Ria Lins, a Belgian artist, is amazed by interpersonal relationships and by people’s ability to adapt rather easily to the rapid changes and diversity  of our society. Her jewelry is inspired by these notions, as well as by themes like “contact,” “connection,” “comfort,” and “mending,” which convey her feelings and ideas to others. But it’s when one feels and wears her pieces that their true expressiveness becomes apparent—they are soft and tactile; they drape and move like fabric, fitting snugly and almost hugging the wearer. Here Ria talks about her work, inspirations, and her current show, Anyway, with husband and painter Beniti Cornelis, at Galerie Pont & Plas.

Bonnie Levine: Ria, tell us about your background. How did you become interested in making jewelry?

Ria Lins: I was educated and worked as a graphic designer. As a young girl I met Beniti Cornelis, a painter and, later, my husband. We were both interested in art in all its facets. Together we visited a countless number of exhibitions. The many conversations and travels were inspiring, interactive, and mutually stimulating. I am very happy with the show Anyway, which is our first exhibition together.

For years I accumulated images, impressions, sounds, smells, and feelings. The language of jewelry gave me the opportunity to share my ideas and feelings. By making them wearable, they become visible to others. I don’t have to yell; I like to be present and just report.

Your jewelry is very tactile and soft, draping on the body like fabric. I’m curious how you create pieces that are so alive with motion and seem so sensuous. Do you have a plan when you start or does the piece evolve as you work with the metal?

Ria Lins: When I created my first pieces, I was searching and exploring materials and how they move. It became a game trying to incorporate little differences and watching the transformations they bring. Today I know—more or less—what will happen if I deviate from my pattern. But surprises are still possible and fascinating, even for myself. Finding new possibilities is a source of pleasure and an opportunity to express new ideas.

Designs such as Meander or Rock Me Baby are made more than once. I start all over again for each piece. No piece has to be identical; each piece is unique.

I’ve read that your jewelry revolves around themes like “contact” and “connection,” and most of all “relationships,” and each piece conveys your feelings to the wearer. How are these concepts and feelings expressed in your jewelry?

Ria Lins: Sometimes a hiatus is the start of a piece. For example, an individual can disappear out of my life. I translate the memories they evoke into design, feeling, and movement.

I am aware of the universality of these feelings. People can feel the stories or shared experiences behind my work, even though they may not be aware of them.  Somewhere there is a story they know – this is why my pieces are desirable.  Once the piece is made, the memory has found its place, and there is no need to explain it or its details. At the moment the piece is worn and shown, it will get its freedom of existence and enrichment.

I love the names of your pieces: Cuddle; Hope in One Hand and Freedom All around Us; Rock Me Baby; Together. How do you come up with them? Does the name inspire the piece, or does the piece inspire the name?

Ria Lins: Both are possible and both happen. Cuddle is really meant as a memorial piece. I was inspired by a story about a woman who kept pieces of fabric sewn in the hem of her dress as a way to remember someone who was deceased.  In Cuddle, you can also put a small object in it to remember someone.

For the piece Rock Me Baby, the movement of the piece inspired the name. It cradles and comforts. People wearing this piece can’t stop touching, stroking, and indulging.

I always try to unite what was lost. The key ideas for Together are connection, contact, link, relationship, and coherence. When relationships are broken, I would like to heal them. I repair, patch, embroider, and restore the components of my work to bring everything together again.

A few years ago you won the prestigious Wim Ibens Prize for silversmithing and jewelry design. (This bi-annual award commemorates this important Flemish arts educator and founder of the department of jewelry design at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Art.) What was the award? Did it change or influence your work in any way?

Ria Lins: I received this award because the jury was impressed by the combination of innovation, classic design, and contemporary jewelry design.

The influence of this award on my work was first of all the honor. But above that, it reinforced the idea to continue and stay on my road. I did not have to follow the international “style.” The classical design and the wearability are often rejected in international jewelry design these days. But they are so strongly linked with our aesthetic history that I have to keep on exploring and questioning.

The Wim Ibens award was for me a support and a confirmation.

Last year you were one of 90 artists from around the world who participated in La Frontera, an exhibition that explored the undercurrents of the US-Mexico border environment through jewelry. How were you selected for this show, and what attracted you to participate? Did you have a particular perspective on this topic? Tell us about the jewelry you created.

Ria Lins: I applied to an open call from the Museo Franz Mayer and Velvet da Vinci, the gallery in San Francisco. I enjoy participating in competitions. This one attracted me because of the story of the border. Even in Europe this border is well known. Border problems are very current and a large human problem. Hope in One Hand and Freedom All around Us tells about immigration and the pain of leaving and the hope to be happy some day.

Your current show at Galerie Pont & Plas is called Anyway. What’s your concept behind the show? What work are you presenting?

Ria Lins: Conscious and unconscious feeling, memories, desires … I am aware of the special influence subconscious has on our daily life. It drives us more than we even realize. We have to deal with what we know and feel … Anyway.

For the show, I made a series of brooches called Eau Bénité, or Holy Water. Water is a need we can’t live without; it is the source of all life. Water is used for religious rituals, as a power source, a purifier, and as a sign of wealth and power. It supports, nourishes, shelters, purifies, divides, and binds.

What’s next for you?

Ria Lins:
•    Galerie Pont & Plas, until September 26, Ghent, Belgium
•    Cominelli Foundation, August 29–October 4, Cisano di San Felice, Italy
•    Design Museum, until August 15, Ghent, Belgium
•    Diana Porter Contemporary Jewellery, August 1–October 31, Bristol, UK
•    European prize for applied arts, October 25–January 10, 2016, WCC-BF, Site des Anciens Abattoirs, Mons, Belgium
•    Sieraad Art Fair, November 5–8, Amsterdam, Netherlands

What have you seen or read lately that you’re excited about?

Ria Lins: There is a lot of wonderful art that touches me. Recently I visited exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, and Berlinde De Bruyckere. As I live near Antwerp, I had the opportunity to visit the exhibition Rubens in Private. To be able to get this close to these famous painting touched me a lot. The jewels—real and painted—are inspirational even today. Another splendid exhibition is Dries Van Noten, a couturier and designer born and raised in Antwerp. The big part of the exhibit is dedicated to his sources of inspiration and is amazing and most inspiring. When I see great art I always feel the need to go straight home and start working.

I often read two or more books at the same time. At the moment I’m reading Sensation: The New Science of Physical Intelligence, by Thalma Lobel, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, two books about our senses.

It is a pity one can’t read books and create jewelry at the same time …

Thank you very much.

Galerie Spektrum has been representing contemporary art jewelry since 1981. In this interview, gallery owner Jürgen Eickhoff provides us with some insight about his selection process and take on the field.

Missy Graff: Can you provide us with a little history about the origins of Galerie Spektrum? Why did you decide to represent jewelers?

Jürgen Eickhoff: Galerie Spektrum began in 1981, specializing in the applied arts with glass, ceramics, jewelry, and paper works. After the first year, we came to the conclusion that it would be important to focus on just one format. So we selected the one we knew best and that we thought was the most avant-garde: contemporary art jewelry.

Please tell us about the artists you represent. What is your criteria or process for selecting artists?

Jürgen Eickhoff: The criteria are subjective, but include the quality and consistency of the artist’s work, their professional behavior, their innovation and individuality. When I decide to represent a jeweler, I try to represent his/her entire body of work, including the work that is not jewelry. Sometimes I select the work that we will represent, and sometimes the artist presents a collection to me.
    
How has international collaboration affected the field?

Jürgen Eickhoff: The field is affected by multiple influences. Questions come to the gallery from other galleries, curators, institutions, and museums from all over the world. These questions concern conceptual things, artists, or the field in general.

In addition to being a gallery, Spektrum is also an official publisher and has released more than 50 titles. The gallery has had its own website since 1996. This sharing of information can be considered a type of collaboration.

All of these ways of communication help information to reach students, schools, museums, and collectors, which in turn affects the gallery.

When developing an exhibition, your gallery encourages artists to use the entirety of the space through installation. Tell us about that process. What is the artist encouraged to think about? Please provide an example.

Jürgen Eickhoff: The artist is encouraged to think about his/her work and its place within society. These thoughts can lead to new ideas about presentation, and the resulting installation is a kind of artwork on its own. One of the artists who is working most intensively in this field is Ruudt Peters, who has had 11 solo exhibitions so far at Spektrum.

How have the artists’ perspectives of the work you represent influenced the gallery?

Jürgen Eickhoff: There are influences that go back and forth between the artist and the gallery. A gallery should have its own identity and style, which is complemented by the artists that it represents.

Galerie Spektrum has been supporting the art jewelry field since 1981. Throughout this time there have been many shifts in processes, themes, concepts, and materials. Have you seen a change in the collector as well?

Jürgen Eickhoff: No. Our collectors are up to date, and they evolve with the artists.

How can the art jewelry community help support the success of the art jewelry market moving forward?

Jürgen Eickhoff: The collectors, institutions, and museums should intensify their efforts. The collectors should buy more work, share their enthusiasm, and encourage others to collect as well. The institutions and museums should have more shows, contests, projects, and workshops about jewelry, in addition to building up their own collections.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists that you would like to share?

Jürgen Eickhoff: Do not follow the trends and fashions.

Index Image: Exhibition view, Icons of the 20th Century, Marianne Schliwinski, 2007, photo: Galerie Spektrum

When Lucy led her three older siblings into the magical world of Narnia, through an old wardrobe in an empty room, she was the same age I was, when I first read this wonderful children’s book by C. S. Lewis. I was already an independent child, and I felt validated that the heroine was a girl, and my age. In my safe, middle class, non-threatening childhood, there were not many strong female role models, but in fiction, I found them.

I could be writing about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mostly autobiographical books, which told the life of a pioneer girl and her family in the American midwest in the 19th century. Or about the heroine of A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. These girls were also approximately my age, and they managed to achieve outsized accomplishments, despite their lowly stature in their communities.

But The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was something more to me.

To start with, there was Lucy, leading the way. Things weren’t always easy, either with her siblings, who didn’t believe her story of snowy Narnia, nor in the country itself, where an evil witch had ordained that it would always be winter but never Christmas. But Lucy was curious, determined, and adventurous, and pressed on, despite being the youngest, and a girl. She took a risk going with Mr. Tumnus, the fawn, into his world, and her life was better for it.

Lewis is gentle with readers of his Narnia books. The underlying message is clearly the eternal struggle between good and evil. But to this young reader, the books weren’t morality tales, but adventures pitting the good guys against the bad guys. The head bad guy was the White Witch, coincidentally a strong female character. With her powerful wand, she regularly wreaked havoc, but the Witch could also be subtle and beguiling, and used her sweet “Turkish delight” to lure Edmund—Lucy’s brother—into her clutches. The good guys were Mr. Tumnus and his compatriots, a ragtag group of gentle animals with no magic powers and not much to recommend them, except their yearning for goodness and truth. It probably isn’t accidental that the worth of the animals is equal to that of the two-legged characters.

Aslan the Lion, whose power comes from before the beginning of time, sacrifices himself to save Edmund. But with everything at its darkest, just before dawn, ultimate goodness and power break through despair—in a roar. It was a strong and hopeful message, and I took it to heart.

Many years later, I recognized the obvious Christian symbolism of the stories, but as a child, I didn’t see it. Instead, I saw magic, and possibility, and courage, and smarts, and doing what was right. There was no worrying about fashion or popularity or what other people thought.

And from there to art jewelry: we’re also a people of independent thought, curious about new ideas, who tend to follow our own paths. My life has been enriched by meeting fascinating artists, writers, gallerists, and collectors in this amazing field. I stepped into a whole new world 20 years ago; now it’s hard to imagine my life outside it.

This is my studio/shed, in my back yard in Fitzroy North, Melbourne, Australia.

It is a very small space, but really all I need. I have just managed to fit in all my equipment with enough room to move around the space freely, just!! Hehe … I am a jeweler/stone cutter so I use my trim saw and my diamond grinders to cut and shape rocks of all varieties. It’s noisy business but some good music in my ears fixes that … sorry, neighbors!

My handyman father built me all my benches, even my jewelry bench, which he made for me back in 2006, when I started studying jewelry making. I hold all my tools and equipment very close to me … they are what enable me to facilitate my art; without them I would feel lost. Oh, and of course I couldn’t work without my right-hand furry friend, Gracie, always looking for a warm spot and stealing my seat.

https://katiejaynebritchford.carbonmade.com/

Madeline Courtney, artist and curator, recently brought together nine artists who explore, dissect, and transform disparate materials for the exhibition Matter of Material. Madeline talks about how meaning—ranging from ethics to functionality—is created through material. This interview also includes some material-specific questions answered by a few of the exhibiting artists.

Olivia Shih: Please tell us about your background and how you became the curator for Matter of Material.

Madeline Courtney: I am an artist with an academic background in fine art, art history, and French. After college, I worked as the sculpture shop technician for several years at my alma mater, Kenyon College, where I developed a body of sculptural work investigating the relationships between object, animal, museum, and sculpture. This led me on a Fulbright Fellowship to Paris, where I took courses in museology at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and researched the history of taxidermy in the city. I found taxidermy to be fascinating because it opened up interesting questions about material—how we relate to it, gain knowledge through it, and also how we manipulate it in order to re-create the world to our own vision.

Back in Seattle, I became involved with the local arts nonprofit Artist Trust, which is how I came to know Karen Lorene and interviewed for the manager position at Facèré. This opened up a whole new world to me—the world of jewelry art and its brilliant community of makers.

Working at Facèré, I have a hand in almost everything we do. So far I have helped produce and manage over twelve exhibitions at Facèré. Matter of Material is the second show that I have independently curated.

In Matter of Material, nine jewelry artists opt for alternative materials and eschew traditional precious metals like gold and silver. Was there a single event or object that sparked the conception of this exhibition?

Madeline Courtney: Facèré has always, with several exceptions, featured work that is primarily metals based. Focusing on nine different materials in this show allowed us to broaden the palette of the work involved. Each material introduces its own scale, weight, texture, and sometimes even smell.

The choice of a nontraditional material is not always a rejection of traditional precious ones. Gold, silver, and gemstones are still present in Matter of Material, although it is alternative materials that are forefront.
 
In my own work as an artist, I am drawn toward nontraditional materials. Different materials open up different modes of expression and identity. If you look at jewelry from Australia, Oceania, and Africa, which incorporates everything from bone to tree resin, you’ll find a different energy than exists in traditional Western metalsmithing. This power of material is something I see many jewelry artists exploring in their work, all of which inspired me to put together a show with this focus.

Why do you think jewelry artists are turning more and more to alternative, and often inexpensive, materials such as acrylic, paper, and cement?

Madeline Courtney: The inspiration for choosing one material over another is different for each artist. Choosing to work in alternative materials can be practical, ethical, poetic, or tied to personal affinity. It can also be all of these things at once. The idea of preciousness itself can mean many different things, and is not necessarily tied to concepts of expensive or inexpensive.

In today’s world, new materials are being explored and created every day. At the same time, many materials are becoming scarce or harmful to source. For many of us, concern over materials affects what we purchase, consume, and bring into our lives. It is something that we as a society are becoming more and more aware of. Artists are not excluded, and may be even more keenly aware of material matters because of the intimate relationship they have with their work.

In order to play upon society’s expectations, artists have been using alternative materials in subversive and mischievous ways for many years. I think of Méret Oppenheim’s fur teacup and how it toys with ideas of femininity. If we look thousands of years back, we see that people were wearing their surroundings and creating meaning through material before they could write, read, and maybe even talk. While material is not a new language, it continues to be a powerful one.

At first glance, the works of the nine artists seem disparate or almost conflicting. A second look reveals circular and chain motifs that run through the exhibition. What ideas led you to curate a cohesive show with so many distinct aesthetics and materials?

Madeline Courtney: When we invite artists to an exhibition, we assume that the majority of the work in the show is going to be created specifically for that show and guided by the theme or concept provided. There is always a degree of uncertainty and of surprise. For Matter of Material, each artist was invited to create a body of work based in a specific material with which they are familiar. We purposefully chose to represent artists working in distinctively different materials. In many ways, it is the disparate nature of each of the materials that makes them work so well together. They are different enough in texture, luster, and scale that they actually complement each other’s unique qualities.

Art jewelry has the ability to subvert traditional values placed on precious metals and gemstones, but how would you introduce the work in this exhibition to a person who has had no experience with art jewelry?

Madeline Courtney: Jewelry made from nontraditional materials instantly sets it apart from the norm. This can be an asset when introducing the work, because it makes it easier to understand the jewelry as art. The familiar nature of the materials can also provide a point of entry that is more accessible. Who doesn’t already have a relationship with wood or plastic? The known material in a new form can instantly create an interesting dialogue.

The major hurdle for nontraditional work is its perceived value. It is easier for the everyday person to place value on precious metals and stones. As art gallerists, we promote the value of ideas and artistry. We invite people into this world by making the work accessible and sharing our love of it with others. More importantly, we encourage people to try things on and to talk about the work. Building community through art is at the center of what we do.

Do you have any advice for emerging jewelry artists on making work or finding representation?

Madeline Courtney: My advice to emerging artists: The most important thing to make is studio time—time to try, fail, create, discover what you love, and return to it over and over again. Whatever that thing is, find different ways of incorporating it and interacting with it through your work. It is important to take your work out of the context. Share it with others. Take pictures. Build a website with it and see how it looks online. Find exhibition opportunities. The more ways you experience your work, the more you will understand what makes it your own.

For representation, research opportunities that exist or could be created. Each venue has its own personality—identify what that is and if it relates to your work.

Join a community through which you can meet and correspond with others in your field. Visit places in person and wear your work. If visiting is not possible, email. Emails with four to eight well-chosen images attached will quickly introduce your work and instantly give the gallery an idea of whether your work would be a good fit. Curate a portfolio that is well edited and that demonstrates a distinct direction and voice. Choose brevity and continuity over quantity. Share information on how you price your work. Familiarize yourself with the gallery’s policies and see if they are a good fit for you.

Member profiles, through organizations such as Klimt02 and SNAG, are a good tool through which to become more accessible to galleries. For inspiration when planning a show, I will often use those resources to discover new artists for the gallery. Creating important content—articles and interviews—for your field is another great way to get your work out there!

We’ll talk to some of the artists next. Francesca, your work transforms everyday material, such as book pages, into woven but minimal jewelry. Does your work as a biochemist influence the way you work as a jeweler?

Francesca Vitali: At first, when I started making jewelry, I was so concerned about the media I was working with and the fact that paper is not a precious material. I have a PhD in chemistry, and it is a totally different background that I didn’t give much thought to. But recently, I started making things just because they felt right, without overthinking the media or how to impress with my work, and I started to realize that indeed my chemistry background informs my work in a very natural way, so much so that it is instinctive for me.

Jennifer, how did you start working with acrylic to create jewelry?

Jennifer Merchant: I started working with acrylic a bit while I was studying metals and jewelry at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I played around with carving it, which I discovered was similar to carving waxes for casting, but I liked that it resulted in a finished piece instead of going through more steps as in the casting process. At the time I just made small pieces to attach stone settings to for my stone-setting class, and carved a pendant. I started experimenting with layering the acrylic with imagery after I graduated. When I moved back home to Minneapolis I was broke and had very few tools, so I didn’t feel I could make very interesting metal work in my modest home studio. I decided to work with things I had, so I made my first pieces out of Plexiglas I had left over from a failed attempt at making display cases for my thesis show, and my collection of fashion magazines. Five years later I had the layered acrylic technique down to a point I felt comfortable selling it, and I started my studio business in 2010. 



What is the inspiration behind the graphic yet luscious pieces from your new Opulent Illusions collection?



Jennifer Merchant: The inspiration for the Opulent Illusions collection started when I carved my first domed form in layered acrylic last year. Until then I had been sculpting very angular faceted forms. I realized that the domed acrylic over images distorted them in really interesting ways. I am also really inspired by op art; I love how a static image can appear to have movement and trick your brain. I wanted to see what would happen if I took these optical illusions and further distorted them beneath domed acrylic forms. I have also been working with 23-karat gold leaf and layering it between acrylic; I felt the gold would be a great accent to the collection and add to the richness of the pieces and complement the softer forms with a gold glow, juxtaposed with the very graphic black-and-white illusions.

Checha, cement is integrated into the pavement we stand on and the buildings we live in, and artists such as Amira Jalet and 22 Design Studio have incorporated this inexpensive and ubiquitous material into jewelry. Why are you drawn to it?

Checha Sokolovic: My architectural background finds a new voice in my jewelry, as I explore familiar architectural forms and materials in unexpected scale. I find inspiration in polished concrete floors, board-formed concrete walls, old concrete pavements, and sidewalks. Through the simplicity of geometric shapes, I wish to reveal a hidden beauty and elegance found in the construction materials. I think of my jewelry as my miniature architecture.

“I think there is a difference between conversation and real talking. Real talking doesn’t exist very much. Most talk is just conversation, which I don’t really like. You cannot force real talk—and sometimes it can be overwhelming. Real talking is when language comes. It’s not guided by you. You might feel it, but only later do you recognize that it was there.”[1]
—Manfred Bischoff

Kadri Mälk: You seem so uncompromising in your work and life; how have you achieved that?

Manfred Bischoff: Uncompromising? —Not really.

I am absorbed in these situations and it’s OK, I accept this. It’s not a will, how can I put it, it’s much softer, much ... I didn’t decide my ways myself. Uncompromising might be only the fact that I’ve accepted the situation. That I’ve not struggled against it. My life seems to me as a private logic for myself but not made by myself. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not an esoteric in the strict sense. But looking back, I always think—phhhhh, strange. If I would have said NO at that time, what could have happened then? I’m somebody who accepts what is meant for him to happen. I’m not uncompromising—not at all, and I’m not a … warrior.

Have you rejected many things?

Manfred Bischoff: Yes. Many.

The question about intransigence sounds interesting, and some people think that I am uncompromising. I am not … in my case, no will has been involved.

It just happens?

Manfred Bischoff: Also not. It means not wanting. Not really.

 But also not neglecting?

Manfred Bischoff: Look, if I speak about myself, I have a problem—either I make myself strong or I make myself weak. And I don’t want to speak about either. Because my position is in the middle and about this I cannot speak.

I saw for example an exhibition of Gerhard Richter in New York, he deconstructs, and he was asked if he could say something about his pictures and he said some sentences ... and I thought—this man should be the best-sold artist in the world, and later I reflected—an artist who deconstructs can never add anything, so if he said about his pictures something important, his pictures would never be credible. In my case, either I get in a situation where I position myself in the center—or—I’ll be an asshole.

But as a matter of fact, I should talk about the center—but I can’t. Because talking about the center would mean talking about my work, and that’s something I would not like to do. I do not want to grip the work with language.

If I leave my work in peace, that’s the best. If I speak about my work I can only hide it or deride it. I do not speak about the Between, otherwise it’s no longer the Between.

So—I surround my work with something, and don’t ask me questions about that.

When the work has been completed, can you distance yourself from the piece, so that you have no more spiritual connection with it?

Manfred Bischoff: Yes, that’s right, because I divide absolutely between an object and a subject. As long as I’m involved in this work ... I’m also not very involved ... but I always see it as an object, and... Look, some people are so disappointed if their works are not in the position they think they should be.

I’m not interested in this because it is just an object, an aim ... I do not mix an object with my personality.

So you keep the distance?

Manfred Bischoff: It’s not a distance, it’s totally elsewhere. It’s not a question of bigger or smaller distance, it’s totally out. It must change into money and money must change into new aesthetics ... that’s the circulation. I told you I only want it to be documented.

Just to preserve it in your memory?

Manfred Bischoff: Yes, perhaps also this can be too much but I’m not such a great artist who can say it’s all the same for me, is it documented or not. No, not so.

But being here does not mean that I leave no trace at all. It’s a circulation.

When have you been most happy about your work?

Manfred Bischoff: A hippie question! I’m not happy about my work. Only if all circumstances around function, if my dogs are well, and .... no, I think on the whole I have been successful and I like it when I’m not too much involved in this. I do my job—basta. I would like to do more, but ... it is as it is. I’m not a warrior.

The reflection comes later. I don’t have such a strong wish and I try not to have too strong a wish, until ....

But my gut feeling tells me that if there’s a distance and I see things from a righter place, higher place, then nothing matters so much anymore. For a viewer, for an observer who sees it for the first time—perhaps it matters. But I don’t think I regard myself as especially important. Importance is totally beyond my wish, will, and wanting.

Space. And time. I like time very much, also the chance to see if what you have done has a substance ... So at the beginning you can be enthusiastic about this ... I’m no longer enthusiastic ... there was a time when I was ... searching for myself, for self-affirmation.

But I can tell you now that the most ... satisfying and beautiful for me is the—distance. When the importance you have given to the pieces is getting smaller and smaller. Then my work has substance for me. As long as your work is so important and stays in the foreground, it’s nothing for me, it’s bad.

No—disappear, disappear, disappear ... Then there is more space to create other things.

Its like in Buddhism, you have to lose yourself, your Self.

Manfred Bischoff: Yes. Perhaps so.

There are many artists in contemporary jewelry who complain that the field of jewelry sounds like a closed diaspora, the circle of people who are interested in contemporary jewelry is not really large, this kind of inside-feeling, which may be quite worrying. Is it also your problem?

Manfred Bischoff: Not for me. I can understand that they get worried. Because they expect so much.

You don’t?

Manfred Bischoff: What should I expect? I cannot ... project what doesn’t exist. What should I expect to happen? Or should happen? I’m very clear about some things ... I do not look for what is behind this door if I do not know what is behind this door. I really do not expect anybody to come to this door. I look at what I see, that’s all. What I mean is ... is what I mean.

So I define my reality only through what I see, I get a call and I get a letter, not silly things like viruses ... such stupid things ... it’s speculation, it’s a thing of mistrust … you don’t trust. No, it’s also not true, it’s ...

Could you say a few words about the students you have at Alchimia school?

Manfred Bischoff: They are young and I try to keep them innocent, I want to have them as children, not as adults, that’s the whole practice of the Alchimia school. We love them and hope they love us. There shouldn’t be fear in working.

To make them stronger?

Manfred Bischoff: Make them stronger? More, to let them play.

We don’t move forward. We don’t move towards a goal like … you must! ... We do not say: you must become famous, and ... that’s the only thing, yes, sure, but it’s not for me, in my teaching, I do not teach how to get famous.

What is essential in your teaching?

Manfred Bischoff: The essential lies in the students, I’m only a director. There’s a play of Pirandello—Six Characters in Search of an Author. So, why cannot we be the author, why cannot we be the play? That’s what I’m teaching. I only set the scene.

You choose the play?

Manfred Bischoff: No, I do not choose the play. They are the play, I’m the regisseur.

I tell them where they have to stand. They are the actors.

It’s also not teaching, it’s finding the right place. I’m not teaching.

I try to create different situations and look at this, if it functions or not. If they are in the wrong position, I try to find another one that would perhaps function better. That’s all.

Look, actors are so childish, my students too. And I mean this with a big mutual respect. When I say they are childish, I say it with full respect. I like that they’re like this.

What about the erotic side of teaching you mentioned?

Manfred Bischoff: Don’t expect me to repeat what I said to you.

A secret for two?

Manfred Bischoff: No, because this is a secret for two, yes. Because if I tell this, the erotic is gone. But it’s a part of teaching. For me the biggest part. Because in an erotic relationship the subconscious is revealed, they do things that normally in dialectical thinking they don’t. They do things in certain delirium, in a kind of between-ness, in a kind of twilight. And that’s very nice.

Erotic is mostly the first movement, the first start, the first impulse, vita vitale. Which starts life out of itself. I think if you take it manually it will not function. You must start metaphysically and the erotic is part of it.

I mean Eros. Eros is always the Between. But I like the unreachable situation where Eros can never be reached, that’s teaching. There is no wanting and no neglecting. To keep that balance.

That’s why I like this situation, they are like small cupids, I like the innocence of them. Because later they have enough time to deviate to one side or the other.

There was a show, Beauty Is a Story, by Yvonne Joring, in Holland. What does beauty mean to you?

Manfred Bischoff: It’s a problem I do not wish to discuss. Because it’s infinale, an everlasting story. I would not like to comment about beauty, might be I’m a creator of beauty but …

No, it’s not an important question, and other people can speak more about this.

Schönheit .... Beauty … No, it’s not a question for me.

What would be the question for you?

Manfred Bischoff: Shall we finish?

Where is the exit?(Note: This is a quotation from MB’s book Üb Ersetzen)

Manfred Bischoff: That’s right! (laughs)

You are sneaky to put me a question like that. I will not answer your question about beauty, would not answer the question, “which would be the right question for you,” and will not answer your next question.

(some time passes)

You must not. You may.

Manfred Bischoff: There rises no question.
You can construct the question, or the question rises.
We can have pieces where no question is needed.
I have a student who asks me always: why don’t you say anything? What should I say when everything is OK, wonderful?
Why should we overload ourselves or ask … when I see something that is beautiful, I stay speechless.
The beauty shows itself in the silence.

Are there any “wrong reasons” in your professional life?

Manfred Bischoff: You can move from one place to an other and start immediately on a temporary bench, it’s your profession, a hammer and let’s go.

When I feel myself sure inside, it functions.

It was not my intention to become a goldsmith. My mother booked me into the goldsmith’s school, can you imagine! It was not me! My mother! What a terrible start. The most terrible start, when you mother decides upon your profession. So, from the beginning onwards, it was a terrible situation.

I had to convince my mother that I’m able to do that. To become a goldsmith. Not to convince me. So who would I have become if my mother hadn’t booked me into the goldsmith’s school? Everything could be possible. No, I had to become a goldsmith. I told her—a photographer, a scenographer—she told me: no, you go to study, I booked a place and you will become a goldsmith. It was not my decision.

Another question?

Have you thanked your mother?

Manfred Bischoff: Thanked my mother? Oh, God, no. No.

Do you feel that the decision has been wrong?

Manfred Bischoff: Not for my mother. But my father, he told me nothing. It was wrong. He didn’t say anything.

He was silent.

Manfred Bischoff: Yes. So I had to learn this profession. And … (Laughs.)

Yes! What shall I say!!!

One great artist has said that it took many years to discover he had no talent for art, but he couldn’t give it up, because by that time he was too famous already.

Does it count also for you?

Manfred Bischoff: For me? —No, I don’t think so.

Everything that pleases your mother is shit. I mean, in the psychoanalyses one can realize at once what it means. You cannot get rid of the Oedipus complex because you are making love to your mother. And I should make love to her for a long time because my father didn’t lead me out.

Why are you so figurative in your work? It’s not usual in contemporary jewelry. Artists are mostly much more abstract in their expression.

Manfred Bischoff: Because I don’t do things which I cannot name. I don’t like straight lines very much, I hate exact circles. There are simple signs and innocent signs, the more innocent the better ... so that I should not hide myself ... not veil ... anymore.

My whole life has been a deconstruction. It’s easier to get into another world in this form than to lose yourself totally.

So I try to find simple images which I can name, which I can work with ... which don’t thrill or menace me, which leave me in peace.

These are not so simple, your images.

Manfred Bischoff: Oh, yes, they are.

There are some animals in your work, one cannot really understand if it’s a pig or a boar or a reindeer, just an animal.

Manfred Bischoff: Ja, animal! —Animal, which means soul. I can handle these animals very well. So we should make them in gold.

(The shelf falls down with a tremendous crash.)
Look, it fell down when I said that.

You have quite a limited list of materials that you use in your work. Does it have a special significance that you use only high-karat gold, coral and jade, sometimes some diamonds? What’s behind that?

Manfred Bischoff: Behind is nothing. That’s the same thing I just spoke about, I killed the significance. The coral is there and behind the coral is nothing. Did you see something there?

Coral is like metaphorical skin, the structure of it, you feel it when you work with it, cut it and polish, how it peels off. And there is so much animalism in it.

Manfred Bischoff: For you! I never thought about that, it’s interesting.

So for you it’s just the color?

Manfred Bischoff: I said I won’t speak about it. The viewer should decide.

I don’t like this light. (Moves aside, because the light is too bright.)

(Laughs sadly.) What are you making me tell you.

I do not kill my images with language. My titles are so far from what you see that I will say nothing about what I mean. I do not invent titles of what is seen. It would be a sin. Eine Sünde.

So the references should be hidden?

Manfred Bischoff: The reference is visible to everybody, but I don’t want to speak about it. I don’t want this to be a style or ... how to say … kind of effect. I would not like to talk about it … a painter should also not be asked why he used pink in his work.

Madonna del Parto, exposed against the background of a drawing of coordinate axes, one of the most powerful works in your creation for me.

Manfred Bischoff: It’s a pathological piece, as I thought I could find here another exit … because … no, I will not talk about it …

(Laughs out loud.) ... No, you will not get an answer from me.

(Long silence.)
The psychotherapist is dead.

Don’t answer.

(Even longer silence.)
I can wait.

Pazienza.

Manfred Bischoff: I don’t mind. But your sound tape will run out soon.

Would you like to say anything else?

Manfred Bischoff: No, I would like to go home.

This conversation took place during Passion Week, March 23, 2005, in Tallinn, Estonia. It was first published in art magazine Kunst.ee, 2005.3.

PuzzleGuts (1999) sits high atop a white pedestal, jointed silver limbs splayed comically akimbo. Cartoonish and endearing, the wearable robot serves as a fitting emissary of Jana Brevick’s exhibition, This Infinity Fits in My Hand, on view at Bellevue Arts Museum through mid-month.

The work featured in Brevick’s mid-career retrospective spans nearly two decades of practice. Earlier pieces, like PuzzleGuts, demonstrate her skillful handling of materials and tools, and an acute interest in metal as a subject—how it can be wrought, dematerialized, and conjoined with unexpected compounds. For the Elements and Diagrams series (2000), Brevick cast and fabricated with visible acuity, experimenting with all manner of precious and nonprecious material to create alloys, delicate conduits, and crystalline growths that draw out the potential for transformation from her jeweler’s bench.

In the mid-2000s, Brevick began to look beyond processes and properties of metallurgy to lend a conceptual framework to her craft. That work crosses varied disciplinary boundaries, veering into the fields of communication, technology, and science fiction. Escape Route (2005), a sculptural installation from the Tiny Universe series, is comprised of a stream of wall-mounted miniature ladder rungs leading down to a sterling silver hatch. Curiously opened and dramatically dark, the action-figure-sized cavern embodies Brevick’s sense of humor, and desire to build a more explicit narrative through her work. Similarly, the objects in her Spy series are pieces of sculptural assemblage that nod to the button-covered, droning computer systems of late 20th-century Hollywood. Clunky and strange, the sculptures delight the children of Pixar, though they were clearly conceived by a child of Erector Set.

The Action series translates Brevick’s burgeoning interests in material experimentation and retro-future narrative into wearable forms. The necklaces integrate sterling silver facets with bulbous rubber ventilators and coiling tubes to create stethoscope-like instruments that appear to have the capacity to diagnose or communicate. With the Eavesdropper series, Brevick brings the theme of communication to the fore. Sterling silver and steel mesh satellites hang as jewel-like pendants from the necklace Listening (2010), a piece that explicitly links systems of surveillance and social connection to the physical human form. Of Course We’re Listening (2006) features a single satellite as a combination pendant and brooch. Like a protective talisman, the piece acknowledges our collusion with the invisible forces that listen, record, and relay information around the globe.

Brevick’s exhibition culminates with Atomic Exfiltrator: Ship Seven (2015), a large-scale installation made in collaboration with Hahn Rossman that eschews the white pedestal in favor of an immersive display. Visitors are led through a curtained entrance down a white corridor that has two rows of portholes carved out on either side. Intended to emulate the windows of an exploratory craft, the apertures—some large, others like small periscopes, are doubly reminiscent of sidewalk displays. Backlit jewelry and ambiguously sized sculptural works are revealed behind each round pane of glass. Simultaneously atomic and planetary, the pieces collapse large and small, significant and inconsequential, evoking the vitality of high-performance technology in tandem with the triviality of adornment.

Can bodily ornamentation provoke a deeper understanding of intangible systems? How does the gesture of placing a necklace over your head and feeling its weight absorbed by your body facilitate an elemental connection with the universe and with other people? Despite the tongue-in-cheek overtones to her narrative, Brevick’s work addresses many of the monumental themes that also concerned the late 20th-century film cannon that she references: communication, surveillance, and the infinite well of knowledge that exists within the universe. Moreover, she expands jewelry’s capacity to communicate beyond the streetwise cues of cultural identity, status, etc. Berwick’s artworks symbolize communication devices in themselves—satirical pieces of technology that link the wearer to the social and informational flows around them.

This Infinity Fits in My Hand is a brilliantly conceived title given the breadth of Brevick’s ongoing pursuit. The subjects addressed in her practice are literally infinitesimal in scope; yet, the language of jewelry allows her to translate these nebulous, ephemeral concepts into material form. The only thing lacking in the exhibition is the kinesthetic knowledge that comes from physical contact with each piece (this is an unfortunate by-product of museum display). This is why the inclusion of the Atomic Exfiltrator is so crucial to Brevick’s endeavor. The architecture of the space forces viewers to confront their sense of physicality as they lean in to view the interior of one aperture, and then step back to survey the next. An embodied relationship develops with the work on view. Viewers are transported, becoming the explorers and space adventurers that Brevick has set them up to be.

The Atomic Exfiltrator ends at a glowing green table supported by bulky aluminum legs. Beyond sits a static white wall—intended to read as the perimeter of a mission control station. Melodramatic and hokey, the space conveys the comedic affect that defines Brevick’s 1960s cinematic precursors. She, too, is scripting an adventure from within a cardboard box. Albeit slapstick, Brevick’s installation is steeped in potential—the potential for jewelers to produce experimental forms that cross genres, play with narrative, and reimagine the relationship between object, body, and world. Brevick demonstrates that deeper connections between things can be explored through the materials and processes of craft. Matter undergoes transmutation, and so can contemporary jewelry. Brevick’s mission to explore and experiment continues—her own black monolith awaits.

Index Image: Jana Brevick, Send and Receive, Atomic Exfiltrator, 2015, sculpture, sterling silver, 1m x 85cm x 8cm, photo: artist

With a background in fashion and millinery, Stephie Morawetz playfully constructs her jewelry with bright colors, overwhelming scale, and expressive shapes—creating adornment for a future when plastic is a rare commodity, and people of mixed cultures are not afraid to speak out loud through jewelry.

Olivia Shih: You hold a BA in fashion and design from the University of Art and Design Linz, in Austria, and you’re working toward a MFA degree at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany. Could you talk about your background and education and how they have influenced your work?

Stephie Morawetz: Actually, it all began when I was seven years old. My grandmother died when I was four, and I never really knew her. My mother always told me stories about her. She was a tailor and designed some of the most fantastic clothes for my mother. My mother also told me that my grandmother was a powerful woman and at the same time got on incredibly well with people. Everyone keeps telling me that I inherited a lot from her. So I made the decision to go into fashion.

I arrived at Linz with the firm intention to study fashion. But in my first semester, I got to know the field of millinery. In this department, everything was possible at once. You could use any materials and at the same time work three-dimensionally. I fell in love with the manufacture of hats.

I soon realized that millinery is jewelry, but limited to a specific place on the body. With this knowledge and the need to learn more about jewelry, I decided to go abroad.

In the end, the decision to study in Idar-Oberstein was pure gut instinct. When I Googled jewelry and study, the first images I saw were the works of students from Idar-Oberstein. Then it was clear to me: That’s what I want to do!

So I came to Idar-Oberstein and this has been the biggest influence on me.

Idar-Oberstein is a small town in Germany, and there is not much more there than gemstones. But it’s the meeting point of different cultures and different people, and it has the biggest cultural variety I’ve ever seen. All this takes place in the 20-square-meter kitchen of our university. The students come from diverse cultures, all over the Earth, and suddenly politics and race are no longer relevant. Everyone is equal, because we all have the same goal. In my time here, I have learned so many different traditions and cultures, and this is reflected in my work.

The feeling for the body and the need to work with it, this I learned in Vienna. The abundance of colors and shapes is my world here in Idar-Oberstein.

Could you talk about your philosophy behind this collection?

Stephie Morawetz: Our society, the one in which we live, has invented an entirely new material. A material that has been artificially created by mankind and that nature cannot absorb. For almost two centuries, we have been developing this material continuously. It is chemically manufactured in laboratories and is constantly developing, receiving new characteristics. Characteristics that make it more and more difficult for nature to process. Hardly anyone knows the composition of the different types of material. But we all use it daily. It can be found everywhere, and is used in almost all areas of life. Life without this material is hard to imagine.

We produce it from fossil fuel, a material that is becoming increasingly rare. Even with the knowledge that it will disappear one day, we handle it carelessly. We dispose of it by simply throwing it away carelessly, as if nature can absorb it. Nature is sick of this material, and creatures die from it.

Meanwhile, a layer of this material has covered our Earth. Even a new continent has formed.

We live in the plastic age.

Your work is flooded with bright, sometimes neon colors, reminiscent of street wear and pop art. What inspires this vivid color palette and aesthetic?

Stephie Morawetz: I see my work in the future. Even the stone that I have created is from the future. The future, as I see it, is full of colors and reflects this mix of cultures. It is a fact that we diversify more and more. The world nowadays is very small. In the future you will afforded the opportunity to live wherever you want and choose your culture by personal preference. I see the future as colorful, and liken the variety of patterns to the mixture of cultures.

Many of your pieces in Night and Day are oversized and read as explosions of personality and color when worn on the body. What kind of role does scale have in your jewelry?

Stephie Morawetz: The size of my pieces has two reasons. Probably the most important is that I think in the future there will be no fear about wearing jewelry. For me, you should wear jewelry seriously. You should show this seriousness and be proud of it. I think jewelry subsidizes our personality and should therefore be visible. In our society, it’s already accepted that woman can wear big jewelry. With men, this isn’t the case. Most of my pieces are designed for men. I believe that men in the future will also wear jewelry: It should be visible and serious.

Rubber, magnets, stone, and rubber bands are a few of materials you use in constructing your jewelry, which at times feels like whimsical assemblage and at times is as precise as ballet. How did you choose these materials?

Stephie Morawetz: We create plastic from fossil fuel, which is a limited resource. Experts have calculated 40 years for the final consumption of this fossil fuel. Our society uses this material as if it is infinitely available, while in reality it’s only a matter of time until it’s totally exhausted.

I have assumed there is no oil in the future. Through this disappearance, there will be a shift in values, and plastic will be the most valuable material. Rubber, rubber bands, and reconstructed materials (recon) are all plastics. In my work I have tried to use only plastic, as it will be the most valuable material. We can see throughout history that value is related to availability. Plastics will be rare because of the exhaustion of crude oil. The plastics I used for my stone are only upcycled plastics. It’s plastic taken from my daily life. Plastic that we frivolously use and throw away without realizing its value.

In particular, you’ve created a new “stone,” reconstructed from what seems to be non-biodegradable plastic. What inspired the creation of your own material?

Stephie Morawetz: The idea for my material was when I first heard of a newly created island. An island of plastic garbage floats in our ocean; it has now attained 16 times the size of Austria. This shocked me so much that I started to collect everything plastic that accumulates in my daily life. When my room filled slowly, I realized how much plastic we actually use. The problem of different chemical compositions and the fact that companies don’t divulge their “recipes,” which makes plastic rarely recyclable. So what happens with all this plastic waste? Looking at all the landfills, the oceans, or, if you just take a walk through the forest, you have the answer. So if we put a layer of plastic over our planet, something must happen with it.

In my theory, nature uses this artificial material to create something new. A stone with plastic inclusions, plastics that we throw away without thinking about the consequences. My stone is not an assemblage of found plastics; it shows the impact on the future we are already creating now.

My pieces are cut out of a new stone called Stephie Stone. The Stephie Stone is a material from the future. Plastic is not biodegradable, it is simply crushed, and seeps into the ground. So with time and with great pressure, the earth could potentially create a completely new stone. Just like the rutile needles in quartz crystal, the future will see stones that have plastic inclusions.
 

Where do you see your work going next?

Stephie Morawetz: I see my work becoming more and more political. I want to make visible and raise awareness of the fact that we are already creating our future. Everything we do has an impact, whether positive or negative.

Do you have any suggestions for recent graduates of art jewelry on how to continue making work and on finding representation?

Stephie Morawetz: I would suggest finding what you love and sticking with it.

In our field you won’t get rich or even make a living from it. But don’t stop doing what you love even when you can plaster a wall with rejections.

Have you heard, seen, or read anything of interest lately?

Stephie Morawetz: A lot of things inspire me every day, even the most ridiculous things, like a strangely shaped fruit. But the thing that touched me most recently was poetry from a Palestinian writer: The Dice Player, by Mahmoud Darwish. After all he went through, he could have decided to hate the world, but his poetry is full of hope. Everything comes by chance, but it’s your decision what you do with it.

“The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”
—Jean Baudrillard

I assume most AJF readers are familiar with the film trilogy The Matrix, in which protagonist Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) leaves “reality” behind and leaps into the matrix. In the film, what we know as reality turns out to be no more—in Baudrillardian terms—than a “generation” by the matrix “of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”

It is no secret that the Wachowski Brothers, who directed the film, were strongly influenced by two relatively short (and erratic) essays published in booklet form in 1983 under the title Simulations. The book even appears on the screen during the film.

Baudrillard established himself as a bad boy intellectual in France with his infamous essay Oublier Foucault (Forget Foucault) from 1976/1977, in which he vigorously attacked the French intellectual for his History of Sexuality. But he did not become a well-known name in the US, or the rest of the English-speaking world, until Simulations. The book never existed as such before the two essays were translated into English. “The Procession of Simulacra,” the first essay in the book, and also the most provocative because it was theory written as fiction, was previously published in Simulacre et Simulations (1981). The second essay, “The Orders of Simulacra,” previously published in L’Échange Symbolique et la Mort (1977), was written in a slightly more academic language, as a kind of history of “the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code.”

For many, Simulations was the work of a prophet, not least for the art world, which succumbed to his ideas and used them to define what appropriation artists like Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger, or the “pictures generation” with Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine, and Richard Prince, were about. (Baudrillard later disappointed the art world by claiming that “all of the openings, hangings, exhibitions, restorations, collections, donations and speculations” were part of a conspiracy to conceal that art didn’t exist.)

In Simulations, ideas that had been brewing in Baudrillard’s mind since his PhD thesis (1966) and his first books on the post-war consumer society (namely The System of Objects [1968] and The Consumer Society [1970]) reached a new level. In these early works he built on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle—a neo-Marxist analysis of the capitalist society—and the semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure. He made efforts to combine these two systems of thinking but eventually abandoned the Marxist idea of base and superstructure. With Simulations he also left traditional scientific argumentation altogether and launched his own “nihilistic” form of writing that better suited his idea that no objective, outside position, from which one could observe society, was possible. The book shows how the real and the image of the real (representations) have imploded into an order of simulacrum where there is no reality behind the “surface”—simulations serve the purpose of concealing the fact that there is no reality at all. In a later book he calls this the perfect murder—the real has been killed by capitalist society through overproduction—but the real is kept artificially alive by systems that act upon its existence (thus concealing the fact that a murder has taken place).

I read this book for the first time when I was writing a master’s thesis in theater theory at Oslo University. My subject was Andy Warhol, his pop art persona, and the theatricality of the social. Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and simulacra strongly suggest that we live in an age of theatricality. A theatricality without a “reality” to oppose it, a theatricality that conceals the fact that there is no reality: All the world’s a stage and we’re merely players, as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It.

Baudrillard wrote Simulations as a novelist on speed rather than as a scholar, sociologist, and philosopher. This way of writing underlines the “message” of Simulations better than a typical scientific analysis would: The form shows that Baudrillard takes into account that his writing is neither objective nor external to the hyperreal, but is a part of it. It analyzes and constitutes the hyperreal at the same time.

For me the book provided a valuable tool for rethinking consumer society and mass communication. At the same time, it has made me conscious of the fact that writing a text is not merely an analysis of a phenomenon: It also serves to shape that phenomenon.

In retrospect, the book and much of Baudrillard’s oeuvre can be read as describing the social structures that have led to the digital frenzy of cyberspace and to an “atomization” of identity—a situation he often refers to as the “orgy of modernity.” (Baudrillard himself never uses the expression “postmodernism,” even though he is considered as one of the most significant postmodern thinkers.)

The thinking of Baudrillard keeps appearing in my own texts and re-reading the book today reminds me how much it has shaped the way I think about reality, society, and art.

Born June 10, 1918, Denver, Colorado

Died August 2, 2015, Sausalito, California
 

June Schwarcz, one of the masters of contemporary craft, has passed away at the age of 97. June’s enamel work and sculptural copper vessels have been celebrated for over 60 years, and her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and many others.

June studied writing at the University of Colorado, Denver; and later at the University of Chicago; and then went on to study industrial design at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, from 1939 to 1941. During her time in New York she worked in package design, greeting cards, and window displays. In 1943 she married Leroy Schwarcz, a mechanical engineer.
 
During a visit to family in Denver in 1954, June discovered enameling on copper. Working with four other housewives around a folding table and using Kenneth Bates’s book, Enameling: Principles and Practice, as a Bible, June was essentially self-taught. 
 
Her early work employed the basse-taille technique, where the copper is etched or patterned in some way and transparent glass enamel is fired on top. In the Oral History interview with June for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, she talks about the inspiration for those early pieces.

“I felt there was a compatibility between the action of acid and the erosion of the elements on things. And so I worked for a long time with these naturally eroded surfaces.”[1]

June’s participation in Craftsmanship in a Changing World, the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City in 1956, launched her six-decade career. In a short period of time, June’s abstract enameled bowls and panels became the most innovative in the field and in 1958 she had a solo show at the La Jolla Art Center. In contrast to much enameling of the time, her expressive use of color echoed the vitality of Abstract Expressionism painting that was revolutionizing the art world. 

Index Image:June Schwarcz working at an electroplating tank, between 1965 and 1969, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, photo: Julian Williams

[1] This and the following quotes from June Schwarcz come from the Oral History, Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-june-schwarcz-12744.

[2] April Higashi in email conversation with the author, August 2015.

[3] Harlan W. Butt in email conversation with the author, August 2015.

[4] Kiff Slemmons in email conversation with the author, August 2015.

[5] Forrest Merrill in email conversation with the author, August 2015.

Joe Sheehan is a carver from New Zealand. He carves basalt into the shape of TV remotes and other non-stone-age gadgets. They are simply beautiful. What more can I say? In his show at Velvet da Vinci, he displayed a wide array of these in conjunction with the work of another New Zealander, Craig McIntosh.

Susan Cummins: Why is the collection of objects you made for your show at Velvet da Vinci called The Quick and the Dead? Does it have anything to do with the Louis L’Amour American western book, or the movie of the same name?

Joe Sheehan: Yes and no. To be honest, I haven’t read the book. I saw the movie once when I was a kid but I can’t really remember it, so I’m not referencing the film specifically.

I liked the irony of the “quickdraw” reference in relation to the TV remote, but mostly I’m borrowing LLA’s double meaning of “quick”: the idea of speed as it relates to time, and the relationship between the living and the dead, present and past.

These stone carvings resemble remote controls and modern electronic equipment. Why are you carving remote controls in stone?

Joe Sheehan: A few years ago I saw an eBay listing of over 700 TV remotes. I used to search simply for “lot” or “collection” because I always thought it was interesting to see what people get into, what and how they curate elements of their lives.

The collection of TV remotes hit me straight away. The amount on display seemed staggering, and the way that they were arranged in the photographs really caught my eye. The seller seemed to have put a lot of thought into the way they were grouped, and to me they looked very similar to collections of stone adzes I had seen here in books and museums.

They were a similar size and color, similar shapes, were both examples of a technology that had become ubiquitous, but they existed at extreme ends of a timeline of use and redundancy.
 
So I began playing around with the idea of making these points meet and overlap by carving pieces that were both and neither, that didn’t look like they belonged to any fixed point in time and so could shift around a bit. I wanted to see if there was any relationship there other than the one in my head, and I was interested most in the possibility of upsetting the viewer’s perspective in the same way mine had been upset. That is, so that instead of looking into the cabinet and seeing these things as only belonging to some “other,” they might also recognize themselves in the objects.

Is stone carving a New Zealand tradition?

Joe Sheehan: It’s not really a tradition although it comes from one of the greatest. Maori culture has produced some of the finest examples of stone carving and material technology found anywhere on the planet, so we are lucky to have this to draw from. Traditional Maori carving almost died during the process of colonization, and it’s only in the last century that stone carving has seen any kind of renaissance. Carving in NZ now happens at all sorts of levels from the hobbyist to the tourist carving of fish hooks and Tiki, but also through this resurgence of interest a space opened up for a more contemporary approach. Both Craig McIntosh and I operate within this space, which draws its influences from not just Maori tradition but contemporary jewelry and other modern art movements.

Do your carved objects relate to Maori carvings? If so, how?

Joe Sheehan: As I have said, if you are carving stone in NZ, you are engaged with Maori culture or history in one way or another. It is the fulcrum point, and in my work provides an opportunity to gain leverage in relation to ideas of place and identity and to work against the overly simple notion that cultural relationships are bound to an us-and-them dynamic. Good artwork should operate like a big mirror, so that the viewers can see not only themselves, but those around and behind.

When did you decide to become a carver and where did you learn?

Joe Sheehan: My father was a jade carver and I learned how to carve from him. I grew up around stone and carving machines and spent many hours in the workshop watching his hands and then making my own small shapes from the age of about 11 or 12. After school I studied contemporary jewelry in Auckland and then spent a few years working as an in-store carver in a tourist jade shop in Rotorua. During that time I traveled a lot, many of the trips taking me to jade mines around the world. Eventually I needed to get out and do my own thing. I had become wary of the limits within such a commercial environment. I set up a workshop in Wellington and had my first show, Limelight, in 2004 at Objectspace in Auckland. Since then I have been exhibiting each year and ranging in scale and materials.

What do you enjoy the most about carving? What sort of tools do you use?

Joe Sheehan: The reductive nature of carving is a process of collaboration with your material that you don’t find in other art disciplines as much. Stone is so resistant and there is something deeply rewarding in the negotiation required to get to where you want, not that it is just hard work, more that the uniqueness of the material means that the outcome is often surprising. The tools I use are all pretty straightforward—saws, grinders, and drills, all diamond-tipped. In fact, these are the same types of machines that the Chinese were using 4,000 years ago with the addition of electric motors. The way they are employed is different, though, I guess. There is a sort of traditional method of carving here that has developed out of a desire to replicate Maori adornment and tools for the tourist industry, but my approach isn’t bound by that so I end up doing things differently. For instance, the The Quick and the Dead series involved me making and finishing the works as whole pieces and then smashing them apart with a hammer. It wasn’t until they had this energy of destruction that they made any real sense to me.

You are making objects but showing them in a jewelry environment. Why?

Joe Sheehan: So much of what makes stone carving in NZ unique is its relationship to Maori adornment and artifacts, so for both Craig McIntosh and I, these things make sense in a room together. We come from a carving background, have similar influences, and work with similar materials, but have ended up in very different places. Craig’s work is jewelry and mine is sculpture scaled around artifacts, so we thought it would be interesting to present these two different but complementary approaches to stone carving in one exhibition.

Who do you look to for inspiration?

Joe Sheehan: There are so many. Locally, Warwick Freeman always has something to hook my eye, and I have always been a huge fan of Christian Marclay.

What have you seen, heard, or read recently that you could recommend?

Joe Sheehan: Seen: Hennessy Youngman, for essential art commentary you can watch with your kids.

Read: Calvino’s Cosmicomics, for when you want to feel the normality and profundity of absurdity.

Heard: The sublime soul of The Montgomery Express. Their The Montgomery Movement album is one of the most incredible things I have ever heard.

Thank you.

Who says that tradition and novelty can’t stay together?

This exhibit could somehow be proof of a good neighborly relationship between two apparently contrasting realities and, in my opinion, a very good opportunity to show by example how some schools—such as the Bianca Lopez school in New York—are involved in the complex process of bringing up and fostering young designers in order to tie art to fashion and to business.

What impressed me more, when I received the invitation, was its fashion idiom. The image chosen to advertise the event was extremely appealing and funny: an “irreverent” model, chewing gum with an open mouth, flaunts colored crystal jewels as if to say, “I am proud to be so fashionable!” (The catalog speaks the same visual language.) Such a provocative statement led me to expect a different kind of setting up and organization, something Padua had never experienced. I was thrilled about this.

I also knew the exhibition would take place at the Oratorio di San Rocco in Padua, and the sharp contrast between the (antique) location and the exhibition theme was an additional tease. The building, which is situated in the historical center, was decorated between the early 1500s and 1542 with a cycle of fresco paintings by two artists from Padua, Gualtiero Padovano and Stefano dall’Arzere, both followers of the style of Domenico Campagnola. The floor-to-ceiling depictions (landscape scenes, domestic interiors, architecture, and grotesque decorations) and the high wooden ceiling provide an—almost overbearing—environment for contemporary exhibitions. Because of this, the Oratorio is a regular—and highly prized—destination for contemporary jewelry exhibitions.

Nearly one year ago Bianca Lopez teamed up with Alberta Vita—a designer from the Padova goldsmithing school (Istituto Pietro Selvatico), a pupil of Francesco Pavan, Giampaolo Babetto, and Giuliano Reveane, and one of the Bianca Lopez school’s teachers—and started talking about rocking the boat in a provincial city like Padua. The challenge was to bring a breath of fresh air to the city, to show their Italian counterparts how lively the American jewelry scene is, and, above all, to promote their strategy for building effective bridges between school education and professional careers. Padua, once famous for its Gold School, is now in the grip of a dreamy indolence occasionally ruffled by dedicated jewelry events. This would have been a precious occasion to show how things are going abroad, how many opportunities young designers have, how convincingly strong the bond with the fashion world can be. This, at least, was the theoretical plan.

The Bianca Lopez Studio of Jewelry Art and Design in Manhattan welcomes anyone—from beginners to advanced students—and puts equal emphasis on teaching its students the craft of jewelry making and the skills to develop their own business as jewelry designers. The school was founded by Bianca Lopez in 2009, and her background may explain the importance given in the curriculum to business development: Lopez received her education from both the Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology and then went on to train with a host of prominent American designers such as Sandra Boucher, Maurice Galli, Anthony Lent, William Manfredi, and Omar Torres, design director of Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, and Elsa Peretti. (She also apprenticed with jewelry artists such as Cecilia Bauer, Valentin Yotkov, and Fred de Vos.)

At the school, in addition to the classes in which Bianca Lopez and other instructors teach technical skills, the students can benefit from individual business incubator programs. What is provided depends on the specific needs of each artist or designer: This may concern advice on strategic planning for new and ongoing businesses, collection evaluation, design development, sourcing materials and manufacturers in the US and abroad, creation of budgets, pricing lines, identifying the market, finding new markets, identifying specific retailers, marketing plans, ad campaigns, social-media marketing, press work, sales representation, and one-on-one advice. Students can approach jewelry either the conventional way, and target the art jewelry gallery system, or look for representation in luxury goods store around the world. The philosophy underneath is incredibly complete and, if compared to an Italian education system that is disconnected from market and job connection, can reasonably be billed a model to be followed.

These were the main points on which the exhibition was going to be built up. Curators Alessandra Possamai Vita, Bianca Lopez, and Alberta Vita originally conceived the event as a provocation: a Harley-Davidson would be set in front of the altarpiece of the Oratorio di San Rocco, straddled by a lady biker wearing a Peppercotton T-shirt. Beautiful models would directly present the work to visitors. High-tech showcases, panels with fashion shots of jewels … in short, a scenography built around the contrast between the overbearing frescos and the contemporary jewels.

Well, things often don’t go the right way. The three women in charge of the event had to downscale their ambition. The Municipality of Padua only provided very limited funds for the event (they eventually had to shoulder some of the costs themselves), and when I finally arrived in front of the Oratorio, full of expectations, I got a big slap in the face.

After having overviewed the room it was clear to me I was in front of a very “traditional” exhibition. I couldn’t believe it. The first impression was such a disappointment. I didn’t get what the invitation promised, I didn’t even see the exhibition advertised (the exhibition poster was not ready for opening day).

On display were approximately 100 artworks by eight designers, seven of them trained by Bianca Lopez in the last 10 years. The designers selected by the curators were chosen for their acquaintance with fashion and, except for Peppercotton, which actually follows fashion’s seasonal model and distribution network, all were meant to somehow bridge the gap between contemporary jewelry and fashion jewelry because of their careers and artistic inclinations.

The next step is to understand how fashion was highlighted. Let’s now have a look at the artworks on display.

At the entrance, the Bolivian Manuela Arnal offered to the viewers her personal interpretation of nature. There were two different types of jewels by her: The first on show, characterized by hints of an Art Nouveau style, were two necklaces with pendants made by lost wax casting technique. She models shapes directly with her finger, so as to emphasize the need to bound the inspirational idea to her subconscious. The result was somehow delicate and graceful.

Her enamel necklaces in a naïve-like style, constructed from overlapping blotches of brightly enameled copper, looked as if they were made by another hand. The colors and shape evoke a form of accidental spill, in contrast with the darkness of the stones used for the chains. Bianca Lopez talks of her as an immensely skilled author with a strong artistic background, now experiencing a cathartic period. Lopez points out that Manuela has found her voice and has all of the tools and skills needed to execute any design she may want. She is also intent on selling and will be among those represented at Lopez’s Studio gallery shop, as well as at other retailers.

The next showcase protected works by Diane Hulse from Chicago. Her art pieces are explosively colorful. What mostly fascinates her is the mystery hidden behind nature’s gifts. In a continuous quest for unusual materials, she assembles resins, plastic, odds-and-ends. Hulse draw inspiration from the abstract, colorful work of German artist Gerhard Richter, and her own research on refraction of light on different surfaces is ravishingly beautiful (the pieces on show come from a larger collection that spurred the interest of fashion editors at publications such as Vogue). She will be ready to show this fall. Bianca Lopez is working with her very closely on the business side as well as in workshops.

Vivian Saade, a graphic designer and visual artist, continuously challenges herself in the exploration of contemporary aesthetics. She is literally captivated by new media and technologies. Her designs seem to profess that “less is better,” and are related to the Dutch industrial design movement of the 70s and to the minimal and graceful lines of Georg Jensen or Agnete Dinesen.

At the end of the first row of cabinets, Mary Zayman jewels were on display. Inspired by the natural world as well as by dreams, emotions, and memories, she strives to underline the evocative meaning of jewels. Art is a sparkle, a bridge between an idea and its coming to life. So her work, made of silver, steel, resins, pearls, and precious stones, becomes an instrument of happiness and a reflection of our feelings. The work presented here—Lopez told me[1]—is rather different in shape and materials from the collection she hopes will get into New York stores this fall, or from her previous collection of colorful rings.

The central line of display cases hosted works by Alberta Vita and Elena Thiveou. The formal tidiness of their work make them a likely pair. Geometry’s precision and clean lines have always appealed to Alberta Vita. Her latest research is on the movement of stones in her jewels and on the manipulation of delicate materials such as sheets of mica and cyanite. For the last two year she has been living between Padua and New York, where she has gained a completely new perception of what surrounds her. She has started to introduce some depth in her more recent series showing us outlines of Manhattan, its corners and tunnels. Being faithful to her style means letting the metal speak, rather than being decoration.

Elena Thiveou’s works were masterpieces of perfection. She studied at Hunter College in New York and at the Wimbledon College of Arts in London. She is a pupil of Cecilia Bauer and Bianca Lopez, from whom she learned the granulation technique. The jewels on show were incredibly beautiful and unexpectedly contemporary, especially if you know the source of her inspiration: Achaean shields and Cretan double-headed axes. Thiveou is a cofounder and owner of one of the jewelry stores, Deca, in Manhattan. She has been selling here for the last few years.

If Bianca Lopez Studio nurtures a great variety of artists and designers, the designers above broadly fall into the studio jewelry/contemporary jewelry category. If, like Zayman, they have retail lines—work that probably more closely aligns with the production methods (or visual idiom) of fashion—they left these at home.

The one notable exception was Patrick Culpepper and Aurelia Cotton, alias Peppercotton. When they met at the Rhode Island School of Design, their respective backgrounds were in painting and apparel design. Color is their main inspiration. Wearability, freshness, simplicity, and versatility are the natural consequence of careful and accurate research on shapes and appearance. They use Swarovski and vintage Bohemian crystals carefully arranged in nylon tubing that each time acquire different glares and shades. All the pieces are, in fact, completely hand made by them. This can be considered a brand-new language, made sometimes of excess and sometimes of elegance: The choice depends on the wearer. Aurelia and Patrick’s work is highly appreciated among the fashion innovators and, as can be read on their website, they are followed by the famed stylist Lori Goldstein, current fashion editor of Elle magazine. She also styled them in Japanese and Italian Vogue. The brand has also been featured in magazines such as Vogue Russia, Interview, Harper’s Bazaar, and the designers’ studio was featured on Refinery29 last fall.

Well, Peppercotton are the incarnation of something singularly dissimilar from what we consider falling into the jewelry category; their work and their marketing strategies underline their unmistakable, strong connection with the fashion system. We are used to perceiving contemporary jewelry as a form of art, communication, symbol, as a statement that strives to steer away from the vagaries of mood and trends. It is on the other hand clear that good marketing and strategy based on a well-focused advertising campaign makes all the difference!



I asked Bianca Lopez to explain to me the “magic” behind Peppercotton’s success. There are no miraculous potions, she says, but hard work, constant dialogue, and a firm sense of the company’s final goal. She points out that for a jewelry startup to find business counseling can be very discouraging, because information and resources are not as visible, accessible, and affordable as they are in other industries. In the last five years she has provided the two young designers with all her support and knowledge in order to assess their company’s various needs. The authentic design and the high quality of the products are the basis—but just the basis—of good results. She focuses on the fact that “it is important to keep in mind when describing the success of small businesses, that the challenges do not end upon experiencing success."[2]Continuous growth has to be nurtured with a precise and efficient costs policy, always maintaining the high art and fashion quality of the piece. Lopez recommended and introduced them to all the companies to which they contract out prototyping, serial production, and finishing processes, thus allowing them to increase output and selling opportunities. Staying on the business means never giving up growth, quality, innovation, experience, and vision.

The design duo underline the central role of Lopez’s permanent support in their brand’s path to success, while listing all the technical and business support they received at the school through encounters with professionals stone setters, model makers, casters, finishers, CAD designers, but also … with their future accountant and lawyer. “She’s been unbelievably helpful every step of the way, even on an emotional level. [...] We wouldn’t be where we are today without Bianca.” [3]

In the end, the exhibition did not “rock the boat” and one guesses that a larger wallet would have helped turn this into something a little more spectacular. This probably has to do with the misleading choice of the Peppercotton image to advertise the show. If the message of the exhibition was intended to highlight fashion, I don’t think it was totally achieved. However the curators’ guiding principle was to show the possible steps to building up an effective career, whether as contemporary jewelry makers or as designers.

Interviewing the organizers and some of the participants has been useful to understanding the commercial aspect of their program. The organizers’ original intention was to showcase an educational approach that focuses on building up businesses. I do believe that they have a good success rate, and, at any rate, that bringing business skills in art’s educational mix should be embraced by all the institutions designated to educate the future generation of artists. But, apart from Peppercotton—who really are designers with design backgrounds—all the other exhibitors—who have goldsmithing and silversmithing backgrounds—presented ONLY their research works and not their commercial ones. This choice, probably dictated by the need to show to a “traditional” audience something more “usual,” misrepresented the exhibition’s original message a little.

Fashion/design and contemporary jewelry can occasionally yield similar results, but they have different masters. Fashion is a complex system ruled by business; contemporary jewelry is a complex system still mostly governed by peer recognition.

I really would have liked to see what they show in their New York shops as well!

Social activism and activist art are generally not known for having a “gentle touch”—unless one has a social media presence equal to the Dalai Lama’s, a quiet voice is rarely heard. At the same time, overt, heavy-handed messages addressing the failures of society are rarely experienced as “enjoyable.”

Nick Cave’s Soundsuits operate on numerous levels. In performance, they are functional, wearable costumes that charge the atmosphere, creating a palpable, visceral experience that entrances the audience, and a transformative, ritualistic experience for the wearer/performer. As static objects installed in a gallery, they present themselves for inspection—vibrant, totemic sculptures dominating the space. In both contexts they explode with color, tactile invitation, and visual delight.

The Soundsuits are fun. They are fun to look at and fun to be around, which makes for a jarring juxtaposition with their origin story. In her recent article for Hyperallergic, Sarah Rose Sharp describes how Cave first developed the Soundsuits while a postgraduate at Cranbrook Academy of Art as a means to process his response to the Rodney King beating.

Much like Adeela Suleman’s Stainless Steel Helmet with Kettle, Cave’s Soundsuits are energetic constructions worn like armor—both protecting and obscuring the identity of the wearer, granting new power while creating new vulnerabilities. In the face of conflict—unchecked prejudice, unchecked privilege, unchecked rage—one suits up for the challenge, to fight with joy.

Cave’s newest body of work, Made by Whites for Whites—assemblages of found racist folk art objects—is a “visual essay” in a sense, moving deeper into the same issues that inspire the Soundsuits. But even these inflammatory, derogatory objects are dealt with and presented with a sense of delicacy and gentleness; as Cave explains, “It provides me this way of tackling really hard issues, but in a way where I’m taking you by the hand on a journey, where you and I can have a one-to-one conversation. It’s not about me being angry, it’s not about me filled with frustration. It’s just really sort of using these objects as a teaching tool.”

What’s most provocative about Cave’s body of work is the absence of anger. Rage, disempowerment, and deep, deep hurt are transformed into charged, compelling objects, and wearable pieces worn in actual community interaction. Racism, tragedy, and suffering are dealt with in a way that is both intense and subtle, choosing to invite further conversation rather than incite further anger.

“The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.”

I learned to be a cultural consumer as a teenager by following pop music. Each year, one of my favorite singers or bands would produce a new album. I would pore over the cover and dissect each track. I remember admiring “A Good Year for the Roses” on Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue for the way it connected maudlin country music to the history of punk.

By contrast with the immediacy of pop music, my theory stars were all golden oldies—Hegel, Foucault, Derrida, and Benjamin. But then Slavoj Žižek appeared. With rock star regularity, he produced a book a year of blinding theoretical virtuosity, dancing around paradoxes. The Lacanian opener The Sublime Object of Ideology was followed by the Kafka-esque For They Know Not What They Do and led to his book of Hitchcock covers, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan ... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. But eventually Žižek’s perversity began to seem predictable.

It’s been years since I’ve found a new mind to follow. But then last year I was watching on YouTube the lecture at the Google Institute by a spritely anthropologist named David Graeber. I was quite taken at how he addressed the mounting anxiety in the 21st century about debt and our ability to pay it back. He argued provocatively that debt was in fact a natural state, reflecting the web of obligations that holds together members of a society.

I eagerly acquired his book on the subject, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and was taken by his many insights. For instance, the English work “free” comes from the German word for “friend,” as in someone who is free to make promises. And given the rise of debt policing, from student loans to mortgage defaults, Graeber’s critique of capitalism is compelling: “A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”

Graeber is no Žižek. He’s an anarchist rather than a communist, so there’s no grand theoretical system at play. As an anthropologist, his interest is in the plurality of rituals, demonstrating that other worlds are possible.

There is where I find his concept of “social currency” so interesting. He identifies various items that manage our obligations to each other, including the whale tooth, wampum belts, tally sticks, raffia cloth, and camwood. These items are not given to cancel a debt, just to acknowledge its existence.

Jewelry is well suited as a social currency: “the objects used as social currencies are so often things otherwise used to clothe or decorate the human body, that help make one who one is in the eyes of others.” Graeber helped me to think about jewelry not as an individual possession but as an object that circulates between people, forging relationships along the way.

Alas, this year’s book by Graeber, Utopia of Rules, doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor, but thankfully there’s a book on Madagascar in his backlist to explore.

This is part of my studio in Fitzroy, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. It has natural light and looks out on a large ghost gum tree that changes color when the weather changes. The studio is also the front space of my house and, to be fair, my working space extends very often to the kitchen table and living space where I have my computer and library (and coffee) and where a lot of the work is happening as well.

I don’t think my studio reflects my entire working process; searching and finding (collecting, documenting) drives much of what I do and this takes place wherever I am, at home or moving about. My work tends to shift between different media and working methods, so there are times that I am working in my studio more intensively. More recently I have been processing material and images for a new book that will be published later this year, so I haven’t used the studio that much. I think these shifts of place, and the movement between different ways of working, are what sustains my practice.

Installation view of Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo, Sicily, Italy
Museum interior and display design by Carlo Scarpa, 1953

Italian architect Carlo Scarpa was asked to renovate the 15th-century Palazzo Abatellis into the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia of medieval art. Quickly, too, but no shortcuts were taken. He had previous experience with designing museum/exhibition spaces, and his attention to detail can be found in every inch of the spacious and luminous Sicilian palace.

Scarpa’s approach was not just a mere redesign of an interior; it was an intervention, far beyond the usual considerations of atmosphere and light. He also responded to the individual need of each object in the collection—at times almost independently of one another—but with the same level of sensitivity and abstraction. The invention came from these needs being prioritized intuitively, focusing on how exactly an object should be displayed while maintaining the space’s authenticity.

Scarpa plays a game of logic, invention, and respect in all of his interventions, big or small: from the inset walls throughout the space that frame certain works and create depth; the vertical mullions of the modern windows placed thoughtfully between the original columns of the Gothic-Catalan windows; the beautifully designed bronze makeshift columns that hold ancient capitals; the colored wall panel that goes around the base of the stairs; even the handmade hinges that pivot certain paintings to an angle off the wall. Pictured is a marble head on a wooden pedestal placed in the corner of a room. A charcoal-colored wood panel is installed on the adjacent wall, providing a nice frame for the sculpture when viewed at the correct vantage point.

Here there is a lesson, and it’s quite simple: when work (of any kind, jewelry included) needs to go into a room, do not stop short. Do what the object asks, respect the space, consider every angle; there is no need to be sloppy.

In May 2014, Dr. Angelika Nollert succeeded Dr. Florian Hufnagl as the director of what is arguably the world’s largest design museum, the Die Neue Sammlung—The International Design Museum Munich, including its internationally renowned jewelry collection in the museum’s Danner Rotunda. While Dr. Nollert’s early background did not point toward contemporary art and design, her vast experience since has been steadily bringing her closer to her current position.

Dr. Nollert was born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1966. Initially trained in banking, she studied art history, archeology, and German literature at the University of Würzburg and the University of Münster. She received her PhD in 19th-century Netherlandish landscape painting from the University of Münster with a dissertation on the Dutch painter Barend Cornelis Koekkoek.

From 1997 to 2000, she was a curator at Portikus, an exhibition space for contemporary art in Frankfurt/Main, and in 2001 she became project manager of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. Following five years as the project manager for visual arts at the Siemens Arts Program in Munich, she was the director at the Neues Museum, the State Museum for Art and Design in Nürnberg from 2007–2014.

Ursula Ilse-Neuman: Dr. Nollert, I would like to thank you on behalf of Art Jewelry Forum (AJF) for fitting this interview into your very busy schedule, especially after the particularly demanding activities of Munich Schmuck week. It was the first time that you have had such an active role during Schmuck. Can you comment on this experience?
 
Angelika Nollert: Yes, it is the first time that I have been directly involved in Munich, but in prior years I had already looked at the Sonderschau and other jewelry exhibitions in Munich and elsewhere. And it is fortunate that the subject of jewelry was always prominent in Nürnberg as well.

Have the Nürnberg jewelry activities been under your direct supervision, or were they mostly an offspring of the activities in Munich—given the fact that both institutions are closely affiliated?

Angelika Nollert: I have been familiar with jewelry at the Nürnberg Museum of Design as well as the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste). The Nürnberg Academy is a fine arts academy that I have been familiar with for many years since I came from a fine arts background. The Academy curriculum features silversmithing and jewelry; the noted conceptual jewelry artist Suska Mackert is now the professor of the fine arts/gold and silversmithing department. (Suska was previously the head of the jewelry department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.) As a result, I have always associated jewelry with the fine arts as well as the applied arts.
 
I deliberately spent the last seven years at the Nürnberg Museum because it gave me the opportunity to work in both the fine and the applied arts. My academic background at the university was in art history, but I was also active in interdisciplinary fields.

JEWELRY COLLECTION

Do you view jewelry more as art, or as craft?

Angelika Nollert: Both. Author jewelry (Autorenschmuck) emerges from craft but it has to reach a different level in order to be elevated above craftsmanship. Whenever I look at a piece, I first ask when was it made and whether it is representative of its time. Does it have a context with its time or even is it critical of its time? How do the materials express the spirit of the time? Jewelry, in my opinion, should always present a discourse on the cultural situation of its time. One does not have to overinterpret everything, but there is a cultural, social, and political context. Some pieces, of course, express these aspects more distinctly than others. I am especially interested in materials and how they are used, because the materials relate to certain stylistic movements.

You just had your first big acquisition committee meeting—how is this committee run?

Angelika Nollert: It is held once a year. In general you can say that all museums have minimal purchasing budgets. You have to personally generate interest in the field and approach sources in the “marketplace.” We have a very privileged situation here at the Pinakothek. The Danner Stiftung does not have a fixed budget for the museum—the amount of money given varies from year to year. But I have to admit this is an amount other museums can only dream about—a wonderful support which allows us to make meaningful purchases. There is an entire committee, including a representative from the Danner Stiftung, as well as Otto Künzli, Karen Pontopiddan, myself. The membership is not a secret—it also includes the jeweler Robert Smit from the Netherlands, as well as Hans Stofer from the Royal College in London.
 
What are the criteria for accepting pieces into the collection?

Angelika Nollert: There are a host of considerations. A work has to have lasting value. It should still be vital in five years. It has to be of its time, which is true of all design. I am not interested in pieces dated 2015, but which could have been done in 1980. Very important is the discourse with the current period and its cultural context.
 
Another consideration is gaps in the collection, which for example does not include many representatives from South America.

What about new acquisitions into the collection? Do you anticipate any changes in your acquisition policy—will you concentrate on a particular era, country, or continent? Will you continue to concentrate on wearable jewelry, or will you also include videos and other conceptual works—such as Suska Mackert’s—that are about jewelry but not wearable?

Angelika Nollert: One has to be careful there. We already own about 1,000 objects in the jewelry collection—mostly wearable jewelry with a concentration on Europe. We own several purely conceptual pieces, like for example the texts about jewelry by Manfred Nisslmüller. Also some boxes that are purely conceptual and not wearable—but we don’t own very many. I think one has to explain those works through the history of contemporary jewelry. In the future, I would very much want to collect works such as those by Suska Mackert. Galerie Spektrum had a very intriguing exhibition of her work: it contained several works based on newspaper clippings—her Atlas, Ikonen, or Augen—that deploy several layers of meaning. I would really like to give Suska a solo show.

What does your committee concentrate on? Mainly established artists, or also emerging ones?

Angelika Nollert: For one, the focus is on contemporary works. But as in the past, we also consider historic pieces offered through private collections or foundations. For example, in the past, a necklace by Henri Van de Velde, Anni Albers, or Calder have been chosen. I just proposed Tattu de Carla’s concentric rings from the 1970s. These are rare pieces and I would like to acquire them when they appear on the market. Hermann Jünger, of course, I would immediately take additional pieces—but they are rare and the price is high. Calder is much higher, but luckily we have pieces by him already in the collection.

Our aim is to demonstrate the evolution of contemporary jewelry through the collection. But I want to emphasize that historic pieces cannot be collected in depth—just a few examples of important works with which to represent an artist, a style, an era—we have to get them when they are available.
 
Are you interested in computer designed and computer manufactured jewelry? Do you collect it?

Angelika Nollert: Not yet. But this is the exciting thing—where does the journey lead us? This is the question all the craftsmen working in any media will have to ask themselves–not just the jewelers. For example those exhibiting at the Handwerksmesse. There are very exciting developments such as 3-D printing—but you can’t just print out traditional forms, they need to be in a new formal language, in which the forms adequately express the Zeitgeist, not just new techniques.

In your opinion, do these objects still look too mass-produced while trying to masquerade as one-off forms of our time?
 
Angelika Nollert: Yes. I think we are still at the beginning of these developments. My main concern is what object do I want to create, and then what technique should be used to realize it. Especially for jewelry, the form and concept are most important, and I would not want to start with the technique.

Are you going to the Schmuck Sonderschau with the intention of buying works for the collection?

Angelika Nollert: The committee members and I go to the fair for this purpose, and everything is very openly discussed. Everybody has the right to propose pieces—that is the beauty of our collaboration. All ideas are on the table and discussed openly. Also, the aforementioned committee concentrates only on the jewelry aspects of the collection, which makes our meetings effective, enjoyable, and productive.

So there is no strong competition among the committee members since the discussions only revolve around jewelry. At similar acquisition meetings at MAD, we presented pieces from different media, and purchases in jewelry had to compete with purchases in other media such as ceramics, textiles, glass, etc.

Angelika Nollert: Of course, each member pushes their preferences, but overall it’s very amicable and oriented toward one common goal within the jewelry department.

JEWELRY EXHIBITIONS

What is your approach to exhibitions with regard to jewelry?

Angelika Nollert: I have always been interested in crossovers and I look for intersections in fine arts, design, architecture, and even theater (stage) design. The present retrospective of Anton Cepka’s jewelry at the Pinakothek der Moderne is a good example. Cepka is particularly interesting as an artist because his works are so flexible—they fit into a number of different visual arts categories. In addition to the jewelry, his models are highly interesting, as for example his tabernacles. It is especially intriguing that, having come from an Eastern bloc country, he was introduced to kinetic art as well as modern architecture as it was practiced in the West. This reflects my particular interest in observing the subtleties of his Eastern (bloc) and Western artistic sensibilities.

Turning to your famous jewelry collection, what are your future plans with regard to its presentation? Will you continue to show the pieces as individual works of art in the Danner Rotunda cases as they now have been newly conceived by Otto Künzli, or would you be willing to mix jewelry with other pieces in the collection? For example, certain eras or forms in design, photography, painting, or even with such exhibitions as your current one that deals with film and the cinema?
 
Angelika Nollert: I would like to continue to seek out crossovers by combining the jewelry with other art forms, but [as the director of the entire museum] I have to acknowledge certain limitations. For example, we already have a wonderful design collection that has been assembled in a chronological order, and we have plans to combine paintings and photography with design. It is a matter of how to display the works in an intelligent and meaningful way that makes sense for our visitors. At the moment, many ideas are being considered, but we have to take a broad approach and consider all the objects in the collection, including jewelry of course. Nothing is set in concrete yet.

I very much would like to present thematic exhibitions. They are not only more quickly realized, but lend themselves to establishing new dialogues that allow visitors to see familiar objects in a different light and with new perspectives. This can be accomplished in a classical, rather straightforward manner, for example a jewelry theme based according to countries, such as Czech or Scandinavian or American jewelry. Alternatively, organizing the pieces according to decades, a point of view that may not be terribly profound or innovative, but which can nevertheless establish important and stimulating visual and conceptual relationships.

In this regard, during my years in Nürnberg, I set up three specific thematic rooms, and we might do it at the Pinakothek in Munich as well. As an example, the theme of “East-West” relationships comes to mind. This would be an easy, pragmatic idea to realize for our museum: We have a very large collection of works from the former East Germany [DDR] that are perfect for this curating approach. Our intention would not be to criticize or make decisions about “good versus bad,” but to show the richness of creativity on both sides of the border.

In jewelry, an important center in the former East Germany is Burg Giebichenstein in Halle—we thought to make a special case for this school.

We might also consider comparisons between the Western world and Asia. Another important aspect of our collections is the wealth of excellent drawings and working models for jewelry. We should definitely show them in the Danner Rotunda, which has not been done so far. This would be a natural and a good first step in making changes to the jewelry display in the Danner Rotunda.

How do you plan to advance the appreciation and knowledge of contemporary jewelry at the Pinakothek, in addition to showing the permanent collection?

Angelika Nollert: So far, we remain with one big show in March—Cepka, this year—and another one under the staircase, each year with works representing one particular school or academy. This year it was recent works by students from the Hiko Misuno College in Tokyo.

So, for the time being, this plan will remain.

Angelika Nollert: For certain the museum’s major activities around Schmuck in March will remain. This is a platform that I always want to use. But in the future, I would also like to think about exhibitions dealing with different time periods, stylistic eras, or explorations of materials and techniques, as we discussed earlier, and to showcase them during March Schmuck week.

Also, during March week especially, one should further the exchanges with the experts in the field—since so many attend the events. I regretted that there were no panel discussions this year.
 
With regard to future jewelry exhibitions, we have to go over the collection very carefully—we have many strong pieces from many countries going back 100 years. But by no means should we rest on our laurels.

I also consider it important to show work created at respected centers of jewelry because so much of the creative output of these international institutions depends on the personalities of the artists/teachers leading them. For example, the Royal College of London is recognized as a major center for creativity, with professors and students from all over the world. Similarly, the Rietveld Academy, the Munich Academy, and Cranbrook Academy, to name just a very few, where there is an active interchange of ideas and approaches through the exchange of professors and students in what has become a truly globalized field.

Are you going to employ guest curators or consultants who are very knowledgeable about specific aspects of contemporary jewelry, or will you remain with your in-house curators for the collection and jewelry exhibitions?
 
Angelika Nollert: Collaborations with other institutions are very important for public institutions, within Germany and internationally. With this in mind, I find that guest curators from other institutions are wonderful. Otherwise, I am very interested in exhibition exchanges through which you enrich your knowledge and understanding of the field. It would be very interesting, for example, to make an exchange with the Museum of Arts and Design.

COLLABORATIONS—ART SCHOOLS

And this brings me to the theme of collaboration with art academies and art schools. One can show the work of students and their professors; I am even interested in creating a research center. This would be fantastic! We might be able to finance artists and other experts through stipends and allow them at the museum to create new works and hold workshops, for example. We would want to promote international exchanges to encourage collaboration and the stimulating exchange of ideas on various subjects and themes.

When it comes to the influence of leaders in the field, whether directors, curators, or professors, I am struck by the fact that there are now two women in charge of contemporary jewelry in Munich—you as the first female director at the Neue Sammlung, and Karen Pontopiddan, the first woman to lead the jewelry department at the Munich Academy to replace Otto Künzli, who has now retired. Do you think the attitude and approach to jewelry will be influenced by this change of gender at the helm? Will feminism play a larger role?

WOMEN IN JEWELRY

Angelika Nollert: I always think when women work together there is quite naturally a greater awareness of gender issues, an interest I readily acknowledge. It would be interesting to find out how many women jewelry designers there are in various collections, compared to male designers. I am in fact currently collecting statistics on our own collection and have also approached other institutions and academies. We are just at the very beginning of delving into the subject.

I feel that these statistics, although dry, might prove or disprove prejudices or preconceived notions. As to the reality, I believe that women might suggest more women artists to collect, which has been my experience to date. After all, it is human nature to deal more with one’s own gender.

AMERICAN JEWELRY

Forgive the blunt question, but what is your opinion of American jewelry? American jewelers, writers, and collectors have often been disappointed that so few Americans are accepted into the Schmuck Sonderschau. In addition, there are not very many Americans in your collection.

Angelika Nollert: Yes, and we will try to remedy this. We will have Thomas Gentille’s solo exhibition in 2016, but he is just one person and his style has always been well received and very acceptable to the European audience. We also have pieces by Sam Kramer, Art Smith, Margaret de Patta, Arline Fisch, and Jamie Bennett, for example. After hearing Toni Greenbaum’s lecture here at the Pinakothek, we realized there are many other American jewelers to consider. I was a bit disappointed that the Sunday lecture elicited so few questions. The lecture was very interesting for our audience, although I would have liked to have been given some insight into the differences between jewelry on the East and West coasts of America.

I could support acquiring more work by Americans because American culture continues to exert a strong and broad influence on Europe. In this regard, given our restricted funds, I would always begin with acquiring contemporary pieces and then go back in time. But we have to get funds for American jewelry. I would also like to exhibit works that represent the interactions and interrelationships between European and American jewelry.

A strong feature in American studio jewelry is the narrative approach, which has historically been achieved through the collage/assemblage technique and the use of found objects. The appeal of these easily procured, nonprecious objects was often in the stories they told through visual and other nonverbal associations. The reason for this approach in American studio jewelry may be the lack of the long and strong goldsmithing tradition that exists in Germany and other European countries. You could fill some gaps in your collection with such pieces because they are so important for American studio jewelry.

Angelika Nollert: I agree that this is certainly an aspect to which we should give consideration and thought.

Since you are coming from the fine arts—could you interest “fine art” collectors in studio jewelry?

Angelika Nollert: Not that much. Most collectors are already intensely focused on their areas. The collecting activities in the fine arts are already diversified through paintings, sculpture, film, videos, and graphics. Since there are these preferences in these fields, jewelry will concentrate primarily on its own devoted collectors and not necessarily gain new converts from other art forms. However, many collectors I know in the fine arts do have an affinity for design, and many painters and sculptors themselves also collect design. But I am more optimistic about increasing the general public’s interest in contemporary art jewelry. Ultimately, I want to get all these visual arts branches together to become enthusiastic about each other’s work, of course including jewelry artists.

SCHMUCK WEEK

Do you think that the events at Schmuck week will grow even larger? There is some criticism that there are too many events.

Angelika Nollert: The week is naturally overweight. I personally find the more choices, the better—you don’t have to go to everything. It’s like an opera program—I choose what I want to see. And, for that reason, I would never complain that there are too many events.
 
Coming back briefly to collaborations, I want to stress again the unique collaboration with the Danner Stiftung that makes working with contemporary jewelry in Munich so exciting. The Danner Stiftung has always been particularly supportive of jewelry.

Another point I want to stress is the city of Munich itself as being uniquely positioned as the number one jewelry town. For example, I find it interesting that you are personally attending Schmuck each year.

Well, I grew up in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, not far from Munich, but I would go to Schmuck even if I were not from around Munich.

Angelika Nollert: That’s really great!

Coming back once more to Munich as a center for contemporary jewelry activities—the city has had a long and impressive jewelry history. The Handwerksmesse was founded in 1949. It was during a very important time for Germany to establish organizations to put forth new design and craft. In 1959, the first Schmuck exhibition took place, under the talented and enterprising Herbert Hoffmann. This information must continue to be disseminated. Munich’s reputation as a jewelry center also owes a great deal to Hermann Jünger’s long-time tenure here at the Munich Academy, followed by Otto Künzli. Dr. Hufnagl also played a big part, who together with Otto Künzli furthered jewelry at the Pinakothek and founded the Danner Rotunda. There were always specific moments where these personalities played a key role in furthering the field in Munich.

Finally, I would like to repeat: Since we have this huge collection, I would like to pursue the idea of inaugurating a research center.

We are coming to the end of the hour we set aside for our conversation. Is there something you would like to add or state again?

Angelika Nollert: What I find particularly challenging and interesting is to have one’s dreams and align them with the reality of the means with which to fulfill them. There are always many ideas and when you are able to realize them, or at least some of them, it makes you truly happy. In general, what makes me particularly happy about my directorship at the Pinakothek der Moderne is its wonderful jewelry collection. [says this with a big smile]

I realized your enthusiasm in the first few minutes of going through the Cepka exhibition—genuine, unfettered delight. I am sure you will be a strong advocate for the field, and the museum, rather all of us in the field, are fortunate to have you.

Thank you for this interview and until next year.

Apinya Boonprakob is a Thai jewelry artist who holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London, and exhibits internationally. She now works as a professor at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Her current collection of work carefully contemplates the relationship between wearer and jewelry.

Olivia Shih: You hold a bachelor’s in industrial design and a master’s in metal crafts and jewelry. How do the two fields overlap—or not—in your view?

Apinya Boonprakob: I believe these two fields share a common basic knowledge. However, there are also monumental differences in approaching the work. With jewelry, a journey starts inside myself and then bridges to the outside world, whereas the process of industrial design flows in the opposite direction.

Do you think of metal crafts and jewelry in terms of design or art? Or in a space between the two?

Apinya Boonprakob: I make jewelry. I have never intended to put it in any category, either art or design. I just focus on my own topic and work on one after the other. Is it possible to move beyond the limitation of terminologies, and just consider a work as jewelry?

You state that the photographs of women who serve as backdrops to your work “act as a house of jewellery.” Where do you find these photographs, and how do you select them?

Apinya Boonprakob: I accidentally found these photographs in a second-hand market in Bangkok. It surprised me that some of them resembled a friend, a relative, or someone else I knew. For me, it felt like finding my past life, and this is the first reason I bought them. However, the five selected photographs of women in this collection are not intended to be a personal portrait. Rather, they are a universal representation of the woman and her roles in life: as a cherished daughter, a dear friend, a lover, a wife, and a respected mother.
 
As your jewelry moves from the photographed wearer to a real-life wearer, hairpins become brooches, and brooches become earrings. What inspired you to create jewelry that traverses scale, space, and time simultaneously?

Apinya Boonprakob: From reading an interview column about jewelry in a women’s magazine, I found that the owners usually talk about various stories about only one piece of jewelry. This was because that one piece was passed on from generation to generation. Some stories not only mentioned their personal relationship with jewelry, but also included comments from the viewers in their lives. The illustrations showed the changing style according to each owner in each period. That inspired me to make a collection that can whisper the relationship among jewelry, wearer, and, of course, the viewer.

In your exhibition, Something about Jewellery and a Woman, your work awakens feelings of intimacy and deep, personal value. Outside of monetary value, why do you think people choose to place value in jewelry?

Apinya Boonprakob: Perhaps there is a magical quality in jewelry that—once it belongs to you—can bring you back to the past … like a hypnotic effect or a sentimental value. There is one assignment in my jewelry appreciation class (for students whose major is not jewelry design/art) in which I ask my students to present their favorite jewelry and explain why the pieces are meaningful to them. Their stories are always about the relationship between the giver and the receiver, the occasion upon which they received or bought their pieces, or how their jewelry relates to their beliefs. The reasons are always personal and intimate.

In the past few years, the art jewelry scene in Thailand has been gaining momentum and attracting a larger audience. What are your thoughts on art jewelry in Thailand?

Apinya Boonprakob: I am glad to hear that, but honestly I think it is still rather a niche audience. However, everyone involved in the jewelry sector—gallerists, curators, educators, and artists—works hard to promote and catalyze the enthusiasm of the audience and younger generation by providing exhibitions, workshops, competitions, and seminars. There are also collaboration activities with other art fields, which I think is a sign of progress. ATTA gallery has just participated in Photo Bangkok 2015. All in all, I think everything seems to be positive.

Could you name three Thai jewelry artists whose works inspire you?

Apinya Boonprakob: I would rather say that I appreciate works by Tataroschong Sreekullkorn (the head of the department of jewelry design at Silpakorn University), not in terms of artwork but of her work as an educator who has devoted herself to jewelry education in Thailand since 1997. In my opinion, this kind of work is the most beautiful contribution to the jewelry field in Thailand.
I admire Supavee Sirinkraporn for her regular work on research in jewelry and community. Her research is not only a good resource for the jewelry field but also a benefit to her chosen community.

And I also fell for Prayut Sirikul’s jewelry, which is made using a traditional Thai embroidery technique.

Have you seen, heard, or read anything of interest lately?

Apinya Boonprakob: Forest Trees of Southern Thailand, a book by Simon Gardner, Pindar Sidisunthorn, and Kongkanda Chayamarit. I genuinely admire their hard work in collecting and analyzing species of the plants in the southern part of Thailand.

Also, I recently watched the Japanese film Little Forest, by Junichi Mori, and it makes me want to try brewing rice wine by myself … very inspiring.

Thank you.

Index Image: Apinya Boonprakob, photo: Borvol Hongprapasr

Does the sentimentality behind antique hair jewelry simply fade away over time? While the original owners of these objects are deceased and we typically do not know whom the locks of hair belonged to, with some historical context perhaps we can reconnect with some of those feelings. These pieces were initially worn to commemorate a loved one who had passed, but also served as a bond between close relations.

First seen in the 16th century, memento mori jewelry featured imagery such as skulls, coffins, and skeletons that served as an ominous warning of death’s inevitability. In the 17th century, these motifs reappeared in mourning jewelry, but in a less morbid context—as affectionate reminders of cherished relationships. Hair became a popular material for this type of jewelry, and it was initially kept private: It was often hidden under metal, crystal, or glass. Wearing a lock of another individual’s hair inspired an intimate bond that promised a reunion in the afterlife.

Rings were frequently worn as a memorial to the deceased, and they often included hair in their design. This 1772 Georgian Mourning Ring depicts an ancient graveyard scene encircled by weeping willow trees. Sepia ink was used on ivory to render the imagery, and brown hair was crushed into tiny bits and attached with adhesive to the surface. At this time, hair was properly sanitized, and then manipulated into flat images using tools such as tweezers, knives, and curling irons.

In the early 19th century, hair became more of a design focal point, rather than simply remaining hidden behind glass. A lock of hair could function as a mourning piece, a token of love or friendship, or to signify a successful business relationship. In the 1830s, hair began to be shaped into three-dimensional forms using methods similar to those employed in lacemaking. It was pulled downward by spools into a hole in the center of a table, where it was woven or plaited into patterns. Hollow motifs were also realized by wrapping hair around a brass or wooden core, and then boiling it in water. Metal fittings were then added, which helped transform the hair into a piece of jewelry.

Hair as a component of jewelry reached the height of its popularity in 1861, after Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, passed away. She mourned his death until the day she died, and even attempted to communicate with him through séances. At least eight pieces of jewelry were commissioned by Victoria that incorporated Albert’s hair. Victoria’s extended display of mourning launched the mid-Victorian or Grand Period, and set the stage for many pieces of art, clothing, and jewelry through about 1880.

An 1880s Hair Work LyrePendant demonstrates an interest in reviving archeological designs by using a neoclassical motif—that of a Greek lyre. The pendant renders this musical instrument using three strings of twisted gold wire and a convex body made up of woven brown hair. Since the instrument is hollow, it is particularly delicate and lightweight.

The obsession with death and the afterlife that Victorians engaged in ended with the Great War. Their relationship with death changed, as it was often moved into sterile hospitals—it had been common for Victorians to die at home. Many families did not even receive their loved one’s body to bury, and no longer wished to retain physical reminders of the deceased. Life was bleak, and belief in the afterlife dwindled along with the exchange of locks of hair.

A few contemporary jewelers, such as Melanie Bilenker, have revived the art of hair jewelry. She frequently uses her own hair, various metals, and resin to create self-portraits on jewelry. Each design stems from a photograph that records an intimate moment in her daily routine. Antique hair jewelry was first seen as a reminder of the deceased, and was then adopted for more lighthearted design purposes—but in all cases an affectionate bond with the owner was retained. Meanwhile, the connection Bilenker encourages with wearers is voyeuristic rather than sentimental, which marks a more self-expressive phase in the use of hair in jewelry.

Index Image:sumos, Scissors in use

Writing about art (or music) is like dancing (or sometimes singing, or occasionally knitting) about architecture, or maybe football, as once quipped either comedian/art collector Steve Martin, or comedian/artist Martin Mull, or maybe musician/comic actor Elvis Costello, or possibly even experimental satirist/Zappa-esque musician Frank Zappa.

As Louis Bury observes in his review of Gilda Williams’s How to Write About Contemporary Art, this “writing about art” simile—as much as it fails to be attributable to any one source—fails also to fully explain the complexities of producing even the most barely intelligible art writing. It’s not that art can’t be written about, it’s that the people writing about art could be doing it better. The Information Age continues to breed more information consumers, which means a rising demand for content—which in turn means the “/writer” hyphenate is getting passed around fast and furious in order to keep up production and meet that demand.

As Bury himself quotably quips, “When everyone is an artist, everyone is also eventually pressed into service as an art writer.” But just because everyone’s an art writer doesn’t mean everyone is good at art writing—Gilda Williams would no doubt agree that not every writer deserves a trophy for their efforts. Fortunately she wrote a book to remedy just that situation. (And AJF has a place for writers who aren’t just in it for the trophy.)

If everyone is an artist and an art writer, then it follows that everyone is now also a curator—a phenomenon Miya Tokumitsu examines for the New Republic. “Curate” used to be a task that required at least an MFA and a pair of white cotton gloves; it now describes the careful accessioning of materials for one’s Pinterest board or Instagram feed. Once upon a time your local coffee shop offered a “choice” between regular and decaf; now you are presented with “a curated selection” of Ethiopian Cognac Bean, Peruvian Fennel Root, or Tanzanian Birdnut.

Tokumitsu argues this is due to something beyond the mere “prestige appropriation” of the handlebar-mustachioed 28-year-old who owns an artisanal goat cheese shop with a Victrola listening room. Instead, she frames the curation craze as a mass compulsive behavior—a culture-wide psychological impulse to restore order to lives traumatized by economic instability.

After a few deep breaths, those of us who haven’t yet lost a basic faith in humanity remember that many people who use Facebook recognize a difference between Facebook “friends” and “real” friends; by the same token, many of us are capable of recognizing the massive amounts of paperwork that mark the difference between “real” curators and casual social media users. Perhaps we can quell our collective anxiety if we all just accept as fact that we live in a world where everyone is an artist, an art writer, a curator, a critic, and a comedian—then no one should have any reason to feel threatened. Nobody’s special and we’re all geniuses. Eventually, naturally, with the gentle passage of time, the curatorial wave will crest, returning us once again to a regular-or-decaf world that no one feels compelled to blog about.