Dots Enamel Ring

Dots Enamel Ring – the Arctic, painted in glass.

Dots have been my signature since 2009. The first ones travelled from my workshop to Designtorget across Sweden, and in 2012 I brought them home to Lofoten. They have stayed simple on purpose: a small disc of silver, a circle of vitreous enamel, a colour drawn from northern light or arctic water.

An ancient craft, by hand

Vitreous enamelling is one of the oldest decorative techniques in jewellery – over two thousand years old and fundamentally unchanged. The enamel itself is finely ground glass with metal oxides for colour. I mix it with water and paint it onto the silver with a small brush, dot by dot, then fire it in the kiln until the glass fuses to the metal. Most studs pass through the kiln more than once, with a fresh layer of enamel each time.

Each colour has its own temperament in the fire – its own melting point, its own ideal time. The line between a finished ring and a melted lump of silver is hair-thin, and learning where it lives takes years and a lot of failed pieces.

I work almost only with transparent enamels, which let light pass through to the silver beneath and give the colour a depth that opaque pigments cannot reach. I source them from the long-established makers in Germany and Japan.

This is real vitreous enamel – fused glass – not the cold-set epoxy or lacquer often sold under the same name. The difference, as I once put it to a journalist, is “like comparing the finest oil painting with one made with poster paint.”