as templates onto silver sheet ready for piercing. Kate’s love of nature and natural forms has been a constant theme in her work. Living in the rural East Midlands, Kate is surrounded by farm and woodland. Lichens seemed a natural choice for inspiration as when you start to look, you see them growing literally everywhere, and when you get closer and pay attention to the detail within the tiny forms and the often bright varied colours, they are beautiful.

Kate’s main love is silver, simply because it’s so beautiful to work with, but sometimes a design demands different qualities or finishes such as thin steel sheet which is incredibly strong and can be hand sawn and heat treated, or base metals such as brass or copper which can be patinated or sprayed in layered colours with acrylic paints.