Anabela Chan

Dreams Through the Looking Glass

I love to dream; I take inspirations from whatever moves me, and I find my own voice in those things. It is not about a good dream or a bad dream, it is more that your mind drifts towards only being concerned with your imaginations, that somehow it becomes true, and the object you create becomes a souvenir from your journey. Although there is romanticism inherent in these reveries, there are darker dramas as well.

I like to frame my work as the very act of ‘looking through a window’ lends itself to the creation of something or somewhere extraordinary on the other side of the glass. It is a chance to create a world unto itself, a fantasy, an imagined place. I like these places to have the bewildering nature of a dream, at once familiar, recomposed of remembered histories, yet strange and untravelled, beguiling the viewer to take the curious journey.

I have always been captivated by the jewels and gems of Nature; from the sculptural forms of flora and fauna to the vivid array of intense colours of insects shimmering and fluttering in unison. Through an alchemy of natural, precious and man-made materials, I create objets d’art and jewellery that employ the artistry of traditional goldsmithing, silversmithing and metalwork techniques.

The Bloom and Beetle series explore the symbiosis of beauty and the bestial nature of things; a notion of beauty in a decay made permanent, a transience immortalised in time.