Alysa Freeman is a mixed media jewellery maker living and working in Exeter, Devon.

Alysa’s work centres on the idea of transmuting an unwanted material into something with unique aesthetic integrity. Utilising newspaper as her core material, layers of paper are combined with silver, which add creative and practical dimensions to earrings, brooches and necklaces.

Through a technique of rolling and compressing Alysa recycles and transforms old newspaper into a new, sculptural material with its own character.  The surface is manipulated by working into the paper stacks to reveal printed ink left behind. This twofold process involves a building up, an overlaying of printed words, followed by a further material transformation as the exposed surface of this new paperwork is explored. The end result is a dense but light material with many satisfying layers and an intriguing history of marks.

The use of text has been a recurring theme in her work for 15 years.

‘As a dyslexic artist I view text as a texture.  In this series I have blurred the lines others hold with the printed word by revealing layers that read in reverse, the opposite way round and alternate directions, removing the original context’