About

CV

Statement

“Being aware of beauty all around me, even in unusual places, I strive to create beauty myself. Experimenting with materials and techniques, indulging my fascination with details, textures and natural shapes, I let my mind roam to create stories and connections. I hope to reflect my care for the natural world in my work, my interest in sustainability and how everything is connected.

Since 2014 I have been working with plastic bags. Without the ubiquitous plastic, our civilization could hardly have become what it is today, but at the same time it is a burden on the environment with far-reaching consequences. Especially plastic bags are an obvious symbol for mindless consumerism and a throw-away society. This makes them so interesting for me to work with, to create from them textures and structures that recall forms of a natural world which we have set ourselves apart from.
In our culture, plastics are commonplace, invaluable yet insignificant. For me they bear the possibility of beauty.”

Biography

Portrait Wiebke Pandikow

I am a Helsinki-based jewelry artist, born and raised in the northeast of Germany in an area of rolling hills and forests and very few people. As teenager the wish to become independent and see more of the world brought me to Finland for a year as an exchange student – my first foray into the country which would become my chosen home.

Growing up in the middle of the forest, nature and biology have interested me since a very young age and for a long time I planned to study biology. Eventually though, it was my passion for creating things, first expressed through writing and drawing as a child, that drove me to choose a career in craft and design instead. So, after finishing my matriculation examination in Germany I returned to Finland, Lahti specifically, to study to be an artisan for goldsmithing and subsequently a jewelry designer. These studies are probably the reason that I have quite a craft- and material-centered approach to my work and that the aesthetics of a piece are very important to me. A ten month long exchange to Japan was also part of my studies. I learned about working with urushi, Japanese lacquer, something that has taught me a great deal about how to be patient in craft.

Since October 2013 I work in Helsinki under the trade name Silver Crane. While at the start I mostly created small jewelry series in silver and other products for sale, I soon turned more and more toward jewelry art, which has by now become my main focus. I have been participating in numerous exhibitions and fairs all over Europe and held many solo exhibitions as well. My work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation as well as the Arts Promotion Center Finland and pieces of mine are in the collection of Museum Arnhem in the Netherlands, the Finnish State Art Commission and the Craft Museum of Finland, among others.

All the while my German home remains very important to me. The meadows and forests of my home, the cranes calling in spring and fall have shaped who I am, and like these migratory birds, I continue to go back and forth between the rolling hills of northern Germany and the south of Finland each year.