Standard Cut

The Standard Cut is a collection of rings from the 1990’s which was shown in a solo exhibiton at  the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Dresden (Museum of Applied Arts), Galerie Marzee in the Netherlands, and in Australia at Craft Victoria in Melbourne and Craftspace Sydney. The exhibition was accompanied by a full-colour catalogue.

The work explores the traditional language of jewellery as a metaphor for the binary opposites of nature / culture (artifice). It utilises the traditional language of stones, claw-settings and gold, causing a displacement within this language and questioning its authority. It explores the possibilities between 2 meanings, 2 materials, and 2 opposed tensions.

The two materials, the ‘raw’ crystals and the ’cooked’ enamel are a metaphor for the binary opposites of nature / culture. In my work the stone becomes the ‘site and surface of the inscription of social meanings’, and not a natural object. The pervading presence of a stone as the centrepiece of a piece of jewellery is played with in the work.

The absence of the stone in the commercial claw-settings calls into question its paramount importance and questions the assumptions we have about the cliches in jewellery. Cries of “but where is the stone” are to be heard everywhere! Through its linguistic reference to the signifier, the claw-setting talks about the stone and yet the stone is absent.

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Created by admin | December 16, 2015 | sample