Peter requested that I make my small intro talk for our opening into a blog so here it is 🙂
I will be sharing a few ideas with you on Polarity: the meeting of opposites; two forces, opposing yet mutually interdependent. It’s all real, and it’s all a dream.
All natural forces flow between two poles. Polarity occurs at all levels: on the macro level, the north and south poles of the earth create a force of magnetism.
On the micro level: the dance of polarity is the basis of all life forms, as seen in cell division during foetal development.
To be Human is to exist at the intersection between the physical and the psycho-spiritual realms. The evolutionary leap to our current level of consciousness has endowed humans with a strong urge to know, to imagine and to create.
Polarity as it relates to human expression is the oppositional tension that motivates all human behaviour.
This show acknowledges experiencing the full spectrum of light and dark. Rather than trying to amputate the darker side of life, we opt to face it square on and not retreat from the dark corners. For it is when we choose to welcome, rather than resist, whatever lurks there that we discover new depths.
When two extremes intersect, is there turbulence? Like when warm and cold air meets creating a tornado, with stillness in the centre? Or is it actually a seamless integration, as one becomes the other, and we incorrectly perceive it as discomfort, when it is merely a transition of the same energy changing forms?
While both inwardly and outwardly observing ourselves and the world around us, we are in constant mode of give and take, between a stimulus and response.
Our artistic practices can be a push-pull of many polarities playing out on several levels.
There are moments when we want to project and times when we need to reflect.
Our subjects and materials range from the sacred to the mundane, the ordinary to the extraordinary, the material and the immaterial.
We constantly walk a line between dissonance and resonance while responding to our internal and external environments.
Sometimes in our practices we unintentionally limit when we could be liberating ourselves.
Quite often during the creative process we experience contraction and other times expansion in a fight between self doubt and self belief.
Usually there is a flow of both gratification and frustration before a body of work is resolved. Every maker knows this place as they walk knowingly into the unknown. And that is what makes it both exciting and painful, constantly placing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. The sane may question why we do it.
There is strong oppositional tension during hundreds of decisions when a maker moves material from a thought into a thing.
The polarity within our own minds of the left and right hemispheres of the brain working in complementary opposition; between reason, logic and technical skill on the one side, and intuition, inspiration and the sensorial on the other side.
In a world caught in a fight between suppression and expression, the generic and the original, the machine-made and the hand-made, contemporary jewellery finds its place.
Our bodies can be our fields of expression. The medium of contemporary jewellery allows us to physically embody an idea by wearing a concept, theme or material on our own person. As the wearer we consciously or subconsciously can activate that energy from the maker into further existence.
We are connecting a thought and an object, object and a person, and a person and another person together. From contact to connection.
Those new to the medium of contemporary jewellery may feel challenged by the unconventional forms presented here. We are not sorry for that. It is part of the role of a contemporary jeweller to challenge preconceived ideas or notions of what jewellery should represent.
French philosopher Albert Camus said it well; “The greatness of art is not to hover above everyone. On the contrary, it should interfere with everything.”