New Futures / Munich Jewellery Week 2022
This year I am presenting two small projects as part of New Futures exhibition taking place at Loggia Gallery in Munich 6-10 July 2022.
NOW
NOW, because tomorrow is never a guarantee.
NOW, because later is too late.
NOW, because now is all there is.
Resist distraction.
Something was awakened in us briefly by the Australian wildfires.
Something was awakened in us briefly by the Covid pandemic.
Something was awakened in us briefly by George Floyd’s murder.
Something was awakened in us briefly by the start of the war in Ukraine.
See clearly.
The ring is not there for pleasure.
The ring is not there to be admired.
The ring is a message to self, a voluntarily administered prompt, a subtle yet persistent reminder that non-action is no longer an option.
Focus.
The ring is there because I bring change.
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To avoid environmentally harmful overproduction this ring is exclusively made to order.
FACE BROOCHES
This project brings together several questions that have been on my mind for a while:
1) What new creative doors does the digital open for jewellery? What is the potential for the relationship between material and digital phenomena? Is digital just another kind of material? Can digital be applied to create new connections to the physical world rather than to throw us at the obliterating mercy of virtual reality? Does materiality actually matter or is it just a habit?
2) What is jewellery, what could it be and what is its purpose in the current times? Could anything with relationship to the body that communicates feelings and emotions or encourages interaction be defined as jewellery?
3) How can creativity, or anything I do, be justified and sustainable, when nothing of what I do is of essential importance to the society or the environment? What is essential? What is sustainable? What is needed now?
The digital filters were created using photographic images of art brooches I made in the past. Thus, a unique handmade material object of artistic value is translated into a two-dimensional visual record which is then reimagined and repurposed as a widely accessible interactive AR artefact. New value is being created while nothing new is actually being produced - the AR objects make use of the readily available properties of the brooches - their shapes, surface colours and patterns, which until then lay dormant and clearly underused, only accessible as attributes of the static material objects. The virtual objects are continuously re-inhabited, re-shaped and re-contextualised. Their immateriality sets them free of all historical contexts together with any idea of preciousness, which in case of the original brooches is an obvious consequence of their uniqueness and the act of material manipulation.
