The Where.
Leading on from my recent bamboo model making workshop experience with a focus on the architectural scale structure, and considering the concept of Home. I was thinking about what Home is for me, and what it may represent to others including and beyond a physical place
This was an interesting head space to be suddenly be thrust into lockdown #5 following the Delta variant of Covid being found in our Auckland community. Now in day 20 isolating at home with only essential movements allowed, I’m aware we have been very lucky relative to the rest of the world in regards to freedom of movement and maintaining a Covid free status but it’s been a hard week.
As a maker of things it’s also an interesting place to be. I am lucky to have set up a workspace from home, as well as having my shared workshop which is currently inaccessible to me. The internet is a direct way to share work and create a distribution network with customers all over the world, but isn’t something intrinsic lost in translation?
Contemporary jewellery is a communicator, it can still do this via imagery to some extent but what about the haptic experience of holding a piece in your hands. Testing its weight, how it moves, the textures, how it fits on your body. What does it look like on YOU, how it makes us feel.
If the internet is the place to show our work for now, how might we respond to this virtual site? How can we represent something of the relationship between body and object, that which makes jewellery jewellery?
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Using moving image as our medium, our team of twelve have been working on our respective online exhibition works under the hugely engaging and energetic guidance of jeweller and educator Estela Saez. Since late May we’ve been challenged via regular Zoom meetings in wild and wonderful ways to make short videos on a range of themes including:
- a concept video about our work, not including any jewellery or words about our practice
- promo for a solo underwater exhibition of our work, not including any work
- a group exhibition on Mars, including a work
- an exhibition instal using only one colour randomly selected and also to show no work
It’s been a learning curve, learning the tools, considering a new medium, how to express something about what we do without directly referencing the actual thing. It’s a little like charades, which has stood me in good stead trying to communicate when languages are not shared. Perhaps it’s a perfect way to reach a global audience at a time when we’re all donning face masks and wondering how to communicate, now that language and facial expressions are not always first option, now that travel is restricted. Perhaps texture can be expressed in sound and time can hold a weight?
My current line of inquiry involves the recording, translating and transmission of personal data. There is a circular nature in feeding my analogue data visualisations back to the internet that is both sweet and sour, much like this new ‘normal’.