Wiebke Pandikow is a German jewellery artist living in Helsinki, Finland. While her work is based in the tradition of craftsmanship with its diligence and patience, she loves to experiment with materials to invent these traditions anew. She has worked with plastic bags since 2014, developing her own techniques using a flat iron and soldering irons.

Without the ubiquitous plastic, our civilization could hardly have become what it is today, but at the same time it is an immense burden on the environment. Especially plastic bags are an obvious symbol for mindless consumerism and a throw-away society. This makes them so interesting for Wiebke to work with: to create from them textures and structures that recall forms of a natural world that we have set ourselves apart from.

She is inspired by nature and its systems and interested in humans’ambivalent connection to them. With the diligence and time it takes to craft plastic bags into jewellery, she examines value and preciousness and reminds people of the different aspects a material has, negative and positive. In our culture, plastics are ubiquitous and invaluable but at the same time insignificant and harmful. For her, they bear the possibility of beauty.