One of the oldest techniques used in jewellery making is cire perdue – meaning “lost wax” in French. It is a casting technique used by Van Cleef & Arpels to create its dainty little ballerina figures, by Cindy Chao to create her fragile lifelike flora and fauna masterpieces, and by the great sculptors whose magnificent bronzes fill galleries and art institutions. It can be used at micro-scale for jewellery or for vast sculptures like Wallace Chan’s titanium Titans .
The technique involves producing a model of the sculpture consisting of a thin layer of wax over a heat-resistant core of clay or plaster. The wax is then in turn covered with another heat-resistant layer, and after the wax is melted and drained off, molten metal is poured into the cavity that the “lost wax” has created {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"Cindy Chao Dragonfly brooch","url":"https://img.
i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/07/25/2458b37e-7879-4c01-aceb-f2e86d1d6785_0edd2952.jpg"} Cindy Chao Dragonfly brooch In jewellery there is no inner core, however, so artists like Cindy Chao carve directly into a special jeweller’s wax.
“I typically start with wax sculpting because this technique helps me tremendously with concretising my imagination and visualising my art jewel,” said Chao. “This cannot easily be achieved through two-dimensional sketches alone.” She captures fleeting moments in .