By John Shanahan

Baiyang Qiu

Milpitas, California
First Place, Professional Excellence (1-3 Years)

Designers find inspiration everywhere. Given the graceful, organic curves and delicate shading of Baiyang Qiu’s Vision Award-winning Emerging brooch, meant to represent a butterfly wing emerging from a chrysalis, you might expect that she took her cue from seeing it in nature. The fact is, she found her muse in the tale of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a children’s book by Eric Carle.

“I have always loved to create narrative pieces,” she says. “I love this story. Even though it’s a children’s book, it’s so romantic.” In the story, a caterpillar eats its way through a number of foods, gets a bellyache, eats a leaf to calm its indigestion, then goes into its cocoon. The final page shows it emerging transformed into a butterfly. Qiu knows that the transformation motif is a common one in art, so she wanted to capture it in her signature style, where the use of small wires within a frame form intricate constructs that possess a strength that belies their delicate appearance.

Emerging is crafted in a blend of 18k yellow, rose, and red gold. The colors shift almost imperceptibly from top to bottom in a gorgeously realized flow of shading. The wing shape is contrasted at the top of the piece by the soft black of an oxidized sterling silver form that also anchors it.

Qiu spent about two weeks on the initial sketches for the design. From her sketches, she created the frame for the wing piece in 1 mm square 18k yellow gold wire, along with the sterling silver section. With those soldered together as a template, she set about creating the triangular mesh that gives the inside of the wing its geometric beauty. The wires in the mesh are drawn down to 28 gauge and cut into small pieces joined in a triangle-based matrix. It’s an architectural technique, often seen in the creation of bridges, that provides strength within an open, airy design by having several points of contact reinforcing one another. 

As Qiu set out to create the mesh, she made a decision that would help define the piece’s award-winning beauty—and give her a whole new challenge.

“I actually started with [the wing being] just yellow gold, but I thought it was too plain” she says. “I wanted the bottom to be more dynamic, which is when I added the red gold.”

The mixing of gold colors brought up several technical issues to be solved. There are a total of four different alloys involved, which was necessary to convince the golds to play nicely with each other. Although they are all the same karat, the mix of metals within the alloys meant each had its own set of behaviors. “The 18k rose gold has different texture characteristics than yellow gold,” she says. “Their melting points are different, the way you heat them is different, and their quenching and cleaning processes are different.” For example, she notes, 18k rose gold needs to be quenched immediately after reaching its annealing temperature. If not, it can become too brittle to work with.

These differences can be readily overcome by soldering, but doing so would not have resulted in the kind of invisible flow Qiu envisioned. “I didn’t want there to be an obvious line separating the yellow gold from rose gold. It was my intention to have the colors blend seamlessly. That was a bit time consuming to figure out.” In addition, the 18k rose gold tends to show firescale when soldered. While that can be removed by sanding, given the small size of the wire, too much metal could end up being removed, which would weaken the piece. The answer was to use laser welding. “It’s much easier to control,” she says. “With the laser you concentrate the heat directly on the joint instead of the entire piece.”

Once she knew how she would weld the wires, she created the mesh for the final piece, using the already-created square wire frame as the template. The mesh is joined to the back of the frame courtesy of the laser. “I don’t want to heat up the meshes,” she says, noting that doing so could affect their hardness. “After they’re done, they look delicate but they’re pretty strong. I love to work with the fine-gauge wire because it has volume but still captures the delicate feel, like it has a temporary beauty. But I don’t want it to actually be delicate. I want it to be wearable, like everyday jewelry.”

With its organic grace and eye-pleasing color-changing trick, Emerging left the Vision Award judges very hungry for more from Qiu.

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