Broach of The Month Club on Art Jewelry Forum

Broach of the Month Club got a lovely mention on the Art Jewelry Forum


You can read the article here:
http://www.artjewelryforum.org/blog/2010/03/26/audience-issues/

Family and Friends from far and wide visit the Best in Show Opening

Following this invitation on facebook....

These visitors made their way to the Best in Show opening at Objectspace

my display

Jewellery on the Brink of a Relationship 

at Objectspace

Mom and Dad taking in the show

 All the overseas friends getting a nice close peak at the work

It turned into a bit of an overseas reunion really.  It was fabulous.
I even got to meet my new born niece!  
And the whole family turned up wearing my jewellery, how lovely!

Best in Show 2010 Opening 26 March

Please join me for the Objectspace opening 26 March, 2010 6pm & artist talk 27 March 11am.

This is how the show is described on the Objectspace website:

Objectspace's annual graduate showcase is now in its sixth year. Best In Show 2010 (27 March- 1 May) will feature 17 contemporary design, craft and object graduates from around New Zealand. Best In Show is a fantastic launching pad for emerging practitioners and represents an exciting professional development opportunity for these new voices in the design and craft communities.  

Makers:
Kate Butler, Nadene Carr, Ko-Hsin Chen, Emma Cullen, Kristin D'Agostino, Matt Fanning, Sunni Gibson, Emma Grose, Gwen Hudson, David Kaho, Corinne Lochner, Sita Main, Jade Muirhead, Helen Perrett, Lars Preisser, Robyn Singh, Raewyn Walsh

Curator:
Matt Blomeley

Fristch on the Lower East Side

These are a few of my favourite things, Karl Fritsch + Lower East Side  NY.
I can only imagine how exciting this jeweller/painter pair will be!  

Karl Fritsch + Richard Wathen

Salon 94 Freemans
East Village / Lower East Side
1 Freeman Alley,

March 2 - April 10, 2010

Here is the show description as posted on the Salon 94 Freemans' website.

Salon 94 Freemans is pleased to present a new exhibition of jewelry by Karl Fritsch and paintings by Richard Wathen.

Challenging the conventions of both sculpture and jewelry making, Munich-based artist Karl Fritsch creates rings that read as miniature sculptures. Often intricately constructed yet coarsely finished, Fritsch’s rings are marked by rough, oxidized finishes and detectable fingerprints, conveying the urgency of the rings’ materialization. He playfully mixes high and low materials, giving equal billing to diamonds, rubies, plastic pearls and glass gemstones. By making all his sculptures wearable in the form of rings, Fritsch liberates his media from static presentation and creates an unprecedented intimacy to the works, simultaneously subverting the notion that jewelry is mere décor and that sculpture must be admired at a distance.

Broach of the Month Club + Masterworks Gallery 2010

Rebekah Robinson snapped these great photos of the Broach of the Month Club 2009 show opening at Masterworks Gallery on Sunday.  True to form, the orginal brooch clan created a fabulous buzz and it was a very fun opening!  

The 2010 Broach of the Month Club - Masterworks Collaboration kicked off as well.  The brooches for the 2010 round are fabulously exciting.  The wearers seemed thrilled to take home thier new treasures!  All very fun indeed.

Big thank yous to all of the out of town guests Lillian who came all the way from Sydney, Pene from Gisbourne, Mary from Michigan.

chromophobia....

Chromophobia by David Bachelor discusses colour and it’s historic association with “a Fall”.   Bachelor explains western cultures fear a fear of corruption or contamination through color. he says that colour is  "dangerous because it is secondary... The minor is always the undoing of the major."  

In this section he is discussing J-K Huysman's hero, Des Esseintes, in his novel A Rebours published in 1884 and translated as Against Nature.  I love reading this quote, looking at my monochromatic work, looking at the Naturally, Unnaturally show and plotting my FALL into colour.

“.. this is after all also a story of a Fall.  But not before he has figured out the problem of flowers.  For flowers, like precious stones, are both brilliantly coloured and often utterly commonplace.  And flowers are also of nature rather than against it.  Des Esseintes begins his careful selection by classifying flowers in terms of social class.  He identifies the ‘poor, vulgar slum-flowers’, a middle class of ‘pretentious, conventional, stupid flowers’ and lastly, ‘flowers of charm and tremendous delicacy… princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having nothing whatever in common with the popular plants or bourgeois blooms’.  Naturally, Des Esseintes admires only the 'rare and aristocratic  plants from distant lands', and these mainly for their unnaturalness, as they are kept alive only 'with cunning attention in artificial tropics'.  This 'inborn taste for the artificial' in turn leads him - in an entirely post modern way,  - to begin 'to neglect the real flower for its copy', which in turn leads him to cultivate an interest in flowers that are literally artificial, those 'faithfully and miraculously executed in indiarubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and velvet.'  And yet he is still not satisfied, which is perhaps the entire point and dynamic of the book.  Des Esseintes is never satisfied with his orchestrations artificiality, perhaps because even the most extreme artifice, once familiar, becomes a kind of nature to him.

          So he turns his attention to another king of flora: ‘tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes.’  On taking delivers of these naturally artificial blooms, Des Esseintes falls into a kind of delirium or conscious dream-state, which, in some respects at least, is not unlike Le Corbusier’s oriental delirium.  Glancing from flower to flower and inspired mainly by the exotic plants’ intense colours, he begins to blur the distinction between flower parts and animal parts, between different types of flesh, between the vegetable and the mineral, between the healthy and the diseased.  One plant ‘looked as if it had been fashioned out of the pleura of an ox or the diaphanous bladder of a pig’; another ‘seemed to be simulating zinc, parodying bits of punched metal coloured emperor green and splattered with drops of oil paint streaks of red lead and white’; another ‘flaunted leaves the colour of raw meat, with dark red ribs and purplish fibrils, puffy leaves that seemed to be sweating blood and wine.’  … Eventually Des Esseintes becomes exhausted by the ‘crude and dazzling colours’ of his ‘depraved’ and ‘unhealthy’ hothouse collection.  Gradually, his conscious colour-delirium lead him to fall into a restless sleep and then into a colour-nightmare …

 

chromatic dreams

I am still thinking about naturally, unnaturally!

I found the material and the colour in the show, very intriguing.

The press release from Masterworks, said this.

With a focus on ideas of botany and the body – the artists have created edgy jewellery that utilises and manipulates non-specific artificial objects including vintage fake flowers and beads alongside silver, gold and wood. Changing the unnatural to the natural the artists have developed two playful bodies of work, which speak to each other through an excited engagement of ideas and material sensibility.

Exciting Blog Finds #1 - Amy Tavern

I stumbled onto Amy Tavern's jewellery blog and it was such a delight. 

She has Guest Star Fridays featuring different jewellers, what a treat!

I cannot wait to catch up on all of the back reading....

I also love her jewellery/drawings.... mmmmm

http://amytavern.blogspot.com/2010/03/guest-star-friday-54maranon.html

Broach of the Month Club + Masterworks Gallery 2010

 

You are invited