FROM THE BENCH / DAU VIT ALEXANDER
Blood Will Have Blood:
A Macbeth Brooch by
Dauvit Alexander
The piece is made from a
corroded steel cap from the
oil tank of a 1960s truck which
was abandoned in a gap-site in
Glasgow. The red elements in
the spaces are polycarbonate
light fittings from crashed cars,
found on the same site.
This piece has had quite a journey,
appearing in several fashion shoots,
on the catwalk at Milan Fashion
Week, on the cover of Mark Fenn’s
definitive monograph, “Narrative
Jewelry: Tales From The Toolbox”,
on stage at the Manchester Royal
Exchange Theatre, at SOFA Chicago
and, finally, in a private collection.
The text [round the top] is
hand-cut and carved from
pure iron sheet and reads
“Blood Will Have Blood”, a
quote from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, Act III, Scene IV.
In this moment, Macbeth
begins to become aware
of the enormity of his
actions.
Like most of my work,
this piece is a melange
of whatever materials
are necessary for me to
create it: in this, there
is corroded steel, pure
iron, sterling silver,
polycarbonate, black
spinels, labradorite,
garnets and lepidolite-
included quartz.
The large central skull was
carved in Mexico from a piece
of labradorite and was really
the key to making the piece: I’d
wanted to make a piece around
Macbeth for a while and this
proved to be the trigger.
There are around
60 discrete parts,
including the
gemstones, in this
piece.
As it is difficult – but not impossible
– to solder silver to steel, especially
multiple times, most of this piece is
constructed using cold connections,
especially rivets.
Although the piece is fundamentally hand-made,
there is a lot of CAD involved. The marking out of the
positions of the stones around the edge was done
digitally, the settings for the main stone and the edge
stones were made digitally – designed in Rhino and
then digitally milled in wax – and the back plate which
holds it all together was designed in CAD.
the designer’s perspective
The idea of making a piece of jewellery
based on Macbeth has been with me
for a long time but I have never had the
necessary ‘spark’ to translate that into a
finished work. I love the darkness of the
play, the fact that it is a bloody tragedy
and that it contains many of the elements
which became classic Gothic and so chimed
Dauvit Alexander
with the sort of dark, narrative work that I like to make.
This piece was made very specifically for the opening
of the Sinister Pleasures: Gothic Jewellery show at SOFA
Chicago in 2012. I needed something to wear with my
charcoal-grey kilt and so turned to not only the play but to
traditional Scottish jewellery, the form being broadly based
on the traditional penannular brooch - often worn with
a kilt.
JUNE 2019 | WWW.JEWELLERYFOCUS.CO.UK
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