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Yn Barod means ‘ready’, and is a really happy, triumphant, upward-reaching shape to me. I instantly saw it as a trumpeting, upward growing form. It made me then think of fungus, and those speeded-up nature films of them growing upwards from the forest floor. How then, to mix the bright,

trumpetyness with that?

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Initial experiments in paper clay and polymer clay were unsatisfying. However, I am a very recent newcomer to wax carving, where a piece is carved in wax, then cast in metal. I decided to make 'yn barod' a ring that I would carve in wax. I wanted it to have a number of these upstretching, trumpet-mushrooms at different heights. I had 3 cast in silver, all given different finishes. My favourite was covered in brightly coloured patinas, which I then scrubbed off. It looks like it was an old tin toy or ring that had been forgotten, and had somehow transmogrified into something else underground. The edges of the ‘barods’ are polished to highlight them.