Travis Lewis

AJF is very pleased to bring you the third in a series of posts showcasing the work of graduate contemporary jewelry students from leading schools around the world. Our third entry in the AJF honor roll for 2010 is Cranbrook Academy of Art, located in the state of Michigan, United States.

Although it may seem that there are no boundaries in the department at Cranbrook, there is a clear context: work that comments on and addresses the body – its conventions, traditions and social behavior within cultures. This does not necessarily mean ‘jewelry’ – objects and sculpture fit in when they related to a language that is embedded in a domestic realm. We are also concerned with the field of design and applied art as these things trigger or evoke associations with daily life objects. It is important that things are first idea-based AND making-based. A hands-on mentality is also important; I do not support figuring things out on a computer first. I want my students to run into things that they would not encounter if they thought only of a finished product.

To view the complete set of images from Cranbrook Academy of Art, click here.

Adam Shirley

At what point does an ongoing attempt to justify paying attention to online jewelry games by calling it research stretch credibility? Frankly, that and other questions are ones that we here at AJF simply can’t answer. But in the interests of being thorough, here is a recent game we stumbled across. You’re trapped in a jewelry store and have to use objects and clues to escape. (Given jewelry this bad, every contemporary jewelry supporter would gnaw off their own limb to get out.) Play or don’t play – the choice is yours. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.

To play The Jewelry Escape, click here.

Anne Sutherland

AJF is very pleased to bring you the fifth in a series of posts showcasing the work of graduate contemporary jewelry students from leading schools around the world. Our fifth entry in the AJF honor roll for 2010 is the University of Dundee, located in Dundee, Scotland.

The Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design’s Jewelry and Metal Design course aims to provide an intellectual and creative stimulus which encourages debate concerning aspects of perception and aesthetics within contemporary jewelry and product design. Great emphasis is placed on drawing as a means of recording and developing concepts related to the structure and form of jewelry, fashion and small products.

To view the complete set of images from the University of Dundee, click here.

Holly Wilcox

Wimalin Pantawangoon

AJF is very pleased to bring you the third in a series of posts showcasing the work of graduate contemporary jewelry students from leading schools around the world. Our third entry in the AJF honor roll for 2010 is Academy of Art University, located in San Francisco, United States.

The metal arts/jewelry program in the school of sculpture and jewelry design provides a unique and supportive environment in which students can develop skill, concept, effective practice, and successful contemporary outcomes. This foundation philosophy exists within a context of rigorous commitment to innovation and personal vision in conceiving ideas, to self-inquiry and critical thinking in pursuing those ideas, and to flexibility, skill, and self-discipline in realizing them. The program is enriched by a vital interdisciplinary collaboration which emphasizes and nurtures investigation and dialogue. The philosophy is incomplete without the synergy of the required coursework that focuses on professional practice. This gives the students confidence and skill with which they are guided to professional maturity, so that they are able to flourish and prosper as they pursue their career.

To view the complete set of images from Academy of Art University, click here.

Kaori Chiba

Valeria Vallarta Siemelink

At AJF we have a particular soft spot for the young jeweler, launching themselves on a wing and a prayer into the uncertain life of the craftsperson and daring to take part in a tradition of making that rivals prostitution for the title of world’s oldest profession. AJF member Valeria Vallarta Siemelink managed to spend some time at Broochmania: a project of Ädellab which recently took place at Galerie Rob Koudijs in Amsterdam from 5 June – 3 July 2010. (To find out more about Siemelink, click here; to visit the Galerie Rob Koudijs website, click here.) It is a tale in which some homework gets eaten by the dog but what’s happening in the classroom, for the gallery, proves to be more than worth a second look.

A title such as Broochmania conjures images of a somehow frantic exhibition. A craze of brooches, where the viewer is confronted with a wild and endless display of the ornaments that have accompanied mankind for a long, long time.  However, when entering the bright and quiet space of the Rob Koudijs Gallery in Amsterdam, we are greeted by an exhibition that is sober, yet full of talent.

The title, as commonly happens, came before the collection was even created: Karen Pontoppidan, jewelry artist and head of the Ädellab (the jewelry department of the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm) envisioned a project that involved students of her academy from the first year to recently graduated masters students. Rob Koudijs, owner and manager of the Amsterdam based gallery hosting Broochmania, welcomed the idea with the open and daring attitude that characterizes his exhibitions and that often regale the audience with refreshing exhibitions and unexpected artists. Through a series of five workshops, the Ädellab students had studied the history and diverse facets of brooches. The students were then encouraged to translate their recent experiences in brooches that would be suitable for exhibition in a prestigious gallery.

Fibulae, Ca. 2000 B.C., Museo di Preistoria e Protostoria Valle del Fiora, Italy

Brooches are perhaps the oldest type of jewelry. They started their lives as fibule, ornamental clasps used by Romans, Greeks and also by Celts and migratory tribes in Europe even before the Bronze Age. Those early fibulae were simple in shape (a kind of large safety pin made of simple materials, like thorn or bone) and in function (to hold clothing together). But soon they began to change form and acquire a different function: to represent the identity of the wearer, indicating ethnicity, rank or status. And so they turned into brooches, which through the centuries have been produced in all kinds of shapes and materials and used for all kind of purposes. From the Victorian lockets that held the hair of beloved or departed ones, to those badges that indicate ideology and preference, to the cherished mementos that people want to keep close to their bodies, brooches are good examples of the powerful nature of jewelry.

Victorian Hair Locket, 1862, Ghanham Collection, France

The theme of the exhibition is both extensive and rich. Brooches are, perhaps, among the most frequently produced ornaments by contemporary jewelers. Their possibilities are almost endless and their prominent display on the chest make brooches a remarkable media for communication. Given this fact, it is a pity that there were not that many Ädellab students taking advantage of the opportunity.

Dutch architect Ward Schrijver was invited to Stockholm to act as a curator for Broochmania. The curatorial experience proved to be a tough one. Absent students (and their expected works), great ideas with technical problems or last-minute pieces that simply fell apart in the hands of the curator, left Schrijver with a smaller choice than expected. A collection of approximately twenty five brooches executed by a group of only thirteen students and graduates made it to the showcases of the Rob Koudijs gallery. As a last minute addition, a small collection of necklaces also made by the selected students was added to enhance the exhibition. And the chosen necklaces were as interesting as their maniac brooch companions.

Schrijver based his selection in the novelty of the proposal, as well as in the aesthetical, formal and technical qualities of the works. Being an architect myself, it was not difficult to spot the hand of a colleague in the curator’s approach. The manufacture of all the chosen pieces is superb and a certain constructivist style can be perceived through the exhibition. Examples of this are the analytic, geometric style of Hanna Lundborg’s work, the sculptural qualities of Emille de Blanche, or the topographic appearance of Jacob Erixson’s massive brooch. A creative, effective and simply beautiful approach to the pinning and closing mechanisms of several of the pieces remains a constant through Broochmania, found in the work of Yi Shen, Maki Okamoto and Dana Hakim.

Yi Shen, Untitled, 2010, mixed media

Although small in number, the collection is diverse, with a variety of materials and techniques that show the different cultural backgrounds and interests of the makers as well as an inquisitive and experimental approach to material. Maki Okamoto’s Spoon brooches show an interest in challenging the conventional use of brooches and inviting the wearer to become engaged with her pieces. Recovered silver spoons are transformed: the hollow containers become voids, the decorations on their handles are erased and weighty, tactful nuggets (which now bear impressions of those decorations stolen from the spoon handles) are the ingenious mechanisms used to fasten the brooch to the fabric. The wearer agrees to have their clothes modified by the spoon and is constantly reminded about its weight and dynamics. Okamoto’s background in sculpture is evident in the balanced proportions and contrasting volumes of her work, yet she seems to be on her way to master jewelry as well. Her Spoons are smart, skilful and pleasant to see, to touch and to wear.

Maki Okamoto, Spoon brooches, 2010, silver spoons

Israeli graduate student Dana Hakim, whose four-brooch series My Four Guardian Angels was selected for the exhibition, uses familiar everyday commodities that are drastically transformed and infused with new meaning in an attempt to persuade the audience to engage in critical reflection. Hakim chooses objects loaded with cultural meaning, such as iron nets, rubber gloves, reflectors and tape, and carefully transforms them into four brooch-amulets that make a clear comment on the current fears of our post-modern society: crime, terrorism, epidemics, bio-weapons. What is most remarkable about her work is the contrast between the harsh, almost post-nuclear appearance of the brooches and the meticulous labor involved in the execution of each piece. The iron nets are cut, folded, sewn as in the making of a delicate garment. The plastic of a light reflector perfectly fuses with silver and paint, resulting in a homogeneous and smooth surface that almost seems to have been born that way. The pins and hinges are cleverly designed and blend into the pieces, overcoming mere function.

Dana Hakin, My four guardian angels, 2010, mixed media

Industrial designer and jewelry graduate Nicolas Cheng presented a series of brooches, part of his graduation project titled The Beauty of Nothingness. Untitled, the brooch selected for Broochmania, questions the invisibility of beauty in our contemporary society. How are our inexorably decaying, grimed bodies perceived by people obsessed with youth and physical perfection? Cheng presents an interesting choice of organic (and therefore also decadent) materials that often serves to clean the body: sisal fiber, loofah, cotton and natural sponge. In his Untitled brooch, a silver twig serves as a support from which a highly tactile shape, made of natural sponge, silk and amber, seems to grow outside the body, like a parasitic animal or a malignant tumor. There is, indeed an ambiguous and subtle notion of beauty in this brooch. The viewer may need to train his eyes and go beyond the layers to discover the beauty of Cheng’s nothingness.

Nicolas Cheng, Untitled, 2010, mixed media

Annie Hagvil, a first year student at the Ädellab, is interested in illusions and the total transformation of materials. Schrijver selected two of her brooches for Broochmania: a couple of puzzling and unexpected ‘containers of empty space’. A dark crocheted see-through membrane separates the outside from the inside. Even the smallest details of the crocheted pattern and the thread used to make the pieces are visible and the viewer thinks of handling them with outmost care, fearing they will be crushed when attempting to pin them somewhere. But Hagvil’s brooches are massive and certainly un-crushable: the original piece of crocheted yam is strengthened with wax and then cast in bronze.

Annie Hagvil, Untitled, 2010, bronze

It’s no wonder that undergraduate student Yasar Aydin’s brooch was one of the first to be sold at the exhibition. It is a piece of exceptional aesthetics derived from its proficient making and the sensible choice of materials: iron, porcelain and leather. His Untitled brooch is part of an ongoing research project that deals with self-acceptance and the acceptance from others – a rather complex topic that he has chosen to approach in a playful way in this piece. Aydin compares his path as a jeweler to the one of a storyteller: he likes to revive his experiences and questions his ideas and the world that surrounds him, using jewelry as a medium to narrate the outcome. It may be interesting to see the rest of the works of his current research project and understand how this piece fits in the story. But Aydin’s brooch is proof that collaborative projects between academies and renowned galleries often work pretty well.

Yasar Aydin, Untitled, 2010, iron, porcelain, leather

Broochmania is an interesting academic project. While it makes it evident that academies and students would benefit from training students from the early stages to face the demanding and complex professional scene of contemporary jewelry, the exhibition has also been a great opportunity for them to acquire real-life experience and for the audience to be treated with the promise of surprising young talents. It also makes us glad to have galleries that are willing to undertake unusual projects and make the jewelry scene even more exciting.

Broochmania may be a slightly big name for a small exhibition, but it is an exhibition that explores the limitless possibilities of brooches in a creative and skilful manner and that leaves the audience wishing to see what these new artists will come up with in the future.

Jennifer Wells

AJF is very pleased to bring you the third in a series of posts showcasing the work of graduate contemporary jewelry students from leading schools around the world. Our third entry in the AJF honor roll for 2010 is East Carolina University, located in the state of North Carolina, United States.

The Metal Design program at East Carolina University offers BFA, BFAED, and MFA degrees and students work in a recently renovated, state of the art facility. The four metals faculty, Linda Darty, Robert Ebendorf, Tim Lazure and MiSook Hur, have diverse strengths and talents contributing to the wide variety of approaches that individual students pursue. Both traditional and non-traditional materials and techniques are encouraged with classes that include metals fabrication, casting, raising and forming, enameling, surface embellishment, electroforming, lathe work, experimental techniques and even large scale welding or smithing. With an understanding of contemporary and historical perspectives, individuality is encouraged through the development of each student’s personal philosophy and direction.

To view the complete set of images from East Carolina University, click here.

Autumn Brown

Grace Cross

AJF is very pleased to bring you the second in a series of posts showcasing the work of graduate contemporary jewelry students from leading schools around the world. Our second entry in the AJF honor roll for 2010 is Central St Martins, located in London, England.

The BA (Honours) Jewelry course at Central St Martins is highly distinctive in that it promotes understanding of a wide variety of approaches and contexts that contemporary jewelers can operate in. The course provides a stimulating learning environment in which innovation, originality and excellence are encouraged and developed.

Our aim is to help students identify and develop an individual identity and recognise appropriate ways of working after graduation. We also aim to initiate an awareness of continuing and current cultural issues relevant to jewelry and encourage investigation of the social responsibilities and ethical implications of jewelry manufacture.

To view the complete set of images from Central St Martins, click here.

Hye Rim Nah

Stephen Knott

AJF is very pleased to bring you this review by Stephen Knott of Hans Stofer’s exhibition Walk the line, which took place at Gallery S O in London from 19 March – 17 May 2010. Stofer is head of the jewelry department of the Royal College of Art in London (you can read more about him by clicking here), and Knott is a collaborative PhD student at the V&A Museum and the Royal College on an AHRC-funded studentship entitled ‘Modern craft: history, theory, practice’.

Gallery S O houses its temporary exhibitions in a small hall behind its permanent salesroom in what used to be a string factory. As the gallery assistant unlocked the room for me during my visit, I noticed ‘Hans Stofer’ written in gold on the architrave above the door, as if we were entering a prestigious family mausoleum.

Yet once the door was opened, the kind of coherent chronological symbolism that you might expect in tombs was replaced by an irreverent scattering of objects gathered around a central corridor made from wood panels, disassembled from a garden shed. This was the passageway that, according to Gallery S O’s press release, the visitor must pass through to enter Hans Stofer’s ‘hidden world and view pieces that attempt to walk the line of maintaining a fragile balance between binary extremes’. These dichotomies included function and non-function, art and craft, sanity and madness, purpose and accident, familiarity and alienation, and many other couplets aside.

Missing from this list is the dichotomy between tools and sculpture. This is important because this exhibition is not just an entrance point to Stofer’s creative headspace but a focused interrogation of the concept of tools and tooling.

Tooling has aroused recent attention within applied art theory. Craft theorist Glenn Adamson wrote a short essay called ‘Tooling up and tooling down’ in Eighteen proposals, a catalogue for Royal College of Art Ceramics and Glass graduating students (May 2010) in which he positioned ‘vertical movement within the single meta-field of tooling’ as a potential post-disciplinary strategy. This represents an alternative approach to the current popularity of lateral movement across disciplines (for example, a jeweler engaging with sculpture), and might involve deliberately using the wrong tool for the job, or conflating different tools together. An example of this ‘tool-as-art’ genre is Tim Hawkinson’s Signature (1993) that combines old school chair with winged platform, a ballpoint pen, a roll of cash register tape and motorized elements to make a contraption that endlessly reproduces his own signature. The chits of paper pile up, making an obvious statement about artistic authorship, but the work also provokes an enquiry into the relationship between art object and tool.

Critical examination of tooling in art practice engenders a post-disciplinary future where craft takes centre stage, due to applied art practitioners’s closeness to the tools they use. But serious discussion of the role of tools in practice is held back by the romantic and often spiritual way in which makers describe their tools.

Stofer’s exhibition Walk the line does not indulge in such an infatuation with tools. Instead there is a playful provocation of the tool as sculpture. Paintbrushes with spoon ends are standing in jam jars and stained tin cans; a jug is made from a one-pint plastic milk vessel and an orange juice carton; nails have tiny ornamental heads on them that would make them frustrating to use in any DIY project; buckets become chairs; a trowel has a candle for a handle. Tools are twisted, made ridiculous and denied of function; conversely found objects are made into tools.

Many of Sofer’s works fall into the Duchampian tradition of the assisted readymade, taking a found object and doing something extra to it. The Swiss Gruyère cheese is not asking to be judged as an art object by itself but is shaped into a cross, parodying traditional jewelry iconography. At the end of the corridor is Off my trolley, a wooden cart laden with what appears to be shards of the artistic process – cigarettes, graffiti, smears, half-used paint tubes and plastic cups. But each piece is constructed by hand: what appears to be a stubbed cigarette, for example, is actually made of metal.

This is more than just an effort to ‘tease out something new and meaningful from the old and unwanted’ as Fiona Rattray put it in her review for Crafts magazine (n.224, May/June 2010). This is a playful, proactive appropriation of found objects that are shaped into functionless and functional tools/art. Moreover, Stofer deceives the audience into thinking that he has only used readymades, when actually he has employed craft skill to make things look like readymades. There is a deception at play, showing how makers can exercise magic on materials to trick viewers – an exploration of craft as ‘crafty’, or cunning.

The title of the show recalls the famous Johnny Cash song ‘I walk the line’. Of course we could explain this choice of title as a reference to treading the fine line between all those dichotomies mentioned earlier – the treacherous path of the maker between art and craft. But there is an alternative reading. Cash often recalled that when composing this song in the 1950s that he wanted to use a snare drum. However, this instrument was unpopular in country music at the time so instead he put a piece of paper in between the guitar strings and the fret board to create his own ‘snare drum’ effect. It is perhaps this more obscure reference, the making of a tool specific to need, that we should look to for in a more provocative reading of the show.

Aliyah Gold

AJF is very pleased to bring you the first in a series of posts showcasing the work of graduate contemporary jewelry students from leading schools around the world. First up in the AJF honor roll for 2010 is SUNY New Paltz, located in the state of New York, United States.

The SUNY New Paltz Graduate Metal program is directed by Professor Jamie Bennett and Professor Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, and includes Arthur Hash and John Cogswell as prominent faculty. We believe a graduate program should be a place that inspires and challenges students to combine making and thinking toward dynamic outcomes. We encourage students to have a strong sense of responsibility, self-reliance and confidence. Graduate study is very different from undergraduate work or working independently; graduate students direct their own course of study, while they form a vital community of inquiry and action. Graduate students have the intellectual capability and motivation to move the field in new directions; we encourage a depth and breadth of investigations pertaining to the practice.

To view the complete set of images from SUNY New Paltz, click here.

Allyson Bone

Agnes Larsson, Carbo, 2010, mixed media, 16 x 18 x 1 inches

Susan Cummins, Chair of the Art Jewelry Forum (AJF), and Susan Kempin, Award Program Chair, are pleased to announce this year’s Emerging Artist Award winner, Agnes Larsson. Larsson was chosen from among 117 entries, from 38 countries.

The goal of the Emerging Artist Award is to acknowledge promise, innovation and individuality in the work of emerging jewelers. The competition is open to makers of art jewelry who have recently completed their professional training and have not been a featured artist in a commercial gallery or museum. Larsson will receive a $5,000 cash award. In addition, her work will be featured by an AJF member gallery at the Sculptural Object and Functional Art (SOFA) Expo in Chicago and in AJF ads, and she will serve as a juror for next year’s competition.

Jurors for the 2010 competition were Namita Wiggers, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon; Susan Beech, long-standing member of AJF and collector of contemporary jewelry; and Sharon Massey, jeweler and recipient of the AJF’s 2009 Emerging Artist Award.

Agnes Larsson, Carbo, 2010, mixed media, 17 x 13 inches

Criteria used in the judging were originality, depth of concept and quality of craftsmanship.  Larsson used carbon and horse hair in this series of work she submitted. She allows the material to lead the way through the working process, drawing inspiration from thoughts about gravity, lightness and heaviness, death, life, transparency and darkness, growth, decomposition and transformation to show contrasts like fragility and strength, depth and surface, darkness and light.

Juror Susan Beech commented, ‘This body of work most exemplified the guidelines for judging: originality, depth of concept and quality of craftsmanship. The use of carbon and horsehair, original materials, work well together. The first thought that came to mind when I looked at this body of work was elegant.’ Sharon Massey added, ‘Agnes Larsson presents a cohesive body of work that I found quite unusual and poetic. Her forms are simple, emphasizing the texture and blackness of the carbon as well as the fragility of the horsehair. Her artistic voice seemed the most authentic and unique.’

Larsson received a BFA, in 2004, and an MFA, in 2007, in Silversmithing and Jewellery from Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, Sweden.

Agnes Larsson, Carbo, 2010, mixed media, 4 x 2 x 1 inches