Reflecting on the month that was April, what an exceedingly full-to-the-brim kind of time. I don’t think I’ve quite processed or recovered from it yet! With Nelson Jewellery Week scheduled in the second week of April, there was a lot to get done in the lead-up as I and others had works going into various group exhibitions and I also had a solo show to produce. It was also planned that our first HS8 in-person 3-day Workshop with Renee Bevan would take place at NMIT, where we’d all be meeting together as a group for the first time
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NEWS FLASH! Above Left: Arrived at Nelson Airport to be met with this digital billboard in the terminal advertising NJW! Middle: Found in action on Bridget Street: Buildings Need Jewellery Signage- Glitter Wall by artists Katie Pascoe & Lee Woodman. Right: My poster design for Buildings Need Jewellery/ Containment/Uncontained Bollard Project.
It was a really wonderful experience getting to meet everyone outside of our Zoom screens and see Renee again. I had been lucky enough as a student at Whitireia to have had a couple of workshops with Renee over the years and to learn about her practice at the time. It was a pleasure to be met with her warm and generous nature, and once again be reminded of her wisdom. She has such great capacity to tune into each of us on an individual level to help us to think about and consider ways in which we can Push & Pull our ideas.
During this time, however, my mind was quite preoccupied with putting on a solo show with my jewelry pal, Caroline Thomas. We had made an application in 2022 to exhibit our evolving project Moments of Jewelleryness for Nelson Jewellery Week (NJW), which had been accepted long before my proposal to apply to Handshake was, so the timing for me meant it was a bit of a struggle to remain focused and present on the workshop with Renee and the other Handshakers. However, I got some energy flowing from conversations with peers and a 1 on 1 with Renee which helped to firm up some ideas I was having and caused me to go on a bit of a wander to source some new materials, which I look forward to investigating at a later stage, along with some other ideas for some existing works that could be developed with my repurposed plastics.
Nelson Jewellery Week was all in all a tremendously wonderful experience, which did many things to refill my cup and affirm a sense of belonging through feeling the togetherness of our Contemporary Jewellery friends and whānau. It was refreshing to see what other makers have been getting up to in their practices and to feel the wonderful vibe of Nelson City, which seemed to host us all very welcomingly. I hope there will be another to look forward to in another couple of years!
Right: Blind feedback from an exercise within the ‘push’ part of our workshop with Renee Bevan.
Above Left: Caroline Thomas & I outside Salt Gallery where we had our exhibition Moments of Jewelleryness: Off the Hook. Above Right: Install view from MOJ.
Left: Fellow Handshaker, Nellie Peoples looking chuffed with her new pin. Right: More merriment at The Free House with the contemporary jewellery community celebrating NJW and enjoying a great big pin swap!
Settling back into life again post-NJW saw myself and a few others grapple with Covid. An unfortunate souvenir! It was my first time, and on hearing a friend I’d come in contact with at the airport on the way home had tested positive the next morning, I had a strong feeling it was my time, which in fact it turned out to be. Once I’d gotten over the worst of it and could muster a bit of energy, it became my daily ritual to settle down at my kitchen table for a couple of hours every day in the late afternoon to work on our HS8 homework assignment Estela had set us. Taking the material we had been working with and a chosen paper model we had created in previous homework tasks, we were to create a series of finished pieces that would embody/ echo the form and or essence of our chosen paper model. I feel like this process became quite cathartic for me, a sort of rehabilitation if you will, which helped to engage my foggy brain and tired body into a flow state. Though I couldn’t leave the house for isolation, I had been prepared enough to buy materials before leaving for Nelson. I just had a couple of thin long strips of Balsa wood to work with, by this stage however, I had developed a bit of a disliking for it. I generally love working with wood, but Balsa wood is a whole other thing. It is not malleable, it wants to snap if you bend it, and it doesn’t have a lovely smell or respond to gouging well or burnishing. So I thought back to my previous experiments with it, one of which I had soaked it in water to try and get it to be more pliable.
I ended up dipping it at intervals of length into a boiling hot bowl of water and gently, gently willing it to bend into a curve. I helped support it into its new form by wrapping it around various cylindrical items (A jar, a broomstick), and holding it in place with rubber bands, allowing it to air dry.
Having experimented a little with burning and charring the surface in previous experiments, I decided this would be my chosen way of interacting with the surface to influence its texture. Cutting with a craft knife seemed too hard to execute with precision the delicate yet firm force the material would need in order to cut shapes from the surface to transform it. So, I invited my honoured teacher, Fire to the party, and she knew what to do.
Using a simple method of burning the surface with a cigarette lighter, I spent my late afternoons creating new surfaces on the wet-formed shapes of Balsa. As I worked, I kept in mind my given word ‘Dreamy’ that Estela had assigned me, and I had a few models alongside me for inspirational reference. As it went, some pieces split, and some I took ‘too far’ with the charring but in the end I found a way to resolve my ideas again by making sculptural forms with another simple addition of super glue.
Feeling like I had given the task the best response I had, it was affirming to hear some positive feedback from Estella and my peers when we later met over zoom to present our results. There was some dialogue generated about responding to a sense of something deep within all of us when we make sometimes, something ancestral? something that speaks or acts from our reptilian brains, perhaps? I think some things just feel primal when we make and get the chance to perform these instincts sometimes, and that is a magical thing to be able to explore and contemplate.
