Wiebke Pandikow was born in Germany but studied jewellery design in Lahti, Finland and now lives and works as a jewelelry artist in Helsinki.
She has been working with plastic bags since 2014. 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. With the help of a flat iron and a soldering iron, she creates, amongst others, lush necklaces of countless, hand formed, pale leaves made from the thin translucent plastic bags often found in grocery stores. The original feel and form of the bags vanishes and they become delicate jewelry, unrecognizable as what they once were. They are quite robust and are meant to be worn. What was living organisms thousands of years ago, then became oil, then became plastic, is now returned into forms that resemble living plants once more. While in our culture plastics are commonplace, invaluable yet insignificant, for Wiebke they bear the possibility of beauty.