2Roses studio encompasses 3,800 square feet and has separate areas for jewelry fabrication, lapidary, machine shop, wood working, and design. 

The two views presented here are of John and Corliss’s individual workbenches. The organization or seeming lack thereof is a direct reflection of the overall approach to creating that each artist takes. Where Corliss is very methodical and structured, John is very organic and spontaneous. Our collaborative process brings these two styles of working together to form a creative process that is highly fluid, eclectic, and prolific. On average we have 30+ active projects at any one time, most of which are one-of-a-kind objects.

Projects are worked on in tandem or passed back and forth between the two of us for a specific task, according to our individual skill sets. We often collaborate with others (artists, clients, gallerists, etc) to develop concepts, product lines, and individual forms of expression.

http://www.2Roses.com

Ulo Florack is a German jewelry artist and painter known for sculpting wildly fantastical creatures and characters in his jewelry. Florack studied under Professor Hermann Jünger and Professor Jörg Immendorff, and his work has been exhibited internationally. In 2011, he received the Danner Special Prize. His recent exhibition at Galerie Katrin Eitner gave us the opportunity to talk with him about the origins of Smashed Investment on the Wall.

Olivia Shih: You studied under Hermann Jünger and Jörg Immendorff at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. How has your education influenced you?

Ulo Florack: All that fabulous time spent at the Academy in Munich was necessary to find out what could be interesting or possible, and nearly every discussion with my teachers has been more than a fight.

In a way you lose the ground you’ve been dancing on, but after a while (in my case more than five semesters) you come back with more confidence and try even harder to succeed with your artwork.

So the answer to your question is: The moment you are right on your own track you must follow your own imagination no matter what might happen.

In this exhibition, you will be showing 36 object boxes, with paintings on the exterior and head-like cast objects within. What inspired these microcosmic objects?

Ulo Florack: Sometimes the casting investment was left over after the filling process, so I had two options what to do with it: either to trash it or to use it for a rapid sculpture—you have only seconds left until the investment hardens. That’s a challenge. I really love working under pressure.

The painting on the exterior of these boxes is my way of a re-adoption of the sculptural act.

The title of this exhibition, Smashed Investment on the Wall, sparks images of casting investment, a plaster-like substance, being smashed against the wall in order to free the cast object within. This title could also be interpreted as breaking open and losing an investment, perhaps a monetary or emotional one. What did you mean by this title?

Ulo Florack: Both, socially conscious—wherever you find a major social problem you will discover the ignorant acts of those who plan or decide the investments, so it would have been a shame to ignore this coincidence of wording.

I had to pick up the sign of the times.

You are known for both jewelry and painting, often sculpting fantastical and distorted characters that seem to be distillations of emotion. What do these characters mean to you?

Ulo Florack: It is nearly impossible to explain the process that you call inspiration. Given as a present “from above” after a long and unsuccessful working day, captured in the middle of a scene of completely unknown persons, whenever mind processes are interrupted by visual coincidences—how could I explain something magic?

Do you have a collection of personal fairy tale characters? Can you talk about them?

Ulo Florack: Those characters exist only in the imagination of the imaginer.

You’ve once said that disaster exists in each of the series you create. With enamel, disaster could result from a few extra seconds in the kiln. What disasters did you encounter in making this series?

Ulo Florack: False castings, no more gold to mix my planned alloy, oxygen pressure too low, gas bottle empty, mold cracked and bursting out metal—need more ... ?

Could you please describe a day in the studio for you?

Ulo Florack: Work and work and work. The best days are the ones when commission work is to be done—cash is greeting out of the oven—the casting machine pushes the alloy into the investment—cool down little object—cut off the channels—finish the ring—call the customer—get paid—close the workshop to party with the family—yeah!

Currently, you are working on jewelry sculptures that relate to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Irish period. Could you talk a little bit about this project?

Ulo Florack: For the past 22 years, I’ve traveled to Ireland frequently. The place I live and work there is very near to Youghal, County Cork, where Sir Walter Raleigh was the owner of an estate. He was the mayor of Youghal from 1588–1589, and his house, known as Myrtle Grove, still exists nearly untouched since his time there.

I always felt some big attraction to this quite adventurous person, so I tried to follow the tracks he left during his Irish period. I am a hunting and collecting person, so the artifacts I could get hold of passed obviously into my working projects—this is only the beginning, much more will follow.

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

Ulo Florack: Yasujiro Ozu’s film Der Geschmack von grünem Tee über Reis (The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice).

Thank you.

AJF has decided to begin posting the prices of pieces in the gallery shows we are highlighting each month. For the works in this exhibition, prices are given upon request.

Seulgi Kwon was the Artist Award winner in 2014, and I have to say she has made very good use of this award by participating in numerous exhibitions and events. In fact, I can’t believe she isn’t staying up all night every night with all her obligations! This is just what we hope happens to all our award winners … not the lack of sleep, but the many opportunities! See what she has done, is doing, and thinks about it all.

The AJF artist award also had four other finalists: Attai Chen, Benedikt Fischer, Lauren Kalman, and Heejoo Kim. They were all interviewed last year after they were recognized as finalists. It was a great group of young and very promising jewelers.

Susan Cummins: Congratulations on getting the Art Jewelry Forum Artist Award last year! It has been quite a year for you. Can you tell us about all the shows and events you have participated in?

Seulgi Kwon: Although I participated in several shows earlier this year with Platina gallery at Schmuck and with a pop-up space during SNAG in Boston, I thought I would just list my upcoming activities. Currently 23 pieces of my work are on display in my first US solo exhibition, titled Tender Moments and held at the Reinstein|Ross Gallery in New York. The show was extended through October 17. Also, two of my pieces are on display in the Korea Now exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. This show will remain on view through January 16, 2016. Other shows that I have coming up include The New Textiles: Transformed at Mobilia Gallery in Massachusetts (opening October 24), and a Christmas Exhibition at Tereza Seabra–Joias de Auto in Lisbon, Portugal (opening November 28). I will also participate in SOFA Chicago with Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h and the SIERAAD Art Fair in Amsterdam, Netherlands; the stand number is 45.

How did the winning of the award affect you? How did it make you feel? Did it change your work in any way?

Seulgi Kwon: Awards are a way of encouraging the artist. The experience of winning an award serves as an opportunity to expand their work. It affects them not only financially, but also emotionally, because it gives them “courage,” which inspires the idea of being an artist.  

An honor like this also helps to formulate an artist’s identity and provides positive energy and motivates an artist’s work. The various opportunities afterward, beyond just providing the means to promote the artwork, can become an important milestone in the artist’s life. In that sense, my first solo exhibition at R|R Gallery is a starting point to form the first milestone of my identity as an artist and an opportunity for branching out. Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to the jury and board of AJF.

Can you tell us something about your school—Kookmin University, in Seoul, Korea?

Seulgi Kwon: We were provided with the physical environment as well as emotional support so that we could immerse ourselves in our work. For instance, we could attend the various special lectures presented by renowned artists, which inspired us and enhanced our creativity. Most of these special lectures provided me with fresh air. Much of what I stumbled into was by following my curiosity and intuition, which turned out to be priceless later on. Furthermore, open and honest communication with professors played an important role in navigating our careers in the right direction.

How did you come to be interested in studying jewelry?

Seulgi Kwon: I primarily made objects while I was a student. But objects are limited to a particular place. Therefore I started to interact with other types of works. I started wearing the objects and in this way I started to make jewelry, which was a very simple and easy way to share my story with people.

What is happening now in the Korean contemporary jewelry scene?

Seulgi Kwon: A wide variety of materials and forms are used in the area of metalwork, without being limited to the material of metal. We are occasionally see outstanding pieces by metal and jewelry artists, displaying their own artwork. The area of metalwork is breaking out of its own traditional paradigm as art jewelry. It is coming face to face with the radically changing fashion industry and is looking for ways to have the public value it as contemporary art. Korea has long been seen as a culture where fashion is deeply related to personal identity and people enjoy fashion. Metalwork artists are capable of promoting their own works and the time is ripe for the modern jewelry field to develop under these circumstances.

You just had a show at R|R Gallery in New York. As part of that show, you are exhibiting drawings. How do you use these drawings in your process? Your work is a big surprise to everyone who gets a chance to feel it. It looks like glass but is a kind of silicone and soft to the touch. Can you describe how you make it? Do you blow the silicone as you would glass? Do you use molds, and if so, what are they made from? How do you add color?

Seulgi Kwon: The process begins with my imagination, thinking about nature, and expressing my ideas on the paper with plenty of free-style drawings. It takes me almost two to three days to conceptualize the design. Once I know what the form will look like, I make a three-dimensional structure. The rest of the process includes molding, cooling, washing, and drying. Then the artist in me comes up with intricate ways to give life and meaning to the form by adding colors, by mixing pigments and adding beads, fabric, paper, thread, and other materials to make it alive and extraordinary. Using silicone as the base material is very important, because silicone is simple, soft, and flexible. These properties have helped to make the jewelry a unique work of art with individual character, elegance, and meaning. It is a multistep process to make the brooches and necklaces.

People are fascinated by your forms, often trying to figure out if they are meant to be flowers, marine life, or human organs. Can you tell me more about your forms? What do you intend for them to be?

Seulgi Kwon: Some people recognize in my artwork different motifs, like that of a cell, a human organ, a marine creature, a plant, or a flower. I like that all of these are living, fluid, and dynamic forms. An artist’s concept is to connect art with nature and life. Nature is at the root of many artists’ subject matter and has provided us with infinite possibilities for creation. Many artworks are based on the continuous study and experience of nature.

In trying to create a living organism, I chose silicone because it is flexible, moves freely, and is light and transparent. In the process of making the jewelry, the concept has evolved and transformed into organic movements of plants and flowers with their mysterious colors and constantly changing forms, thus creating a unique, simple texture that corresponds to the artist’s story. I try to show beauty as a sophisticated well-crafted brooch or necklace with rich colors and unique shapes.

Images of plants and flowers have always successfully conveyed an artist’s concept and memories of daily human life. Plants change their forms at each stage of creation, from seeding, sprouting, spreading, and blooming; these stages provide insight into unpredictable organisms and organic forms. Taking this into consideration, Tender Moments shows jewelry that is large enough to reveal the hidden inner beauty of the soft, transparent yet colorful shapes.

What are your inspirations?

Seulgi Kwon: I was inspired to make this work because it allows me to consider my past and think about some of the negative events and reassure myself that things will be better. For example, one of my most treasured pieces, Last Winter, the Sky Torn Apart Poured Down between Dead Twigs reminded me of my father, who had an unexpected relapse and died when I started making this piece. In this way, the abrupt changes in my life have influenced me deeply, like the tree that casts a long shadow over the lake.

What do you expect the future to hold for you?

Seulgi Kwon: I find the process of preparing an exhibition really motivating. An exhibition is not just a means of promoting the artworks, but a critical milestone in an artist’s life. Motivated by my recent shows, I’m planning solo exhibitions in Korea and Europe. I want to show a wide spectrum of my work and also that that I am an artist whose boundaries have been widened through meeting with various artists and students.

What are you reading, seeing, or hearing that you can recommend?

Seulgi Kwon: The blooming and wilting process of flowers is very similar to people’s lives. Just as people get old after reaching their peak at youth, magnificent flowers that grabbed everyone’s attention, too, quietly face the end of their cycle by themselves. I saw an old film recently that I would like to recommend. The film Cherry Blossoms (2008) inverts this process and presents the following question: “Is it possible to be most beautiful at the moment of facing one’s death?” It is the story of an old couple on the surface, which in fact tells about the cruelty and regrets of love from the viewpoint of Rudy, the widower who traces back his wife’s life.

Rudy is on top of Mount Fuji wearing his wife’s clothes to cherish her memories; he performs Butoh dance against the background of cherry blossom petals falling all over the mountain. The dance is so poignantly calm and serene.

Cherry blossoms are so splendid that the Japanese have “floral festival” (Hanami) every year. The way the cherry blossoms wilt is quite a sight as the very thin petals fall one by one, looking like drops of flowers coming down. The cherry blossom flowers bloom so quickly, with such gorgeous color, and then, in no time, only the green leaves remain after the spring rain. It is like the brevity felt at the moment of the utmost beauty that is gone in the blink of an eye. Perhaps the ephemerality and splendidness is why they become an unforgettable memory in our hearts.

Thank you.

While AJF is not multilingual, our readership certainly is, and we often hear how unfortunate it is that our articles are not translated into other languages. We cannot afford to do that—but what we can do, when a piece is supplied to us in its English translation, is publish it in the original language as well.

We are extremely happy for the opportunity to reproduce the following interview of Italian master GianCarlo Montebello in both English and Italian. I would like to thank Eliana Negroni for her tireless efforts to bring this long project to the finishing line. (Please scroll down for the Italian version.)

—Benjamin Lignel, editor

“What is simplicity? A non-manifest complexity.”
—GianCarlo Montebello

GianCarlo Montebello is one of a handful of goldsmiths around the world who is respected both for his own design work and for the design development and manufacturing work he did for famous others. In 1967, he founded the company GEM, which oversaw the production of limited-edition jewelry by fine artists: César, Sonia Delaunay, Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana, Hans Richter, Larry Rivers, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jesús Soto, and Alex Katz are some of the personalities with whom he worked. In 1978, Montebello began designing work under his own name and took part in the establishment of the jewelry department of the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED, European Institute of Design) in Milan. Since then he has set up collaborations with a number of artists, galleries, and collectors, especially in France, the United States, and Japan, and has been featured in countless exhibitions worldwide.[1]

Montebello was with us[2]as we discovered the pieces presented for the 2013 and 2014 editions of Gioielli in Fermento[3]. During these meetings, he revealed his excellent skills of observation, analysis, complicity, and critical investigation, which put the work of each candidate in the context of a world and system of which Montebello is an acute reader and interpreter.

I met GianCarlo Montebello again in February 2015, and in a rich conversation gathered his ideas and thoughts.

Eliana Negroni: GianCarlo Montebello, your attention to thinking about simplicity is well known. I would like to start by asking you what to expect from the quite exasperating multiplicity of formal approaches that exemplify today’s jewelry. Could this multiplication of “languages” obscure the role and function of a wearable ornament?

GianCarlo Montebello: This multiplicity, this diversity in making, is very interesting because, especially in Italy, it is an expression of the great many ways of interpreting a piece of jewelry, or ornament, as I always refer to it. This is for the most part due to the particularity of Italian geography, which is close to the heart of Europe but stretches into the Mediterranean, until it reaches the shores of North Africa. However, it is clear that alongside variety one should not lose sight of quality. By quality I don’t mean an approved, coded method—because this would not allow for freshness, intuition, and the determination by individual thinking—but a kind of responsibility of thought. Above and beyond multiplicity, we first must find out if before the act of making there is the responsibility of thought. Before any making takes place … it is a good idea to reflect a while.

Do you mean that identifying an individual “language” and some of its interpretative keys has to start with the author?

GianCarlo Montebello: A reflection that starts with ourselves is needed regarding our way of making, our way of working, to join our creativity together with our know-how. What our hands create is worth consideration because the mind is the source. To use a different image: We can define our mind as our software and our hands as our 3D printer capable of translating the most subtle of thoughts.

This means taking time for reflection, knowing how to evaluate intention, and pursuing a consistency in making ... The intention is the cornerstone: the intention guides the project.

Is then your advice to work on identifying a certain path and then evaluating with lucidity all that is superfluous, the noise that can scramble the initial intention?

GianCarlo Montebello: In the face of that exasperating multiplicity you mentioned earlier, the fundamental step of a project is to identify the intention. We must focus on it and develop with determination our ability for self-criticism. This is the point: to develop analytical techno-cultural abilities, with a good dose of severity and strictness toward ourselves, avoiding paths and solutions that are more comfortable and reassuring.

The route is strongly individual, because most of the artists we are talking about are self-employed: We are the only ones who get to review and question our own work during its development phase.

As far as my own experience goes: I think of myself as a designer-craftsman, which implies sharing with others. Taking heed of this need of mine, I decided to pare down projects in order to bring out the method, the project itself, as much as the process of execution and quality—where quality means intelligence and consistency of making.

I am mindful of my original intentions all along the project: The formal result should make manifest not only the feature(s) of the project, but also the skills of those craftsmen and women who translated the design into a physical, material object, using various fabrication processes. This is most important to me. The goal is for an excellent synthesis to come out as the result of sharing and reciprocity between design and execution.

This working method comes from the experience I have built up since the GEM[4]years, when contact and collaboration between the most highly skilled goldsmith “jewellers” (orafi “gioiellieri”) played a fundamental role in bringing to life pieces of jewelry—or rather ornaments for the body—out from the perfunctory designs of famous contemporary artists. The whole exercise was made possible by participation and exchange based on respective competence.

If I think back over my experience at the European Institute—it was the 1980s, there was talk of training the designer, the stylist, the creative—I remember I insisted on training “designers” (progettisti) capable of bridging the gap between ideas and their realization. Ideas become thoughts to be built and therefore required for a design to go through the practical environment of the workshop.

Now, as then, I believe a creative talent—as an end unto itself—has no reason to exist without the necessary experience in the workshop. Of course it is useful to acquire vision, knowledge, and wealth from the experience of other designers. Nevertheless, the ability to verify one’s own ideas and projects is only possible after working at a goldsmith’s bench, discovering one’s own abilities in manual skills and integrating them to one’s design abilities. This dual preparation is essential in order to have a greater awareness of the feasibility of the project in its entirety, and a deeper knowledge of the materials, the techniques, and their limits.

Your formative vision of the designer was even then a necessity. Many universities abroad today combine theoretical and practical training, but not as many in Italy. Perhaps at present much of the formative aspect is entrusted to the revolution and the spread of rapid 3D prototyping techniques? A method with which everybody can design and create anything, which results in a cold dichotomy: on the one hand, a proliferation of handmade elements resulting from elementary design techniques that are therefore standardized, even banal, and on the other hand, unimaginable and truly virtuoso products resulting from the genius of digital experts ...
 
GianCarlo Montebello: Exactly. 3D printing is like a wild card: Anyone can do anything. There has been a big pop-style opening up to the technology: Before it was available only to a few within the field of industrial production, and now it is available to all and sundry. I can see the advent of a general and widespread discomfort (in both those who observe, study, and design, and those who look, choose, and wear): “the thinking goes on strike.” This fast-evolving 3D technology may end up being used compulsively as a thing-multiplier to reach consumerist heights never before dreamed of, like slot machines in gaming arcades, and it should come with a warning: Out-of-control use induces addiction and damage.

I would rather the significance of body ornament were not lost, and the quality of the object to be worn were preserved, along with the individual choice of wearing it, of celebrating daily life by choosing a piece of jewelry for oneself.

Today’s rapid 3D prototyping has such an elevated firepower—and a power of saturation … The construction and finishing aspects of fabrication abdicate in favor of fast production, and with them, a main part of the process loses importance. This being the case, it would be interesting to launch an opposite trend, and, say, promote the goldsmith who works on the edge, the jewelry goldsmith.

Since the 1870s, and for a large part of the first 40 years of the twentieth century, the definition of jewelry was “the smallest amount of precious metal to hold the largest number of precious stones possible.” This in turn gave rise to refined constructions and surprising mechanisms for the assembly and disassembly of ornaments, in order to satisfy the various requirements of fashion of that time: It is an excellent period to study and research, in order to perhaps rediscover these refined techniques for new contemporary pieces.

Are the economic obligations of our times probably the element that has changed the directions of our sector in such a crucial way?

GianCarlo Montebello: The logic of industrial production and the concept of low cost feed the voracity of consumerist styles, and possibly carry with them devastating consequences from humanitarian and environmental points of view.

If we go back to your reflections about the present reality on the experimental ornament, doesn’t showing, exhibiting, immobilizing pieces in “static” exhibitions risk distancing them from daily use? Isn’t it a paradox to foster public interest in objects “to wear” by erecting pedestals and installations of all kinds? Doesn’t the tendency to show jewelry like sculpture and make it appear like something else de facto put some distance between all that and the human body?

GianCarlo Montebello: I cannot guess how calculated this phenomenon is, or how aware the ones who do this experimental research are, but I would suppose that this oversizing, the out-of-scale-ness in appearance and exhibiting layout, embodies “the variant.” I suppose that the point is to get artworks and their authors to arouse the curiosity of a specific, prime audience: those who choose luxury jewelry. This is when the exhibited jewel can enchant, surprise, and determine status. I am thinking of people who choose high-carat and highly valuable jewelry in the same way that they could choose highly visible and unusual jewelry.

... Of course it is necessary to understand how to exhibit these pieces to attract the attention of people who are used to something else. Being oversized, and overbudget, relates in this case to how contemporary art is proposed and consumed—and this is where we get back to the matter of training and experience.

Everyone can understand instinctively as well as reasonably how to slip into this “other scale.” I recall my own experience in artist’s jewelry, with established artists who thought of the female body wearing jewelry mostly as a moving exhibition space where they could go oversize quite freely. The artist’s jewelry edited by GEM Montebello was designed by painters and sculptors and therefore went to be displayed in galleries: In the period they were made they were shocking—these were the 60s and 70s—they broke with conventions because they transcended the code of jewelry as a status symbol. Today museums and collectors are interested in these very same pieces.

Does being open to unconventional “languages” and modes of expression mean forgoing, limiting, recoding today’s aesthetic standards?

GianCarlo Montebello: When this happens today we have to call on our awareness, trusting in the sincerity of what we notice and transferring it into our work.

I welcome going beyond conventionality if it demonstrates evolution. However, with regards to experimental jewelry, we have to pay attention to appearances and tags. My work, for example, might seem conventional because I move along the traditional fault line between jewelry and metalwork. We have to develop analytical tools in order to evaluate if a piece shows signs of evolution in its design, and defines a new aesthetic for body decoration.

Sometimes designers’ attention hangs on the necessity of dealing with the physical quality of a piece of jewelry and its powerful front face, while the back must be simply well done. As far as I am concerned, the back side in a piece of work is a consequence of the front side, and this is where quality becomes active, stimulating the project in its multiple aspects of evolution. My bracelet, Double-Face, is an example of this.

Lavishness and richness are profoundly different. Lavishness is the quality which includes fine thought, a clear vision of all parts of the project, with an expertise in execution … a paper necklace by a Dutch artist[5]displayed a few years ago at the Triennale (Milan) had these qualities, and was sumptuously regal. Meanwhile, a large set diamond has its stated proven value as an economic status symbol: It is a demonstration of richness, which is not a matter of aesthetics but rather of basic lack of attention… at least in my personal point of view.

Are we still sensitive beyond the aesthetic concept, to shared emotions, to a shared “language,” to harmony playing the main role when designer and observer, creator and end-user meet?

GianCarlo Montebello: The concept of aesthetics as it used to be understood has run its course and has different prospects today: Its definition should move toward a common and shared thought, more ethics than aesthetics. But I feel a certain inattention and a consequential loss in balance, like we said earlier, a basic lack of attention among new generations, distracted by the quick passing over of previous codes, pushed by what I’d call a futuristic technological leap. An example of this is the undifferentiated use of digital tools and 3D printers to which we unwittingly attribute qualities they do not have.

This sensation reminds me of a complete opposite feeling: the awe I felt during my youth in Paris watching a master engraver of ivory spheres and his extraordinary manual skills. They derived from his inner strength and patient dedication, the outcome of which stood as metaphors for a life rich in the experience of skill and know-how.

This could be the key to recoding aesthetics in East-Ethic[6]and rediscovering a balance in the design of future ornaments, conciliating ancient téchne[7]and new technology.

Today, most of the contemporary jewelry works I see are the outcome of mono-techniques, and this kind of approach is very constraining. Yesterday’s goldsmiths used to join various methods, regardless of whether or not they were applied directly by themselves or by their partners, in order to create what had been designed.

Going back to Gioielli in Fermento, it has been interesting to select and arrange the collection and make manifest several ways of seeing and interpreting ornaments today: The way the collection was built reflects an attempt to identify different research areas, and to understand if the authors recognized themselves in all this.

I would also add: with great interest and almost a sense of complicity, in attempting to identify the original and personal touch, discover what’s striking in each piece[8]...

GianCarlo Montebello: Yes, of course, attempting to find that famous intention!

… and to track different research approaches over time, through the work of artists who have participated in different editions of Gioielli in Fermento.

Thank you, GianCarlo Montebello, for the time you have given us.

ITALIAN VERSION

Conversazione con GianCarlo Montebello
Eliana Negroni

“Cosa è la semplicità? Una complessità non manifesta.”
—GianCarlo Montebello

GianCarlo Montebello è uno tra i pochi orafi al mondo a godere di grande considerazione sia per la propria opera di designer sia per i progetti sviluppati e realizzati per altri autori famosi. Nel 1967, con la sigla GEM, iniziò l’attività di editore di gioielli d’artista: César, Sonia Delaunay, Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana, Hans Richter, Larry Rivers, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jesús Soto, e Alex Katz sono alcuni dei numerosi personaggi con cui ha lavorato. Nel 1978, Montebello iniziò a disegnare e presentare i propri gioielli e in quegli anni partecipò alla costituzione del Dipartimento di Design del gioiello presso lo IED, Istituto Europeo di Design di Milano. Da allora ha realizzato importanti collaborazioni con designers, gallerie e committenze, in particolare in  Francia, Stati Uniti e Giappone, e i suoi lavori prendono parte ad innumerevoli esposizioni in tutto il mondo[9].  

GianCarlo Montebello[10] ci ha accompagnato nella scoperta dei lavori presentati per l'edizione 2013 e 2014 del concorso Gioielli in Fermento[11]. In occasione di questi incontri, si è rivelato un meccanismo straordinario di osservazione, analisi, complicità, indagine critica che ha messo in relazione il lavoro di ogni candidato a un mondo e un sistema di cui GianCarlo Montebello è acuto lettore e interprete.

Ho incontrato di nuovo GianCarlo Montebello nel febbraio 2015 per raccogliere in una ricca conversazione le sue idee e le sue riflessioni.

Eliana Negroni: GianCarlo Montebello, conoscendo la Sua attenzione a riflettere sulla semplicità, vorrei iniziare chiedendoLe cosa aspettarsi dalla molteplicità quasi esasperata di esperienze tradotte oggi in forma di ornamento contemporaneo.  Il moltiplicarsi dei linguaggi potrebbe far perdere di vista il ruolo e la funzione di un ornamento indossabile?

GianCarlo Montebello: Questa molteplicità, questa diversità nel fareè molto interessante, perché esprime specialmente in Italia quella caratteristica intrinseca di manifestarsi in una varietà fatta di molti modi di intendere il gioiello, o l’ornamento, un termine di definizione che preferisco. Ciò è dovuto in massima parte alla particolare geografia italiana, così prossima al centro Europa e protesa nel Mediterraneo fino quasi alla sponda nordafricana. È chiaro tuttavia che accanto alla varietà, non si può prescindere dalla qualità– e per qualità, non intendo una modalità omologata, codificata, perché se così fosse, non ci sarebbe la freschezza, l’intuizione, la determinazione di chi pensa: dunque la responsabilità del pensiero.

Ecco che l'attenzione rivolta alla molteplicità, vuole in primo luogo indagare se a monte del fare, vi sia una responsabilità di pensiero. Prima di ogni fareè bene riflettere.

Quindi una identificazione di linguaggio e di chiave di lettura che deve partire dall’autore?

GianCarlo Montebello: Una riflessione che parta da se stessi, rispetto al proprio fare: il proprio operare, la propria creatività sommata al saper fare. Merita considerazione quanto scaturisce dalle mani perché la mente ne è la sorgente, parafrasando la possiamo definire il nostro software e la mano il mezzo 3D capace di realizzare i pensieri più sottili.

Si tratta di avere un tempo di riflessione, saper valutare l’intenzione, perseguire la correttezza di un fare…  L’intenzione è la pietra fondante, l’intenzione guida il progetto.

Il suo consiglio è dunque lavorare individuando un percorso e poi valutare con lucidità tutto il superfluo, il rumore che possa far disperdere l’intenzione di partenza?

GianCarlo Montebello: Di fronte a quella molteplicità esasperata a cui si faceva riferimento, riconoscere l’intenzione, la pietra fondante del progetto, su quella dobbiamo restare  e sviluppare con determinazione la qualità dell’autocritica. Questo è il punto: sviluppare capacità di analisi, tecno-culturali, con rigore verso se stessi, evitando di “abbuonare” con percorsi più comodi.

Il percorso è individuale, perché la maggioranza degli autori ai quali mi riferisco si auto-produce: ad ognuno fa capo l’investigare del proprio operato durante l’evolversi del progetto.

Relativamente al mio percorso ho sentito di essere un progettista artigiano, che vuol dire condividere con l’altro: ascoltando questa mia necessità ho deciso di spogliare i progetti per valorizzarne sia la modalità, del progetto stesso, che il processo d’esecuzione e la qualità, qualità  intesa come intelligenza e bontà di realizzazione.

Ho sempre curato le intenzioni d’inizio lungo tutto il progetto così che il risultato formale mi fosse manifesto nel duplice intento di rendere visibile la modalità di progetto e, quanto più mi stava a cuore, di  mostrare la qualità di chi realizza trasferendo il progetto nella fisicità delle materie e dei differenti processi d’esecuzione di artigiani, donne e uomini, che cercano di lavorare a regola d’arte. Un risultato finale di sintesi ottimale frutto della condivisione e della reciprocità tra progetto e realizzazione.
 
Questo modo di procedere è frutto della pratica maturata fin dagli anni della GEM[12]in cui è stato fondamentale il ruolo di contatto e collaborazione tra le più alte capacità artigianali - i bravi orafi “gioiellieri”- e dove realizzare i progetti degli artisti nella loro destinazione d’uso di gioiello - o meglio, di ornamento per il corpo - fu impresa di partecipazione e di scambio sulla base delle rispettive elevate qualità.

Ripensando alla mia esperienza all’Istituto Europeo[13]- eravamo negli anni ’80, si parlava di formare  il designer, lo stilista, il creativo – ricordo che insistevo perché si formassero  dei progettisti capaci di coniugare le idee e la loro fattibilità. Le idee che si fanno pensiero per la realizzazione e da ciò far sorgere la necessità del progetto per poi passare all’esperienza della pratica di laboratorio.

Oggi come allora ritengo che il creativo, fine a se stesso, non ha ragion d’essere senza la necessaria esperienza di laboratorio. Acquisire visioni, conoscenze e ricchezze, dalle esperienze di altri designer, d'accordo, però la “prova del nove” per verificare la validità delle proprie idee e dei progetti è possibile solo dopo un’esperienza al banco orafo: scoprire le proprie capacità manuali da integrare alla capacità di progetto è straordinario.

Fondamentale sperimentare una duplice preparazione per avere una maggiore  consapevolezza della fattibilità d’insieme del progetto, la conoscenza dei materiali e l’approfondimento delle tecniche e dei loro limiti.   

La Sua visione formativa del designer era già allora una necessità, molti istituti universitari all'estero hanno oggi una rigorosa impostazione in questo senso, in Italia sono pochi, forse oggi molto dell'aspetto formativo è affidato alla rivoluzione e alla diffusione delle tecniche di stampa 3D? Modalità con la quale tutti possono progettare e realizzare tutto derivandone una dicotomia di pari freddezza: una proliferazione di elementi frutto di tecniche di progetto elementari e quindi standardizzate perfino banali, contrapposte a produzioni inimmaginabili, veri virtuosismi frutto della genialità degli esperti di grafica digitale…?
 
GianCarlo Montebello: Già, la grossa incognita progettuale sul 3D: tutti possono fare tutto, una grande apertura pop di disponibilità tecnologiche prima riservate agli addetti ai lavori individuali o alle produzioni industriali e quanto prima alla portata di tutti indistintamente.

Intravedo un grande disagio (un disagio generalizzato, tanto da parte di chi osserva, studia e progetta, tanto da parte di chi si ritrova ad ammirare e scegliere di indossare), direi: “lo sciopero del pensiero”.

Questo virtuoso strumento 3D se usato in maniera compulsiva come moltiplicatore per il raggiungimento di vette consumistiche mai sperimentate prima, mi fa pensare alle slot machine nelle sale giochi: si dovrà informare che un uso del 3D fuori controllo crea dipendenza e produce danni.

Vorrei non si perdesse il significato di ornamento della persona – la qualità dell’oggetto dedicato al corpo - la scelta di indossare un gioiello, per se stessi, di trattenere un segno che ritualizza il quotidiano.

La prototipazione rapida in 3D, ha oggi una tale potenza di fuoco - e di saturazione - dove gli aspetti costruttivi e le finiture dell’ornamento abdicano per velocizzarne il risultato, e così una parte significativa del progetto cade. Stando così le cose sarebbe interessante innescare la controtendenza e ricercare il maestro orafo che lavora a filo, l'orafo gioielliere. Sin dagli anni settanta dell'800  e poi per buona parte dei primi quarant’anni del '900 per gioielleria, si intendeva il minimo impiego di metallo nobile per trattenere il maggior numero di pietre preziose,  e ciò diede  luogo a fini costruzioni e sorprendenti meccanismi di scomposizione e di ricomposizione degli ornamenti a soddisfare le varie necessità dell’abbigliamento e delle situazioni: eccellente sarebbe studiare e riscoprire questa tecnica raffinata per nuove opere contemporanee.

Il vincolo economico della nostra epoca, è probabilmente l'elemento che ha spostato in modo determinante le direzioni attuali del nostro settore?   

GianCarlo Montebello: Le economie di produzione ed il concetto di low cost, porteranno a conseguenze pesanti sia ambientali che umane, e sempre più svilupperà la voracità degli stili di consumo.

Tornando alle riflessioni sulle realtà attuali dell'ornamento di ricerca, esporre, esibire, immobilizzare le opere in mostre "statiche" non rischia di allontanarle dal requisito di uso quotidiano? E' un paradosso interessare il pubblico a oggetti "da portare" erigendo piedistalli e installazioni di ogni genere per consentirne la fruizione, la tendenza a mostrare sculture che appaiono come altro, di fatto allontanando tutto ciò dal corpo?

GianCarlo Montebello: Non posso valutare quanto di calcolato ci sia, quanta consapevolezza ci sia da parte di chi fa lavoro di sperimentazione: l’ipotesi può essere che l’oversizing, il fuori-scala di forma e relazione espositiva, che tali tendenze nell’ornamento di ricerca incarnino “la variante”, ponendosi l’obiettivo di destare la curiosità di destinatari di fascia alta del gioiello. Ecco che allora il gioiello esibito può affascinare, stupire, determinare status. Destinatari che indifferentemente accedano al gioiello di altissima caratura e preziosità, come al gioiello ad alta visibilità e fuori dagli schemi.

…Certo bisognerebbe capire come esibire queste opere per attirare l’attenzione di chi è abituato ad altro, oversize, overbudget - pensiamo a come oggi l’arte viene proposta e consumata - e qui torniamo a un discorso di formazione ed esperienza.

E' intuitivo, oltre che ragionato, capire come inserirsi in questa “altra scala”, e mi ricollego all’esperienza del gioiello d’artista ad opera di autori ora storici, che pensavano il proprio gioiello per il corpo femminile non come tale, bensì come uno spazio espositivo in movimento: l’artista poteva andare “fuori scala” liberamente. I gioielli d’artista editati dalla GEM Montebello erano di pittori e scultori e giocoforza venivano esposti nelle gallerie, per il tempo in cui sono stati fatti sono stati dirompenti, erano gli anni ’60 e 70 di rottura con le convenzioni d’allora, perché trascendevano la codifica del gioiello come status sociale; oggi quegli stessi pezzi sono d’interesse per i musei e i collezionisti.

Essere aperti a linguaggi ed espressioni non convenzionali significa rinunciare, limitare, ricodificare canoni estetici contemporanei?

GianCarlo Montebello: Per quanto accade oggi, occorre chiamare in causa  la propria consapevolezza,  confidando nella sincerità di quanto avvertiamo e saperlo trasferire nel nostro lavoro.

Ben venga il superamento del convenzionale se è segno di evoluzione. Tuttavia, riguardo all’aspetto della non convenzionalità nella ricerca, bisogna prestare attenzione alle apparenze e alle etichette: per esempio il mio lavoro potrebbe sembrare convenzionale perché mi muovo nel solco canonico dell’oreficeria e della metallurgia. In questi casi occorre sviluppare un’attenzione e capacità di analisi per valutare se il determinato pezzo reca segni evolutivi di progettazione, che ridefiniscono nuovi percorsi est-etici di decorazione della persona.

Poniamo questo: talvolta l’attenzione si sofferma sulla necessità di affrontare la qualità fisica del gioiello e la sua prestanza di facciata, mentre il retro viene liquidato con un ottimo dal punto di vista tecnico.

Per quanto mi riguarda il retro è la risulta del suo fronte: ecco allora la qualità diventare attiva, stimolare il progetto nei suoi molteplici aspetti di evoluzione. Faccio qui riferimento ad esempio a un mio lavoro, il bracciale Double-Face (vedi foto).

E ancora, profondamente diverse sono la fastosità e la ricchezza. La fastosità è la maestria che comprende finezza di pensiero e visione d’insieme unitamente alla perizia d’esecuzione,  un ornamento come il collare di carta - di una artista olandese[14] esposto alcuni anni fa alla Triennale - possedeva  questi requisiti di fastosa regalità, al pari un grande diamante incastonato giusto per il suo valore di status socio economico riconosciuto. Si tratta di una manifestazione di ricchezza, non è questione di estetica ma di una intrinseca mancata attenzione, questo è il mio personale punto di vista.

Dunque possiamo essere tuttora sensibili oltre il concetto estetico, a una emozione condivisibile, un linguaggio comune, una sintonia a cui è attribuito il ruolo principale nell’incontro tra designer e osservatore, tra autore e destinatario?

GianCarlo Montebello: Il concetto di estetica come la si intendeva ha fatto il suo corso: oggi il suo divenire è forse l’Est-Etica, più etica che estetica, per un pensiero comune e condivisibile. Constato disattenzione e  una conseguente caduta di equilibrio, come detto poco sopra, la mancanza di attenzione, in generale, e che subiscono in particolare le nuove generazioni, tutti distratti dal repentino superamento dei canoni precedenti, sospinti al balzo tecnologico - direi futurista - già presente tra noi. Ne è un esempio l’uso indifferenziato degli strumenti digitali e delle stampanti 3D, ai quali inconsciamente attribuiamo qualità a loro sconosciute

Questa sensazione mi riporta a un sentimento di reazione inversa, l’inquietudine che mi provocava osservando, negli anni giovanili a Parigi, un maestro intagliatore di sfere d’avorio, e le sue  straordinarie qualità manuali, dovute alla forza interiore per la necessaria pratica della pazienza con cui vi ci si dedicava: il risultato era nelle sue opere, intese come racconto di uno dei possibili modi di vivere una intera vita immersa nell’esperienza del proprio saper fare.

Qui potrebbe esserci la chiave per superare ostacoli ideologici e ricodificare l’estetica in Est-Etica[15]ritrovando così un equilibrio per ottenere il risultato prefigurato durante la progettazione dei prossimi ornamenti, riconciliando antiche téchne[16] e nuove tecnologie.

Oggi la maggioranza dei prodotti sono frutto di mono-tecniche, questo tipo di approccio è molto vincolante, l’orafo di ieri univa varie esecuzioni, indipendentemente che le applicasse direttamente o che si avvalesse di altri, in un sistema di abilità differentemente dosate per realizzare ciò che si prefissava.   

Tornando a Gioielli in Fermento, è stato interessante sistematizzare la collezione e rendere una visione d’insieme sui tanti modi diversi di intendere l’ornamento oggi: anche nel tentativo di identificare aree di ricerca di natura differente, e con il tentativo di capire se gli stessi autori vi si siano riconosciuti.  

e aggiungo, con l’interesse e quasi una complicità nel cercare di individuare il tratto personale, scoprire cosa colpisce del singolo lavoro[17]...

GianCarlo Montebello: sì certamente, cercando di intuire la famosa intenzione...!

… e svelare  le singole esperienze di ricerca, spesso ritrovare un percorso tracciato nelle edizioni che si susseguono, nel linguaggio individuale degli autori che hanno lavorato in tempi diversi al progetto.

Grazie GianCarlo Montebello, per il tempo che ci ha dedicato.

Sculptor Peter Rockwell in his studio in Monteverde, Rome, with a photo of jewelry he had made in the 1960s.

The first piece by Peter Rockwell that I had seen in person was a necklace. More specifically, the part that he had sculpted was a pendant: a ghoulish dark green face, silly and grotesque. It hung from a long, shiny gold chain. It was exhibited in the Tiny Biennale, a big group show of work no larger than a few inches squared. Each artist could only submit three works, but I heard a rumor that Rockwell found a loophole by having some of his friends wear a few more necklaces to the opening. Clever, I thought. I later visited his studio to talk more about the jewelry that he has made periodically throughout his career. I asked how he considered the jewelry amongst his other work, if they’re equal in his view. “Yeah, why not?” he said. “I mean, they are sculptures, you know.” He elaborated about the necklaces with acrobatic figures and peculiar faces pictured beside him, one of which was featured in an exhibition of jewelry by contemporary artists in the 1960s. This, he supplied, was “the only thing I’ve ever had in a New York museum.”

Lessons tracks a small roster of AJF contributors as they look, shoot, and reflect on what they see. Our first guest reporter is Kellie Riggs, who finds inspiration in meeting artists, hearing them talk, and, in one instance, discussing the watch of their dreams.

Moniek Schrijer is a jewelry artist hailing from New Zealand. With a background in printmaking and jewelry, Schrijer experiments with the intersection of the two fields through a humorous lens. Pearl Ear, her exhibition at Masterworks Gallery, is the culmination of her work as the 2015 Françoise van den Bosch Foundation Artist in Residence at Studio Rian de Jong.

Olivia Shih: Could you talk a bit about your background, where you were born, where you live now, and how you came to be a jewelry artist?

Moniek Schrijer: I was born in Lower Hutt, a suburb of Wellington. Currently, I am living in Island Bay, which is the rugged south coast of Wellington City. My first influential experience of art jewelry was in 2001, an exhibition at The Dowse Art Museum titled Grammar: Objects and Subjects, which absolutely captured me. So I decided to study contemporary jewelry design at Whitireia New Zealand, but back then it was only a one-year diploma, so I continued on with life, working at a metal art foundry. And exploring the world throughout this time, I kept thinking “jewelry,” so in 2011 I decided to return to New Zealand to study jewelry further. Since then I have never looked back.

This exhibition showcases work you created during your 2015 van den Bosch Foundation artist residency in Amsterdam. Each piece contains traces of iconography from the Netherlands and from New Zealand, where you’re from. Is your work often rooted in a sense of place?

Moniek Schrijer: I do not usually make work informed by place, but for this residency I wanted to explore national icons, so it has become an element of the work. It just happened.

Could you tell us more about your residency and how you translated your experience into physical objects?

Moniek Schrijer: Before I left for the Netherlands, I researched and sourced materials that I thought I would like to work with in Amsterdam. This enabled me to arrive, create, and explore the city. New ideas then developed over the two-month period while in residence at Studio Rian de Jong.

It was the beginning of summer and I spent a lot of time outside and visiting museums, so I was constantly being inspired. The workspace was within the apartment so I could make jewelry at my leisure.

Your work is often an alchemy of materials and a fusion of the two-dimensional aspect of printmaking and three-dimensional techniques of metalsmithing. What draws you to this kind of experimentation?

Moniek Schrijer: Experimentation within my multidisciplinary practice allows for new ideas to form. I like to explore connections and disconnections between media. The flat plane allows for different thoughts to be expressed that the third dimension cannot offer, and vice versa.

There is a quiet humor to your jewelry. Instead of Vermeer’s pearl earring, you offer the pearl ear. Instead of flowers in a Hawaiian lei, you string together porcelain clogs in a similar fashion. How does humor function in your work?

Moniek Schrijer: If you get it, you get it … got it?

The art jewelry field has been flourishing in New Zealand in the past few years. Could you share your views on the state of art jewelry in your country?

Moniek Schrijer: It’s continually growing. We have such a rich and strong sense of community, thanks to the pioneers of New Zealand contemporary jewelry for installing this ethos.

Do you have advice for young jewelers embarking on their careers?

Moniek Schrijer: Keep making, explore and follow your own truth, get a day job.

Have you seen, heard, or read anything of interest lately? Could you share a few with us?

Moniek Schrijer: Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky.

Visually stunning and uniquely designed, this wondrous book captures 50 islands that are far away in every sense—from the mainland, from people, from airports, and from holiday brochures. Author Judith Schalansky used historic events and scientific reports as a springboard for each island, providing information on its distance from the mainland, whether it’s inhabited, its features, and the stories that have shaped its lore.

Thank you.

AJF has decided to begin posting the prices of pieces in the gallery shows we are highlighting each month. The price range for the work in Pearl Ear is $50 to $1,500.

“I’m very worried about my body.”

—Ted Pikul

This is not a movie review. This is sort of about the objects in David Cronenberg’s movie eXistenZ. This is definitely about my weird relationship to creepy facets of biology, and how that somehow relates to a lot more of contemporary jewelry making than you might imagine.

Any information pertaining to the movie itself will be strictly incidental, I promise.

As a thirtysomething, I’ve officially become nostalgic about cultural flotsam and jetsam that bears the hallmarks of my teen years. For this reason, I have rewatched this most 1999 of movies again, to try to talk about it as a jewelry maker so that I can retroactively legitimize an influence from my formative years that I’m sometimes conflicted with. Let me unpack my love/shame for you.

First, if you doubt that this is the most 1999 of movies, please consider the following information:

•    It is set in a world in which video games are ruining reality with meta versions of virtual realities within virtual realities.
•    It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh (duh) set to maximum girl-power as the world’s leading video game designer with scene-change defining hair textures to make sure you know when you’ve sunk “deeper” into the game. (Why didn’t Inception make better use of this hair-time continuum?)
•    I’m pretty sure Daria was responsible for wardrobe.
•    It has a pre-creepy Jude Law playing a dude ingenue. Whatever.

Now, it must be itchingly, burningly obvious that Cronenbergian body horror is firmly up my alley. (Or maybe it is overflowing from a derelict dumpster in a corner of my alley, really stinking up the place, but sort of just part of the terroir at this point.) I have a very personal agenda investigating the flaws in the biological world, and picking at a simplistic idea of an idealized, benign, and “classically” beautiful version of nature. My interest, in particular, is in the inevitable failure of biology, its frailty and fallibility, that runs contrary to the misleading culturally ingrained idea of a “perfect” body. (Or maybe I just rubbed too hard against the friction between second- and third-wave feminism on the trajectory through art school.)

This interest in appropriating, subverting, and reclaiming the body is something I have in common with a lot of other artists and makers in our field. Masumi Kataoka, Masako Onodera, and Lauren Kalman are just a few names that could arguably be placed in this camp, too. Contemporary jewelry has so efficiently outgrown every attempt to define it that it now lies sort of amorphously over the surrounding turf of “intimacy,” “process,” and “preciousness,” where the body is content rather than just context. We invoke it when we add “brooch,” “ring,” or “neckpiece” to a caption, even when a piece is documented in a neutral white void and destined for a museum shelf. Contemporary jewelry is intended to be consumed sensually, even if it is only an imagined and unrequited interaction.

Because of the current formality of display and restrictions with regard to interaction, eXistenZ is my own personal hot fudge sundae of fleshy and turgid practical effects. Hypersexualized biotech protuberances serve as hardware to a video game interface that slurps and glorps in and out of people like a sex toy trade show. The users are tethered by an Eva Hesse-like umbilicus, and the game console looks like an animate Fleshlight—veiny, wiggly, and covered in mucus. A specially designed orifice on the lower back of the user is gingerly daubed with Chapstick before insertion, in what can only be described as “buttplugesque.” However, as the two protagonists sink into layers of games within games, new versions of biotech manifest themselves to show a progression leading to a sort of pocket-sized insertable that splorches straight into those surgically installed sacral sphincters. All of this slurping and plopping was deeply satisfying, in a really terrible scab-picking sort of way. Were gene-splicing my process and lab-grown tissues my medium, I’d like to think I’d come up with something similar, and I know I would not be alone.

INDEX IMAGE: Technicians in the workshop construct various versions of the game pod, eXistenZ, 1999, image courtesy of Entertainment One, photo: Ava V. Gerlitz

Within our field, which is at its core diverse, there is often a certain set of assumptions on what makers in the field “make”: the wearable object, the handheld object, the adornment object, the commodity object. In this text, and another two short essays, I will investigate emerging makers whose practices conjoin the methodologies of jewelry with wholly installation-based work. They do not address wearability or function on the body, but rather the body itself in space. Their practices, diverse in intent, all circumvent the age-old conversations around the function of jewelry on the body and address instead the cues of space, architecture, and subtlety of perception: How this particular body of ours interacts with space and surface, and how engaging in installation imparts knowledge of bodily experiences that wearable work could not.

Julia Heineccius’s recent exhibition, Divisible, installed at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, Washington, late last year was a significant stride in her practice. Heineccius’s prior object-based work is strongly embedded in the interaction of form and surface. The transition from plane to volume, and the materiality of texture, color, and reflection, are so significant to her pieces that one tends to wrap oneself around the tactility of surface before even noticing there is something vaguely “tip-of-the-tongue” familiar about her forms. A brooch from 2012, Coil 2, for example, is formed from thick copper wire, subsequently rose gold-plated to create a wholly new and lustrously crafted object. Yet the piece so much resembles a segment of flexible metal conduit that one unconsciously absorbs the internal conversations of the commonplace within it: construction, utility, materials of function. As in much of Heineccius’s past work, this object is built from a post-industrial language later skinned with notions of the decorative.

Her most recent show, Divisible, replaces the conversations of adornment, the decorative, and “objecthood” with investigations into perception, subtlety, and the body. A net of fine silver wire is suspended from the gallery walls, hovering just overhead and slightly above the natural line of sight. The surface of the wire netting is so slightly delineated that your first recognition of it is its shadow, then a mere glinting from the polished surfaces as you move beneath the lights. Your body displaces the air in the gallery and the net trembles.

The installation divorces itself from conversations of the handheld object, and commands attention to that which we often ignore: glossed-over spaces that lie just beyond our line of sight, the scale of our body under a looming shroud, the vibration of the air as we force our bodies through space. The lightness of the connection between our physical form and the gallery space becomes poetic; the further we progress into the space, the more we unknowingly begin to participate in the work itself.

Like Heineccius, many current emerging makers are approaching the body in an interdisciplinary context, utilizing the methodologies of jewelry in formats that expand far past the boundaries of traditional practice. What, then, is the value of installation-based works like Divisible for contemporary jewelry? Taking the knowledge of body, form, materiality, and wearability inherent in jewelry, works like Divisible allow us to develop deeper dialogues within our field. These installation-based works demand physical action from the body itself: to navigate and perceive that which is rooted in the brief experience of space. They foster our ability to understand movement and vision in ways that wearable work could not; they do not address their “objecthood” through the ability to be placed on the body or integrated into the daily activities of an individual, but rather through a fleeting encounter with a modified space. Bodies are more than forms to place works onto or suspend works off of, they are objects of motion, experience, perception. “The body is our general medium for having a world,”^[1]and our worlds are comprised of more than the adornment, decoration, and objects that revolve around us. Installation-based works such as Divisible allow us to develop our bodily knowledge of the countless unexpected subtleties that having (and being) a body constitutes.

INDEX IMAGE: Julia Heineccius, Divisible (or dear A, dear M, dear E, dear S, dear I, dear P, … ) (detail of constituent parts), 2014, installation, silver, 457 x 152 cm, photo: artist

This summer, the Estonian jewelers belonging to the group õhuLoss/Castle in the Air exhibited their work in Haapsalu, a small seaside town in the western part of Estonia. The proposal came from the Evald Okase Muuseum, a private museum dedicated to the life and work of the well-known Estonian artist Evald Okas (1915–2011). The two-story house in the idyllic town of less than 10,000 residents used to be an art school for children before it became a museum, so the venue has a long cultural tradition. Piret Hirv, Kristiina Laurits, Kadri Mälk, Eve Margus-Villems, Villu Plink, and Tanel Veenre have been exhibiting as a group for 16 years (at the beginning, Katrin Sipelgas was involved, but she has by now chosen a different path). The exhibition, their seventh in Estonia, and curated by the jewelers themselves, was displayed on the first floor of the house, in one large room and a smaller one. The six artists exhibited artwork created mainly in the last four years, including new pieces that have never been shown before in Estonia. Kadri Mälk also included some works from the 1990s. Altogether, almost 90 pieces were on show. õhuLoss has never exhibited in Haapsalu before, and it was their intention to give an overview of their recent work. The exhibition design was developed together with the architect brothers Lembit-Kaur Stöör and Ülo-Tarmo Stöör.

There has always been something mysteriously and captivatingly dark about Castle in the Air. Not only because of the person central to the group, Kadri Mälk, and her inclination toward the more romantic, poetic, and dark side of the world. Not only because of the colors of the materials they use, “intensifying to dark brown and black,” as Rüdiger Joppien has pointed out,[1], but also thanks to a certain unspoken knowledge of “the real things” that the group seems to share: things that really matter, that have true value. This mystical world comes alive in their brooches, necklaces, rings, and objects.

In the Evald Okase Muuseum, their jewelry was placed on fragile-looking but carefully arranged constructions of burnt wood, black and dark brown, gleaming in the daylight. Boards of different length, chairs with legs missing or holes in them: the remains of a fire. Amazingly picturesque and at the same time simple and not too “loud” for the work of the most well-known jewelry group in Estonia. After a fire, people start building up again, and that’s exactly what Castle in the Air did—they built a new castle. A dark and poetic one. Perfect in its imperfection.

“Burnt wood or to be more precise, an object made of burnt wood stands for destruction, fragility, the evolving of something new, the exposure of the important. And in addition, fire is an important tool for jewelers and blacksmiths,” says Lembit-Kaur Stöör, one of the architects involved in the exhibition design.[2]

One of the highlights of the exhibition is definitely Kadri Mälk’s necklace The Finishing Angel, exhibited in Estonia for the first time. The piece seems to have been made exactly for this particular environment. It’s exhibited alone on a wooden board that’s supported by a chair and another board. The fragility of the construction and the mysterious strength of the necklace create a beguiling combination. In the last few years, she’s been working on a new theme—the testament. “I still do as I’ve always done. If something pains me, interests me, I detangle it in my artwork. To see what’s inside. Like cutting open the stomach of a teddybear,” she wrote to me.[3]

One exhibitor, Villu Plink, is often less of a jeweler and more of a conceptual artist. His two objects, Successes and Failures, consist of fragments of paintings from 2000–2015 exhibited in Plexiglas containers on window sills. He’s recycling paintings, like he’s done before. In an exhibition in Tallinn nine years ago, he turned more than 50 paintings from 1996–2006 into seven sculptural objects. Plink’s conceptual objects are in intriguing contrast to many of the other artists’ more jewelery-like pieces displayed. And yet, his objects don’t disagree with the mindset of the rest of the group. They work well together, six individuals creating a whole.

õhuLoss brings to mind an old saying: “You have the clocks, we have the time.” The jewelers of Castle in the Air are the ones who have the time. Time to build up a new castle after the fire. And then another one. Their newer work shows a continuous evolution: Piret Hirv continues her elegant handling of silver in two new brooches called A Straw, Tanel Veenre shows for the first time in Estonia his wood pendants Heart Studies, continuing with heart-themed jewelry. They haven’t taken revolutionary steps in this exhibition, they move forward calmly and constantly. As per their usual practice, the exhibited artworks have not been dated. “This century and last century!” Kadri Mälk has said.[4]“The more basic the subjects are, the less visible the time,” Piret Hirv added.[5]

In 2016 the same selection will be shown in Putti Gallery, Riga, Latvia.

Earlier this year, Mia Maljojoki, a Munich-based jewelry artist, spent 24 hours in a Munich subway station “performing” in a project called 1000 Stardust. What started as performance art has now been made over into a window installation at Galerie Spektrum in Munich. 1000 Stardust explores the concept of the equality of every human being and our common roots: we are all one. Here, Mia talks about the project, what she learned, and her inspirations along the way. You can also read an earlier interview with Mia about her exhibition called Life Is Juicy—How Fragile Is Your Day, which was held at Galerie Spektrum as well.

Bonnie Levine: Your current installation at Galerie Spektrum, 1000 Stardust, started as an urban performance for 24 hours in the Münchner Freiheit Underground Station in Munich earlier this year. Tell us about the project and how it came about. What was the significance of 1000 Stardust? What role did jewelry play?

Mia Maljojoki: The cultural department from the City of Munich asked me to make a proposal for a project for a public space. I proposed 1000 Stardust—Everyone matters. Everyone counts. Each soul has an important role to play in the tapestry of life. It is a site-specific project for the city of Munich and the Münchner Freiheit Underground Station. It is for and about the people that live in the city of Munich. It is about the equality of all of us, no matter where we come from and what we look alike. It is also a 24-hour project that reveals what happens in the city metro station during 24 hours.

In terms of the jewelry, the Stardust pins are laser-cut stainless steel plates. They exist in three different skin tone colors, and they glow in the dark. They are numbered from 0001 to 1,000. Together as a whole, they seem the same, but once picked up and worn, they become individuals creating their own paths with their wearer.

Describe the 24 hours and what happened during that time. Did it accomplish what you hoped? How do you assess that?

Mia Maljojoki: I was in the subway station with one other performer, Monika Gomis, and a photographer, Conny Marshaus, who filmed the full project. It was a place in constant motion with people moving quickly. Our plan was to “perform” a live 24-hour daily routine, like having a sign “EAT” and we are eating there, and to offer our Stardust pins to passersby on a silver plate so they could take one. But it was interesting—people wanted to talk with us and tell their stories and have long discussions. There were so many opinions about the equality of humans that my project was very political—my first ever political project. I could not agree with some of the opinions at all, but lots of them were positive.

Also, being awake for 24 hours in a public space was very demanding on my body. It made me think about people who have many jobs and hardly have time to sleep. We saw morning people rushing to work and back later; evening was more calm; and some daytime visitors came back to have a longer look and talk with us.

It is impossible to prepare yourself to do a 24-hour performance project. I have done a six-hour performance in public before, but this was heavy on my body and it was hard to actually stay awake that long. But for me the heaviest part was the negative reactions people had about the equality of humans. It was an interesting project that took over during that 24-hour period. I would love to do it again but in another country.

How is your current installation at Galerie Spektrum, 1000 Stardust, similar to and/or different from the performance in the underground station?

Mia Maljojoki: For Gallery Spektrum I have built a window installation. It is very different from the underground performance presentation. At the moment this project does not need me to be there. It stands by itself and becomes actually more of a commercial design presentation where a pin can be purchased for 15 euros. There are still some left!

I’ve read that Professor Otto Künzli and jewelry designer Helena Lehtinen were your mentors early on. How did they influence your work and what did you learn from them?

Mia Maljojoki: Simply I have learned patience and trust—patience meaning slowing down to give myself space and time to really finish a piece and project, and trust of my own way of developing and moving through from the beginning to the completion of each project’s journey.

You’ve said that jewelry is a powerful form of social interaction made solid. Can you elaborate on this? Does this idea relate to 1000 Stardust?

Mia Maljojoki: Yes, it does. Stardust pins are three different tones of skin color. They refer to us, humans. They are solid, wearable reminders of the idea of human equality.

Over the years you’ve created several bodies of work using different materials and techniques—some more refined, some seemingly unfinished, all very different from each other. Are there common themes that you explore in these different collections?

Mia Maljojoki: My themes come from everyday life of the present. Once I have an idea, I search for the most suitable material to represent it. This is the reason I am not attached to one material. I also do not need to know how one should work with my chosen material. I enjoy “making friends” with it, and discovering new ways to work with it. This is a very important part in my work.

Quite different from these bodies of work are the jewelry collections you’ve designed for Marimekko, the international Finnish textile and clothing design company. This jewelry is more geometric, organized, patterned, and structured, like the clothes. How did you come to be associated with Marimekko? What’s the inspiration behind this work? Is it different from the themes you explore in your other projects?

Mia Maljojoki: Marimekko contacted me in 2011, asking if we should try to collaborate. They sent a big box of fabrics and asked me to make some jewelry with them. I have designed eight jewelry collections for Marimekko.

My “toolbox” to create Marimekko collections contains very different tools from my own artistic work. Mainly my inspirations for the Marimekko collections have been my memories and experiences of my home country of Finland, like open-air dance (Lavatanssit) or outside games I used to play with my friends growing up. I deliver a PDF file to them with drawings that someone else will produce. The pieces need to have a flow so they are easy to wear, easy to produce, work nicely with the clothing, and are FUN!

What are your thoughts about the intersection of fashion, art, and jewelry?

Mia Maljojoki: I believe everything is connected, overlapping and supporting each other, and sometimes creating confusion. There is often discussion about where does design end and art start, or what design is and what art is, and this differs from one field to another. I am often asked how can I do both.

Do you have a fashion icon? If so, how does he/she inspire you?

Mia Maljojoki: Coco Chanel and Grace Jones, to mention a few. They are iconic and beautiful with a strong presence. They inspire me: I see both of their styles to be linear—classical but rebelling at the same time, or the other way around. Hmmm … perhaps it’s the opposites that attract me!

What projects are next for you?

Mia Maljojoki: I have a jewelry performance installation coming up during Schmuck 2016 at Giesinger Bahnhof (a public space that belongs to the city of Munich) in collaboration with Annika Pettersson, a jeweler from Sweden. I welcome everyone to Munich and please come and see our project

Thank you.

I inherited my workspace from my father, a talented Ukrainian icon crafter. He made it personally under the roof of the block of flats we lived in. 

Now I use this space to make my jewels. Some tools came from my grandfather, who was an artisan, too. 

This space is for sawing and hammering, soldering and electrotyping, and, mainly, it is for my contribution to our family’s handicraft tradition.

http://www.sergeyzhernov.com/

Monika Brugger is a fascinating and deep thinker about jewelry. What is its relationship to clothes and to sewing. She makes subtle but provocative work with violent underpinnings. It is quite unusual but thought provoking. In this show called Damage Control at Atta Gallery she pulls together a grouping that draws on memory and on past work. Give it a careful read.

Susan Cummins: Where were you born? And where do you live now? What is your house and studio like?

Monika Brugger: I come from the Black Forest, near the Swiss border in Germany. After a lot of moving, I finally settled in Little Brittany, France, in the countryside, with a garden, vegetables and flowers right outside of the window. My studio is now in a small town between Rennes and Saint Malo, and still under construction.

Can you describe the step-by-step process that led to your show in Thailand at ATTA Gallery?

Monika Brugger: A long time ago, I had a student from Thailand, and she spoke to the gallery about me. I was very happy about their invitation to do this exhibition, and it was easy to work with them. Of course it also gives me the possibility of visiting a new country and to have contact with jewelers from other cultures.

What were you thinking about as you put together the work in Damage Control?

Monika Brugger: I wanted to show new works and some of the key elements related to them. Finding a title for an exhibition is always the most difficult part for me. I want it to tempt, to indicate a vision, to open up approaches and points of view on questions of the jewel and its relationship to objects. So in this case, when I looked at all the selected works, I saw that they related to a text written by Caroline Broadhead in 2008 entitled Damage Control. So that is how the title was found.

Can you walk us through the ideas behind one of the pieces included in the show?

Monika Brugger: In my work I have different “departure points,” often not really calculated. In the case of the “thimble” earrings, it started with the fact that a lot of people have seen one of my first rings (Fingerhut), a thimble, this very feminine tool, not very fancy, a small and usually completely forgotten utensil worn on the tip of the middle finger. So I appropriated the real one for these new pieces. But now they are no longer hidden in the sewing kit but shown and hung around the face. Another set of earrings was also inspired by some very lovely earrings from the 19th century. Humor is a very important aspect in this series. They are jewels with a surrealist aspect, with a wink to what can happen. The red garnets are present and allude to the damage we do to the ears when we make the hole to wear them.

Are the ideas of memory and damage intertwined?

Monika Brugger: I can only say yes given the way you ask the question. Many pieces are made using the idea of “memory,” or they refer to something I said, I learned, or I need to deal with. Making brooches is not only about making beautiful compositions with different materials and forms, but it is also the fact that you make an object that is related to the human body. This will affect how the wearer is perceived by the viewer and by society. When I use a garment and when I sew the elements directly on the textile, I speak, among other things about the memory of a sorrowful period of my “national background.” I also refer to jewels as a mark on the body, and to all the ways societies invent reasons to include or exclude a part of the human race by force or voluntarily. This is human damage.

What interests you about absence?

Monika Brugger: In his analysis of Parcours, Christian Alandete said it best: “And yet it’s very much within the world of jewelry that Monika finds her place. This is the basis of her self-understanding, whatever form her work may take—a photograph, a piece of embroidery, a book, a projection. She has a paradoxical capacity to make jewelry manifest via its very absence.” In fact I don’t usually make traditional jewelry. It is absent.

Why is your jewelry largely made up of cloth and clothing?

Monika Brugger: Everything has to do with coincidence. I was invited to the artist-in-residence in Bienne and didn’t bring all my tools with me. At the same time, I was occupied by the question of the interaction between brooches and garments and thinking about the relationship between the object and its support. A brooch can’t exist without the clothes. So it was possible to explore my interest about the result of “a thing” on the body and not about the “thing.” My intention was not to provide a decorative object designed to be placed on clothes but to set out to contaminate fabric with shapes and patterns. It provided an association so that the final piece could be considered a sculpture, a jewel, or a dress. I tried to make the brooch as abstract as possible, revealing its associated functions as a vehicle for personal identity, underlining social and ritual roles while questioning society as a whole. It could depict a body-borne stigmata, corporatist markings, private signs, or work-induced scars.

In several installations, clothes are metaphors of the body keeping the public gaze at a distance. It is also a fact, discussed by Georg Simmel, that clothes and jewels are the artifacts we use to construct our social body. But jewelry has a longer life. Clothes will be damaged faster. They are deformed by the body and marked by usage. Clothes will depreciate faster than jewelry and go out of fashion immediately. I like to talk about the contradiction of values between an object of contemplation and an object of use.

How did you become interested in making jewelry with these materials? What is your background in making?

Monika Brugger: It is never the material I’m interested in; it is the concept of the project that determines the materialization of my ideas. I’m inspired by stories and images like the photograph by Dorothea Lange called Mended Stockings, from 1934, or the novel The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other marks on fabric worn on the human body. It is the interaction between a brooch and the support that are the focus.

All young Nordic girls of my generation had to learn to use techniques such as hand sewing, embroidery, and other traditional handicrafts. In the piece Inseparable, I have stitched the definition of “brooch” from my favorite French dictionary, called Le Petit Robert, into the cloth. Robert is not only the name for my favorite dictionary, it is also an old French slang word for a woman’s breast. Using these outdated feminine techniques to embroider the image of a brooch is also for me a way to deal humorously with very serious themes, and to make a conceptual work in the most applied way. Using textile and cross-stitching is my way of being “in between” different approaches and contexts, crossing over the traditional approach of making jewelry.

I learned sewing in school, I make my own wardrobe, I like fabrics and the feeling they provoke. I use clothing because it speaks about the whole. It has movement, a silhouette, and a reference to the human as a whole. Jewels are the details. They need a place to exist. They have this extraordinary quality “to assist” or to perfect the beauty, the attractiveness, and perhaps the illusions that wearers and makers want to create. I’m always attracted by images depicting “la couture” or the representation of female archetypes and other tricks to make someone look beautiful. But it is the project that gives me the opportunity to explore uncommon and common materials.

But I’m not the first one to explore this very special field between fashion and jewelry. Emmy van Leersum and Gijs Bakker did it in the late 1960s, and it was a beautiful surprise to read the gijs+emmy spectacle from 2014. It turns out we have both developed projects around similar questions and we used comparable materials to connect jewels and clothes together in an original way.

The German word schmücken has its etymological origin in “sich in ein kleit smücken,” which can be translated as “bejeweled in a cloth.”

I think that it is also necessary to understand my work in a French context. There was not really a contemporary jewelry movement when I started in the 90s. Jewelry was identified by the “haute joaillerie” or the fashion jewelry/custom jewelry industry. We had few schools, and less support from the national institutions or museums. So in a way France was a kind of “no man’s land.” This gave me the possibility of exploring different approaches and the possibility to find answers to the questions in a proper way. I know that it was this environment that gave me the right atmosphere to explore, to progress, to make, to ask questions, and that introduced this kind of approach, which is connected with the fashion industry, “la mode” and the vision of femininity in France.

You often use red thread in your work. What does the color red mean to you?

Monika Brugger: Using red thread makes sense!

Red as blood, white as snow, black as hair, or “How I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony” (Snow White). The reference is not as easy or direct, but if you make works in textile, the fact is that you can get hurt and bloodstains might follow. This fact and also this real experience give me the possibility to explore these new elements and forge new ways of making ornaments.

The first time I used the red thread was in Passage, part of the series called Parcours. I made this monogrammed embroidery out of cross-stitches, like a bloodstain, in reference to lost virginity. All the pieces included garnets and always referred to working traces, wounds, and injuries, like the piece Stichwunde, Geschenk der Näherin/Wound, Gift of the Seamstress.

What does red mean to me? Well, red is most powerful in a symbolic way. Life and death are united in it.

In French, the expression “C’est cousu de fil blanc” means very predictable, flimsy, or “la supercherie est vite découverte.” It is “Fadenscheinig” in German, but simply too obvious in English or American, I think. But I sew with red thread. As well we can find an echo in the expression “un fil rouge”—a red thread or common thread—which gives coherence to an ill-assorted group!

Who are your muses?

Monika Brugger: Muses? Artists by example, by their works, and their radicalism have opened up for me a kind of possibility to do the same. you need to bring in all your energy. Artists from the jewelry field who inspire me are Onno Boekhoudt, his work as well as who he was as a person, the work by Manfred Nisslmüller, and Otto Künzli. Also the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Mona Hatoum have given me a kind of confidence to continue. But in the end, gardening can be a very good muse for understanding the world and for confronting essential things.

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

Monika Brugger: I can recommend the documentary film Le Testament d’Alexander McQueen, by Loïc Prigent, a film about the creations and the background of Alexander McQueen. Also, I have taken the book by Winfried Menninghaus, called Das Versprechen der Schönheit (The Promise of Beauty), once more out of my library to reflect once more on this very complex and complete book about beauty and what it promises.

Thank you.

In March 2015, Art Jewelry Forum released Shows and Tales—On Jewelry Exhibition-Making. The challenge of showing contemporary jewelry has given rise to a bubbling exhibition landscape, with amateurs and professionals playing musical chairs to a very D.I.Y. score. Artists mount exhibitions in their bedrooms. Museums invite amateurs to curate shows from their collections, and visitors to handle work. Collectors issue exhibition lists and detailed press releases. Students wearing jewelry parade the streets in white overalls. In short, ever since contemporary jewelry became self-aware in the 60s, jewelry exhibition-makers have ceaselessly experimented with new formats to present ornaments.

Given how extremely busy these—often self-proclaimed—curators have been over the last 60 years, it is surprising that the variety of their approaches is so rarely acknowledged, or taken seriously, as is the extent to which curation transforms our perception: There has never been, thus far, a publication on exhibition-making with jewelry as its focal point.

Shows and Tales aims to remedy this absence, and features a series of commissioned articles on landmark exhibitions, ranging from MoMA’s Modern Handmade Jewelry (1946) to last year’s crop of street-bound jewelry parades; commissioned essays by, and discussions with, curators on the challenges of curating jewelry; select exhibition reviews from Art Jewelry Forum’s archives that track some recent experimentation with display strategies; and a detailed checklist of all the exhibitions discussed in the book.

After sharing with you Lizzie Atkins’s essay called Parades, we are happy to now give you Jorunn Veiteberg’s essay on exhibitions that let visitors touch—and handle—objects: She tracks, using a few key examples, the history of “not touching,” explains why this traditional model is losing steam … and tells us about the challenges and opportunities offered by more interactive formats.
 

Download the PDF

Call for entries
We were well aware, publishing Shows and Tales, that a number of influential shows were missing from it, and we are already working on publishing a second volume. A few of our supporters have pointed out some shows that, in their minds, deserve to be looked at and brought into the public eye again. We value their opinion, but we also want to hear from the wider jewelry community. Here are two questions:

• In your opinion, which three exhibitions redefined the way jewelry is exhibited and had a lasting impact on the field itself?

• What do you think are important components of a good exhibition?

Please take a minute to think about them, and send your answers to editor(at)artjewelryforum.org.

INDEX IMAGE: Images of visitors wearing objects from Touching Warms the Art, 2008, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon, photo: Photo Booth and visitors

Known for his insightful forms and well-designed jewelry, Marc Monzo is an artist living and working in Barcelona, Spain. After studying jewelry at the Escola Massana in Barcelona, he has gone on to give numerous lectures and workshops and to exhibit work internationally, from Tokyo to Germany to Australia. In this interview, we talk about his exhibition, Blank, at Gallery S O in London.

Olivia Shih: Where were you born, and where do you live now? What drew you to jewelry in the first place? Why have you stayed with it?

Marc Monzo: I live in Barcelona. I was born here in 1973.

I studied jewelry because I feel comfortable working with small-scale objects. I like to put my attention to them.

Much of your jewelry in this collection, Blank, seems to embody the idea that less is more. Simple lines, simple shapes, but with endless possibilities—what were you thinking about as you made this collection?

Marc Monzo: When I order gold plates from my metal provider, I always get these perfect, industrial, totally flat, polished plates of gold. I always found these elements interesting. The way they look fits with the idea of what this metal represents for me.

The pieces are made first with paper, cutting small papers with scissors and sticking them together with tape or glue. Then I order the plates in the measurements of the papers. The providers cut them with a guillotine so they are always a bit different. Once I have them, I weld them together with a laser. I don’t change their proportions and don’t use any tool in the process, just the laser.

The plates are thin, 0.22 mm. They are tempered metal, so they are hard.

I like the thinness of the plates, nearly immaterial, confronting the symbolism of gold.

I very much like prototypes, the nature of them ... the unfinished exercise. Using paper to build them. I consider the nature of the prototype precious. That is why it is represented with gold now.

I don’t try to do minimalist works. Things happen this way.

You seem to be playing with reflections and the mirroring aspects of polished metal. How does that play into the construction of the piece?

Marc Monzo: Some years ago, when I did a brooch titled Fire, I realized that when you confront two yellow polished surfaces of gold, an orange color appears. Due to my discovery, many of the surfaces of these works are flat and polished, and if I place them perpendicularly in the middle of another plate they produce a reflection and they seem partly transparent. This seems to make these works even lighter.

Your jewelry suite, Blank Earrings, Blank Pendant, and Blank Ring, contains almost no trace of the jeweler’s hand. There is one school of thought that defines craft as a practice tied to specific medium, specific techniques, and making by hand. As a jeweler who values craft, what does craft mean to you?

Marc Monzo: I admire people who can be precise while working with their hands. That they have a profound knowledge of any material. Sometimes I think they can understand and experience this context through a precise practice with matter.

At the same time, nowadays the concept of “handmade” is not a sign of quality anymore.

Technology is developing very fast new tools that are getting in our workshops. I see this technology just as tools. Maybe what makes me think a work is interesting is the thing that keeps in mind the human dimension.

This way of projecting an object has similar values to the concept of craft, even if there is no sign of hand manipulation.

In this exhibition, there is a set of brooches that resemble a brick wall. What inspired you to translate everyday brick and mortar into metal? Into jewelry?

Marc Monzo: I construct jewelry. The works I do are always made by adding material, not taking. The Wall brooches represent this fact. I also like the experience of building walls in a jewelry workshop. I find it funny to wear architecture.

Your use of materials is very playful but specific to each piece of jewelry. When working on a new piece, do you begin with the material, or the concept?

Marc Monzo: Sometimes materials bring you somewhere. Other times you are somewhere, and you need a material.

Could you describe a day in your life as a working jeweler and artist?

Marc Monzo: I like to wake up early. I have breakfast at home. I go to the workshop. I share my workshop with a friend who is a product designer. His name is Curro Claret. Each of us has an independent space. I mostly work alone, but there are periods during the year when some students do internships at the workshop.

For the last year, I have been taking part in a new project of a new brand of fine jewelry, Misui. Every day I dedicate time to this project.

In the late afternoon I close the workshop, I have dinner, and go to sleep early.

Have you seen, heard, or read anything you would like to share?

Marc Monzo: There is a Catalan music composer, Frederic Mompou, that I like, and I sometimes listen to his music at the workshop. His pieces of music are short.

Thank you.

AJF has decided to begin posting the prices of pieces in the gallery shows we are highlighting each month. For Marc Monzo’s show, the prices are between 70 and 2000€.

Visitors to After Wearing: A History of Gestures, Actions, and Jewelry, were greeted with an intriguing, if perplexing, display that included … no jewelry, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, show-goers encountered jewelry dematerialized into words and images that purported to expand the very definition of jewelry while examining how it inspires, per the catalogue essay, words, gestures, and actions through making, wearing, attachment, or ownership.[1] Helpfully, the curators—Gaspar, a design historian and researcher at the Institute of Theory at the Zurich University of Arts, and Skinner, an art historian and curator of Applied Art and Design at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira, New Zealand—also provided a 47-foot wall installation called Scale of Relationality. It functioned as a kind of mind map to a conversation they had two years ago that evolved into this challenging, if at times opaque, show. In the catalogue, a recap of their dialogue reveals that their aim was to “relocate typical discussions about contemporary jewelry within a context of participation[2] and use through the format of an exhibition.”[3] They agreed that there was a need for research regarding “those jewelers whose work has become increasingly participatory, requiring action from, or interaction with, the audience in order to exist.”[4] This “wearer/owner/use” perspective, they felt, would be a valid basis for collaboration.

Gaspar, observing that “these projects seemed to belong to the kind of post-studio practices that had emerged since the 1970s,”[5] determined with Skinner that their approach should be post-studio as well, an insight that led them to “dump the jewelry”[6] and thus “activate the audience’s social imagination.”[7] Without this visual aid—created as a graffiti wall by Martí Guixé—the show may well have floundered, lacking a graphic thread connecting such diverse works as a wall of fake (non-realistic) beards; giant paper animal heads; ironically titled, closely cropped photographs of wealthy, but blemished, women wearing expensive conventional jewelry; video clips from Hollywood swashbucklers showing necklaces being torn off the necks of various heroines; a plywood sandwich board covered with 23-karat gold leaf; several flickering digital “brooches”; and a jeweler’s workbench minus the jeweler. Among these assorted installations, the most accessible was Mah Rana’s Meanings and Attachments (2002–present), photos of a global assortment of jewelry wearers paired with their comments on the nature of their emotional attachments to their pieces.

Some of these works, sorted into two sections—Gestures, and Participatory Projects—made their points effectively, but others were obscure in their relationship to the concept of jewelry and the show’s central aim. In a few instances, for example, the works on view seemed less concerned with elucidating the concept of jewelry—indirectly addressed via the disparate examples on view—than with the notion of “wearing” per se, or even more arcane issues. In the Gestures section, Joanne Wardrop’s Matrimonial Rituals, Gender Studies and False Facial Hair (2013) presented a fake-beard installation—items made of paper strips, tinsel, pompoms, straw, etc.—that was inspired by a four-day Angolan marriage ritual in which brides don straw beards and eyebrows and become “bridal boys” for a brief time at the end of the ceremony. This ritual was depicted in an accompanying video using stock footage[8] from the 1930s, and it was certainly fascinating to learn of an ethnographic example of transgender role reversal. Also featured in the video were a group of contemporary women wearing the wall beards and examining their responses to this affront/challenge to their gender. While interesting as an academic exercise in queer studies, this work’s relevance to jewelry remained obscure, especially as it lacked a curatorial statement. Instead, the viewer was left to wonder if the fun-fake beards on view are meant to be taken as jewelry simply because they are wearable.

Likewise, Yuka Oyama’s enormous paper animal heads (mythical and otherwise; one 2010 dragon is titled Metamorphic Spirit), which in her words represented “expanded concepts of jewelry,” though delightful and a highlight of the show, provided less of a jewelry experience than an opportunity for highly theatrical cross-species transformation. Oyama is a trained jeweler whose website, tellingly, does not have a “jewelry” category and who is perhaps better known for her comically incisive performance art, e.g. actor/dancers costumed as cleaning utensils who perform karate katas. For this participatory work, Oyama had asked subjects to name their “inner animal,” then made the appropriate head and photographed the subject in question wearing it. These photos were displayed with the wearers’ comments about how it made them feel; “stronger, less shy,” stated a woman who donned a jaguar’s head.

What’s being demonstrated here is an iteration of primitive rituals that seek empowerment through the wearing of constructed animal heads or real parts, such as claws, bones, and skins. But if you accept, as the artist maintains, that giant paper heads expand the concept of jewelry—yes, the glinting staples added a clue to jewelry—then (and you will ask in vain) why shouldn’t hats, or shoes, or handbags? Or what about cigarette packs held in the hands behind the back, as in the Dutch jeweler Robert Smit’s 1975 installation of 50 Polaroids of himself so posed, which he called Everyday Adornments? This series, meticulously reproduced in the show’s Gestures section with the original Polaroids held in place with silver pushpins, has been consecrated as the first instance of conceptual jewelry, an action that Smit performed (and photographed) to illustrate his radical contention that “any object could be jewellery if it was put forward as such.”[9] A related photograph, My Shadow Wears: Green Ticket (Barcelona), was from Roseanne Bartley’s 2012 series in which she took pictures of her own shadow positioned over various pieces of street litter. In the one on view, a green paper ticket functioned as a virtual brooch. On her website, Bartley states: “The performance My Shadow Wears was created over a four-day visit to Barcelona and suggests a symbiotic relationship between body, object and the environment (images taken on an iPhone).” Wall text in the exhibition suggested that anyone can do likewise, including casting a shadow on one’s own body—the hand or wrist, say—and snapping the picture.

Such an ephemeral action invites anyone to create and wear jewelry—no craft or money needed—a participatory concept Bartley takes further with her second project included in this show, Seeding the Cloud: A Walking Work in Progress. One of her colorful necklaces, made from pieces of found plastic (acquired on a walk) artfully inlaid with fake pearls, was displayed along with her DIY instructions (a take-away sheet that could be folded into a booklet). It addressed Bartley’s interests in “interpersonal jewelry experiences” and her focus on “the intersection between material culture and conceptual practice.”[10] This invitational aspect of jewelry and craft was also addressed via Gabriel Craig’s Pro Bono Jewelervideo of himself, shown on an iPad located at the show’s unoccupied jeweler’s bench. Craig is known for taking his workbench and tools to the streets with the aim of engaging the public in the “magic” of jewelry making. He is a passionate proselytizer for jewelry, and craft in general, a person who literally stands on a soapbox in public spaces cheerfully haranguing—um, inviting—passersby to engage in a dialogue on his chosen field. As the Pro Bono Jeweler, he has been known to give away made-on-the-spot silver rings to anyone who stops and becomes involved with his activity. Show-goers who stopped to sit and view the video may not have been able to divine the full extent of Craig’s commitment. However, one has to be grateful for the fact that a reference to traditional craft was included in this mostly documentary show.

Related to that point, also in the Participating Projects section, was a photo presentation of Hochsitz (2010), a small room for jewelry practices located in a verdant meadow in northern Germany. Designed by Martí Guixé and built by company Makra Bau, the little building was created by Schmuck2 (no relation to the annual jewelry fair), a nonprofit “interdisciplinary platform,”[11] run by the German jewelry artist Susan Pietzsch, which seeks to help emerging artists on various levels—exhibitions, workshops, and more. The Hochsitz (or high house) is raised on stilts in the manner of hunters’ structures and features several windows and a transparent roof. Jewelers may apply to work there amidst the tranquility and natural beauty of the setting. What After Wearing did not include were pictures of jewelry created in the Hochsitz—nor could I find any evidence of such online—but a Facebook posting by the Japanese jeweler Naoko Ogawa showed the interior of the tiny house with her drawings laid out on a table.

This led me to another website in which Pietzsch wrote that Ogawa’s project would pursue “likenesses of jewelry that exist only momentarily through the diffusion and fragmentation of light.”[12] Of course! Jewelry is everywhere, and nowhere, as ephemeral as a ray of light or as invisible as a virus, which turned out to be the inspiration for this show’s only other project (along with Bartley’s necklace) that could be considered, with reservations, to be real jewelry: Lauren Kalman (where was her 2009 Tongue Gilding video?) and Kipp Bradford’s Virus Simulation (2011–2015) project—25 phenomenally complex brooches made of custom-designed circuit board electronics. While only a few of the brooches were presented, albeit secured within a clear acrylic box, their flickering lights drew intrigued viewers no doubt grateful to see something possibly wearable. But would the toxic symbolism of these visually alluring brooches attract or repel jewelry wearers? The wall caption described the concept for these interactive electronic brooches that mimic the spread of the human papillomavirus (HPV). The flickering lights are programmed to interact with each other, just as real viruses spread from one person to another. Viewers may or may not understand that HPV is a common vector of sexually transmitted disease and a potential cause of cervical cancer, information omitted from the caption—as was the fascinating fact that the brooch designs are based on microphotographs of actual viruses.

Gaspar told me that these viral brooches—essentially biotech jewelry expressive of the many pathogenic threats we unknowingly live (and die) with—could be tried on if the viewer asked permission, a fact not stated on the caption. This omission, perhaps intentional, highlighted the show’s main weakness. Richer printed information and some curatorial wall texts could have supplied puzzled viewers with expanded “relationality” rationales for the inclusion of specific projects—the dubious fake beards, for example, or the photo of Jhana Millers wearing a gilded sandwich board, a crude advertising apparatus enlisted to convey a conceptual absurdity in that real gold is expended for the sake of negating its value.[13] This familiar art-jewelry-world trope—the denigration of the use of precious materials for their own sake—is reinforced by Jessica Craig-Martin’s brutally ironic, closely cropped photos of celebrity women at play, their expensive jewelry serving as emblems of shallowness and wretched excess. Here were two stylistically divergent yet on-message images with negative connotations that begged for a curatorial point of view. Were Skinner and Gaspar stating a policy position re commercialism, or simply staking out extremes of wearing?

Left to themselves, show-goers may have found aspects of the exhibition provocative, yes, but also off-putting. The problem was that they were there mainly as passive viewers of the projects, many of which required further explication to be fully understood and/or evaluated—hence my extensive Googling. And there was something counterintuitive about presenting participatory art in what amounted to a textbook setting. Had After Wearing been presented entirely online as an interactive work of art in itself, the show might have gained in effectiveness. I mean, once you dump the jewelry, why not dump the venue as well? Here was a show that assumed a “post-studio” posture only to embrace the gallery. By relocating post-gallery, i.e. online, After Wearing would have opened its virtual doors to a far greater audience invited to share its responses to the show’s unstated yet strongly implied question: What exactly is contemporary “jewelry,” and does relocating “typical discussion” of it “within a context of participation and use”[14] in fact advance the case for a wider appreciation of this richly creative though long marginalized field?

[1]After Wearing: A History of Gestures, Actions, and Jewelry. Curated by Damian Skinner and Monica Gaspar. September 25–November 14, 2015. Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, 6–7.

[2] See http://jaumeferrete.net/text/Bishop-Claire-Artificial-Hells-Participator....

[3] Skinner/Gaspar, 2.

Valdis Brože makes jewelry about the passage of time. His forthcoming exhibition, White Pate, at Latvia’s Art Gallery Putti, features Brože’s series of intricately hewn rings. Each ring reflects minute progression in the artist’s craft: shades of difference realized in careful form. In our interview, Brože spoke about the evolution of his craft, his love of ancient Baltic artifacts, and loneliness.

Eileen Townsend: Can you tell me about your background, both your early life growing up in Latvia and your career since you graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia?

Valdis Brože: I was born and raised in Riga. From a very early age I was interested in making jewelry. At first I made it from various found materials. I was like a little magpie being attracted to shiny objects. As a child I had sharp vision, attention to detail, and I liked making small objects—I carved detailed faces in small plastic balls. In my youth, I worked in archaeological excavations where I had the chance to explore ancient Baltic artifacts and jewelry that was predominantly made from silver and bronze. This changed my perception of materials, and I fell in love with silver. After graduating from Decorative Arts College in Latvia, which is a great school with an open and creative atmosphere, I entered Art Academy of Latvia, where I graduated with a degree in visual communications.

What does White Pate mean?

Valdis Brože: “White Pate” comes from a cartoon—a beautiful and melancholic story about how you can’t stop time, although it can stop us. Its lead character is an old man who has decided to leave his cell after many years, but the lost moments of time won’t let him go; they keep him inside. I created the doll for this character—it was a very detailed piece made of silver, mammoth tusk, and crystals. I created limbs that were connected by silver, which is a soft material. It was a big challenge to work with silver for this particular piece. Great precision had to be applied in the creation of the old man’s crystal eyes, which were supposed to be able to mimic natural blinking. I carved very thin eyelids from mammoth bone. The eyelids were supported with hinges that formed a circumference around the crystal eye. I spent three days working on the eyes alone. The making of this character was a starting point for me to make a brand-new jewelry collection about the time that I live in and the space that I don’t leave—just like the character in the cartoon.

With the pieces to be shown in White Pate, you seem to work with a lot of small variations on similar forms. How do you plan for each new piece?

Valdis Brože: I am a loner. Loneliness is part of my character. My works are like little sculptures. When I make them I open my world, allowing all my creative energy to pour out. When the piece has been created, it is ready to face the world and tell its story to anyone who wants to listen. It is very important to me to develop an inner world that tells a story for each piece. I try to put life in every piece—whether it’s a small hinge that creates movement or other details that make the object come to life. Sometimes, in the process of making, I become so attached to my pieces that it becomes very hard to separate from them later. I work a lot with colors. Sometimes I create an unordinary combination of colors, in order to give life and give joy to the ordinary. I don’t tend to make identical jewelry. I like to invent, so in every collection there are only a few elements that repeat themselves.

In this case you have used rings as your starting point. Have you done this kind of variation for other jewelry forms as well?

Valdis Brože: Yes, I use subtle transitions, hinges, mammoth tusk, and enamel in the design of earrings and brooches. I am not interested in simple compounds and they have to be very organic. Sometimes earrings come close to looking like sculptures, and that makes me wonder about people with tough ears, as everything has its limit.

What are your days in the studio like?

Valdis Brože: I start my day in the studio with green tea and then I dive straight into work. It is important for me to start working as soon as I walk in my studio because I am very productive in the mornings. I don’t like to work in the midday—that is when I enjoy my breaks or do something else. However my most productive hours are between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. This rhythm has always been very important to me.

What is the most challenging project you’ve undertaken in your career?

Valdis Brože: I have to admit that the biggest challenge for me was a recent exhibition at Gallery Putti—Amber in Contemporary Jewelry. It was very difficult to understand how to work with amber. The beginning was a real torture due to the traditional stereotypes on how amber jewelry should look. The image of streets oversaturated with souvenir shops of traditional amber designs just wouldn’t leave my thoughts. I had to stare at this mineral for one month before I could see its true beauty. I got to the point where I thought, “I will never be able to work with amber,” but somehow magically I found my dialogue with the mineral and this dialogue became very harmonious. When I began working with this material, I realized that it is a very powerful conversation partner, and requires just as erudite a conversation partner in return.

Which jewelers and artists do you look up to as inspiration?

Valdis Brože: I look at a lot of talented artists online and in exhibitions. But my biggest inspiration for new jewelry designs is my own previous work that makes me push forward and achieve something greater. I find profound logic in that. Of course it is very inspiring to see others who have found their unique language of expression.

How has your work changed since your last exhibition, Thin, Thin, in 2012?

Valdis Brože: It’s difficult to say. Approximately once per year I take a step back and look at what I have achieved—a moment of surprise because I always feel that I evolve and develop but the truth is that I just change a little. Everything is a little different. Essentially, I find new ideas and things in my work over time and think, “How did I not ever think of this before?”

You have spent a lot of time studying human anatomy to better understand how jewelry can be worn. How do you feel about having the jewelry in a static display in the gallery?

Valdis Brože: When creating White Pate I was thinking more about the static display than the wearing aspect, especially when I created my gold series. The most important thing in the exhibition is to find new language, which will be used for future pieces that will be more wearable. But, yes, I have spent a lot of time studying anatomy books. I was trying to understand the human palm from an anatomical perspective in order to create a perfect fit, or create a ring that fits on two fingers. I don’t usually wear jewelry myself. But I did wear a ring for a while for experimental purposes. I wanted to understand the curve of the finger, where the center of gravity in the ring must be located for the wearer not to feel it. The jewelry needs to “grow” on the wearer, become a natural extension. Of course the functional aspect doesn’t always materialize in the exhibition. Sometimes a decision needs to be made about whether the piece will be jewelry or artistic expression.

How do you hope someone wearing your jewelry will experience the pieces?

Valdis Brože: In an ideal situation, someone sees a piece of jewelry and feels the connection, as if it belongs to them. As if it’s a small part of the person itself. Jewelry fully blossoms when it encounters its person and meets everyday life. My works are like a bridge between the wearer’s intimate inner world and the public space. I want my jewelry to be adored and worn. I want it to create strong, positive emotions for the wearer and leave an impression on the observers.

Thank you.

“Once formed into images and representations, surfaces become keys and corridors of perception, signaling immediate reactions, eliciting habitual responses, exciting associations, and awakening and establishing memory.”[1]

Looking at two very different makers, this article explores adornment in installation works and the ways by which optical qualities such as luster, reflection, tactility, and pattern harken back to conversations on jewelry, the body, and wearability.

1.
First and foremost, is there such a thing as “jewelry for spaces”? I don’t mean the many jewelry-like works that decorate sites, from architecturally sized necklaces in public spaces (such as the Inges Idee 2004 work for a shopping center parking garage in Düsseldorf) to the organization of products in the field of interior design for the purposes of comfort and beauty. I mean works that add both decoration and content to an architectural space in a manner that allows the viewer to critically consider what it means to adorn. Amelia Toelke and Kristi Sword, two emerging makers in the field of jewelry and metalsmithing, address what it means to adorn sites with the language of jewelry (rather than simply decorating with large-scale jewelry itself) and, in turn, develop a conversation between space and adornment that is rife with content.

Amelia Toelke’s recent work addresses decoration, pattern, and surface in an array of ways, specifically focusing on wall-based installation works. While other pieces within the same show (Cloud Forms and Transom) are safe constructions of the decorative florals and baroque-style forms ever rampant in our field, Dragonfruit is her pièce de résistance. In it, she abstracts badges, ribbons, and banners into oversized, fuchsia-colored reflexive surfaces that refract and bleed into the gallery space. Much like installations by artist Laura Hughes, Toelke’s reflections saturate the space and interrupt your experience in the gallery, allowing for an ever-changing experience with the work. Bathed in color and casting a look at your reflection as you pass by a panel, you become a part of the work itself. Repurposing the traditional forms of jewelry, badge, and banner and reassembling them into a hybrid mash-up of pattern and repetition, Dragonfruit calls to the history of the wearable symbol, the quality and luster of the jewel-toned, and the malleability of contemporary sculptural objects.

What does it mean to create new, fresh symbols from the reassignment and reorganization of traditional ones? Honor, celebration, success are now jewel-toned and “supersized.” They don’t lie upon your body, but rather reflect onto it from the vantage point of the architecture itself. The piece practically exclaims its position of excellence, full with symbols that give cause for its own celebration. Much of Toelke’s earlier badge work includes jewelry-specific details: a bail, decorative flourish, chains and clasps. In Dragonfruit, the language is wholly digital: laser-cut clip art etched with a gridded pattern that appears to pixelate the pieces, one by one. This work acknowledges the language of decoration in the contemporary moment while still paying homage to traditional forms and shapes.

2.
Kristi Sword, a maker of both jewelry and installation-based objects, approaches ideas of surface beyond the spectrum of traditional symbols and instead toward tactility, surface structure, and patterning. In her body of work called Quick Count Drawings, Sword expands on notions of surface, faceting, and the precision of fabrication with wall-based installation works. Comprised of thousands of miniature segments of plastic mesh sheeting, Sword’s surfaces are lush and evocative hills and valleys that both absorb and reflect light in lustrous ways. Even when patch-worked and seemingly flat against a gallery wall, the pieces become faceted and angular, a topography of small elements coming together as one complete, nearly vibrating, body. The dense white plastic is painstakingly pinned together with silver or gold, becoming a tactile, beaded surface asking to be touched. When a piece is touched, the connected elements sink into one another, compressing the surface much like pushing your fingers through a heavily sequined dress. Similarly to how these sculptural works function in the gallery space, Sword has a body of wearable work using the same mesh sheeting materials, exploring forms and movement on the body through the same tactile methods of building.

Like Amelia Toelke’s work, Sword’s sculptural pieces exist on the wall, removing themselves from the immediacy of wearability and adorning the architectural space in which they exist. Where Toelke’s work used symbols rife with content and jewel-toned surfaces saturated with color, reflection, and luster, Sword’s work tackles space, surface, and adornment with subtle connections to light and volume. She segments and interrupts ready-patterned material with her meticulous fabrication, creating surfaces that seem to mimic pavéd and bead-set stones in various states of volume and flatness. In Quick Count Drawing pt. 3, she highlights the peak of each “facet” with gold or silver, which reflects light from the edge much like a cut stone. In pt. 2, traditional quilting language and references to cross-stitch fade and pixelate into abstracted bunches of dense and not dense. While there are elements of her work that reference traditional jewelry in their process, and consideration for the interplay between surface and form, her work does not attempt to mimic the traditional decorative elements of jewelry itself.

Going back to our opening question—“is there such thing as jewelry for spaces?”—we must ask ourselves if these works are both in conversation with the field of jewelry and with adornment of an architectural space. The ways by which Toelke’s and Sword’s works occupy space in the gallery set them apart from either straightforward wall-based sculpture or installation art. Indeed, their work addresses adornment in a manner that ties them to the field of contemporary jewelry: the visual qualities of reflection, luster, texture, the slight tip-of-the-tongue recognition of the traditional jewelry properties of a pavé setting, the ribbon of a badge, or the saturation and gleam of a stone. What makes this work exciting is its ability to adopt the languages of adornment and decoration, and find new methods to expand jewelry practices into a broader spectrum of form and format. The “jewelry perspective” of making and viewing work means taking what is conceptually and formally significant at the core of our field and creating fresh, critical venues by which to discuss it. These works, among many others, give us the freedom to reconsider what being a contemporary maker in our field looks like.

Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde, in a stunning show of disregard for everything capitalist society has to offer, has taken it upon himself to remove carbon particles out of our air. The carbon particles we’ve worked so hard to put into the air. After everything we’ve done to move society forward! Well, guess what—if it weren’t for the industrial revolution, you wouldn’t have been able to build your precious smog tower, Daan!

Clearly there’s a socialist agenda here at play, what with the giving away of clean air for free. Apparently Daan Roosegaarde does seem to understand one thing about the consumer market—the simple act of breathing fresh air is not incentive enough for anyone to put money into. First he needs to convince potential investors that they need their air cleaned—thus this elaborate, bizarre smear campaign against so-called “pollution.” Does he really think we’ll believe that carbon residue in the air is unhealthy and abnormal? Ha ha, nice try, but your little plan will never work!