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DIY IUDs, installation made as part of my MFA study

 

As mentioned, HS5 is comprised of two exhibitions in 2019, the first at CODA (The Netherlands) and the final, at Te Uru (Auckland). As a maker you’re often asked to respond to external themes or ideas that can pull you away from current lines of enquiry and thinking. This is a problem I’ve not yet solved. One successful jeweller I know of shows ‘wherever she’s at right now’. I’ve always loved that idea because it seems the best way to keep your thinking ‘your own’ and not get drawn off track, avoiding the requisite spending of making/thinking time, energy and materials on ‘getting back on track’.

Studying for my final year of a Masters of Fine Art alongside HS5 means being deeply enmeshed in lots of concurrent ideas. My MFA revolves around material explorations and responses to bodily autonomy and the emotional labour of parenting (as above). Neither of these subjects have any relationship to the architecture of Te Uru nor Onno Boekhoudt’s jewellery. For sanity sake, I need ideas that make sense to both CODA and Te Uru, but that don’t mess with my study.

At the beginning of the Handshake5 program we workshopped potential responses with Roseanne Bartley. The overriding idea I took away was translation, only it didn’t actually translate into an idea until I re-read Roseanne’s An Encounter with Necklace 1978 – One to One Recurring in Art Jewellery Forum. The article details her thorough engagement with a Daniel Kruger neckpiece made in 1978. Within the text there were a couple of ideas that stood out (underlined as follows).

 “it became apparent that in order to bring the object to light, or life, I would need to reorient gaze and intention. Rather than look directly at Necklace 1978 and comment on it (authoritative voice), I considered what it might mean to “look among” (Elkins, 39) the object”.

With Roseanne aiming for these ideas to facilitate “dynamic forms of encounter and exchange”.