{"id":1432,"date":"2018-08-06T13:39:42","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T13:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamhanid.com\/?p=1432"},"modified":"2018-08-07T15:11:15","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T15:11:15","slug":"the-mountain-incense-burner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamhanid.com\/?p=1432","title":{"rendered":"The Mountain Incense Burner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201ca perfect mixture of poetic and musical lines with a bold application\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
(happy client feedback on delivery!)<\/span><\/h5>\n

Britannia\/Sterling silver, lemon gilding, hand chased, engraved and carved with inner incense container. (20x13x13cm)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"M_Hanid_Incense<\/a>I love the fragrant aura of calm which incense brings. I knew silver incense burners existed and always hoped I would be able\u00a0to make one in my own style. The opportunity to create a bespoke censer came as an indirect\u00a0<\/span>result of my Union Centrepiece (commissioned by The V&A in 2012)<\/a> being exhibited in Hong\u00a0<\/span>Kong as part of ‘Masterpieces of British Silver: Highlights from The Victoria and Albert Museum’.<\/span><\/p>\n

Within the display, exhibited at the Liang Yi Museum, was a 17<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> Century silver incense burner on loan from the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection<\/span>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The client who commissioned my design saw this antique censer as well as my Union Centrepiece and this sparked the idea and a request for me to create a contemporary incense burner for his own use.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"M_Hanid_Incense_Burner\"<\/a>The initial brief was for the chasing to include mountains, swirling clouds and waves, with birds and fish somewhere within the piece. As our conversations about the design developed, he also decided he would like to include a small fishing boat with fishermen somewhere within the waves.<\/span><\/p>\n

I found my research into the landscapes of China and Japan fascinating,<\/span>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>and envisioned a design based on terraced rice paddyfields, rocky summits, waterfalls in the mountain foothills and also my signature style of waves within the mountain lakes. The element which ties these diverse elements together is water, so I sought to portray the invisible but outwardly manifesting water cycle in the chased areas of the piece. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Rippling lakes morph into clouds by evaporation, tumbling onto the peaks and troughs of the mountainside landscape, cascading down through shining engraved waterfalls into rivers and streams wild with movement.<\/span>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>The never-ending ebb and flow of water continues down to the base of the piece, swirling around the stem \u2013 just as liquid would drain away \u2013 on its journey back to the sea. I experimented with hand carving to form terraced and craggy mountains to shape the burner’s lid, envisaging that this would enable the incense smoke to curl up and out of the holes within the carving rising off into the ether.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I used a moulding putty called ‘magic sculpt’ to carve the mountain lid, which is mixed up in two parts and on curing sets hard ready to be filed, carved and sanded. I used pendant motor steel <\/span><\/span>cutting tools to shape the mountains. It took several days to achieve this essential element of the piece. <\/span>The work was then sent to a casting company which specialises in larger scale objects. They encountered issues trying to cast the mountain model in one piece, so had to cut it into five pieces. They then took rubber moulds of the various pieces separately, and put the mountains together again from the five wax pieces they created from the moulds. This proved a time consuming process and there was significant cleaning up to do on the model when I received it back in silver. However I was pleased with the result and was thankful to the manager of the company for having persevered with it. We had several long chats on the phone talking about various ways to cast the piece, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to re-make the mountain model after having spent at least a week building and carving it!<\/span><\/p>\n