Royal College of Art, London
Born in China and trained in fields of both fine art and business at Rhodes College in the USA, Shiqi Li is currently studying for her MA at the Royal College of Art. She is interested in the connection between jewellery and domestic objects by creating works that have the ability to transform from domestic objects to jewellery and back again to challenge the notions of what jewellery is and give both domestic objects and jewellery a second life.
Wall Adornment
material: Wallpaper, plaster, pastels, magnets
With the interest in the connection between jewellery and domestic objects, she creates work that have the ability to transform from wall decoration to jewellery and back again to challenge the notions of what jewellery is and give both wall decoration and jewellery a second life. Creating works that have a dual function as both jewellery and wall decorations, she wants to explore the possibilities for jewellery when is not worn on the body where it can rebirth in another form that we have the chance to maximise our enjoyment and appreciation of these beautiful designs and extend their practical and aesthetic use.
The work consists of self-designed wallpaper and 3D printed wearable jewellery based on the patterns from the wallpaper. It allows the wear to take off 3D objects from the wallpaper to wear as brooches or earrings and then attach them back by magnets to the wallpaper as wall decorations. The magnetic feature is a kitsch reference of fridge magnets to bring the jewellery into a domestic context. She chosed damask wallpaper as the reference of the wallpaper she designed because damask is a type of traditional wallpaper that is based on symmetrical drawings of nature and plant-life. Through understanding the traditional way of making decorative objects from drawings, she re-interpreted and updated this process for modern times. Instead of making drawings of plants which are an abstraction, she used plants directly to compose a damasks pattern and then took an image of it.
