Made to Last

Metalsmith Andrew Last’s works capture the fleeting beauty of flowers in a much more enduring format.

At the Armstrong Prestige Jewellery Breakfast at this year’s Vodafone id Dunedin Fashion Week, Andrew Last’s jewellery stood out. Compared to many of the other pieces on show that dripped with brightly coloured stones and pearls, Last’s work was markedly understated. His heavy round pendants on simple wires needed a closer look before their workmanship became evident.

Last is an ex-pat Australian who moved to Dunedin to teach jewellery-making at the local polytech five years ago. He and his wife took a punt on a half-time job at the institute, packed their bags and left their Australian township with the name that’s shorthand for the back of nowhere. “I was living in Wagga Wagga for Chrissakes,” Last laughs. “We just decided, yeah, well, we’ll give it a go. It was a change, I tell ya. One thing Dunedin does have is lots of weather, which is quite different from Wagga Wagga.”

He was trained in the use of precious metals, but these days he predominantly works with a more prosaic material: aluminium. “In the scheme of metals, aluminium is the most chameleon-like. You can make the metal do lots of different things,” he explains. “I found working with aluminium to be very freeing, because you can afford to be generous with it. Sometimes I’ll go down to the scrapyard and buy a 10kg block of aluminium and hack at it until there’s only half a kilo worth left.

“If I want to colour it, I can use anodysing chemicals to colour it, so it looks like coloured metal, not painted metal. It’s quite a challenge to work with too, because you can’t treat it in the way you can other metals – you can’t solder it or weld it. I’ve actually taken a lot of techniques from engineering workshops.”

Last, who has been making jewellery, as well as larger scale products like bowls and lights, for over 20 years, bases much of his recent work on the idea of phyllotaxis, the pattern of plant growth characterized by intersecting spiral geometry. Sunflowers and cactuses play a particularly strong role in his influences.

The idea came about through an evolution of ideas of his work. “About 10 years ago I was working on the idea of things that flew; aeroplanes, spaceships, birds, space junk…” he recalls. “Along the way, a lot of things that I was producing started to take on shapes that were quite plant-like. Eventually I began working on the idea of phyllotaxis. So I started out making space junk that looked like flowers, and ended up making flowers that looked like space junk.”

Last uses computer modeling in the design process for his works, digitally ‘growing’ the shapes on screen before he renders them in metal. Although most of his jewellery is now made as exhibition pieces, a few production pieces are available through Masterworks gallery in Auckland.