Jewellery on the Radio

Radio NZ interviewed Lisa Walker on the Arts on Sunday this past weekend.  Listen to the interview here:

picture via the New Dowse: Lisa Walker: brooch, 2007

Having listened to this a week ago, I am still loving the line, "Everything is food for jewellery"

feast-ive

~treats and surprises for feast~

Opening on Sunday 20th December between 3 – 6pm, ‘FEAST’,

a special satellite show hosted by Studio 20/17 and curated by Zoe Brand, on display in THE DEPOT GALLERY, as well as the completion of the second year at Studio 20/17.

Studio 20/17 has extended opening hours in the lead up to Christmas and both galleries will be open SUNDAY 20th through to Christmas Eve on THURSDAY 24th December from 11am to 6pm.

On failure and the love of liminal things

I cannot stop reading this lovely passage written by Ann Ellegood and continually interchanging the words art - sculpture - jewellery....

The artists' willingness to allow their work to suggest both a coming together and a falling apart is one of the most important, and distinctive, aspects of the work, resulting in an open quality that refuses to spell out or tie down its meaning. A visible awkwardness on indeterminateness may take on structural manifestations in terms of delicasy, precariousness, and the periodic use of inherently unstable materials, but the failure I am most interesting in here is the one that remains a possibility, as these artists simultaneously embrace and challenge the legacy of what sculpture can and should be. To put something out into the world whose meanings is opaque, value undetermined, and historically position ambiguous is, to put it mildly, risky (especially when the contemporary art world, and particularly the art market, increasingly demands facile interpretive meaning, an easily understood accompanying narrative, and legible and digestible formal qualities). Yet the possibility of failure here is not intended to be heroic. These are the small, daily failures that accompany an ongoing commitment to experimentation and refusal to become complacent.  And the result, it turns out, are not failures at all. These artists genuinely push against the parameters of the traditions of sculpture, taking an active role in parsing through its inherited languages while proposing wholly new languages as yet undefined. Samuel Beckett described this type of commitment to process and change beautifully, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’* Despite the fact that the works contain elements that carry associations the views can sin their interpretive teeth into, these sculptures might be best characterized as liminal – somewhere between an object and idea, between matter and consciousness – and this is a radical place to be.


* Samual Beckett. Worstward Ho in Nohow On: Company, Ill Seeen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1996; originally published 1984), 87.

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Ann Ellegood. The uncertaintiy of objects and ideas: Recent Scultpure. (Washington DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2006) 15.

Publication worthy of its objectness

                     

The object and jewellery graduates from Unitec created a lovely little end of year publication called 3D Tales (full disclosure, I am part of that group).  It is a delightful object to behold, if I do say so myself.  We were all so pleased with the photographs taken by Jessica Goodall and the excellent design by Mark Lovatt.  There is an introduction by Pauline Bern and Ilse-Marie Erl, critical essay by Matt Blumeley of Objectspace, and end note by Kim Meek.

feast

"celebrating the predetermined and gloriously spontaneous moments" of the season,

this evening Raewyn Walsh, Lynsay Raine, Sharon Fitness, Anne Baynham

and I are shipping off our little treats to Syndey for Feast.

The brain child of Zoe Brand, as a special satellite Christmas exhibition of Studio 20/17, the show promises to be exciting. 

Syndey:  depot gallery 1, 20 - 24 December