handSTAND at the NZ Jewellery Show
handSTAND was the major contemporary jewellery exhibition at The New Zealand Jewellery Show, this year held in Auckland rather than Wellington.
handSTAND was the major contemporary jewellery exhibition at The New Zealand Jewellery Show, this year held in Auckland rather than Wellington. Following in the footsteps of Brand Spanking New (2007) curated by Karl Chitham, and Overcast (2008) curated by Renee Bevan, this year’s curator Peter Deckers decided to restrict submissions to jewellers who have graduated from tertiary study within the last four years. As a result there was no exhibition theme as such.
Rather, handSTAND demonstrates a moment, a social group, with no particular expectation that the works will speak to each other.
Let me start with a quick description of the context. Straight through the main entrance of the convention centre at Skycity and you encountered contemporary jewellery first up on the right hand side. All the jewellery was displayed in vertical cases, suspended against a plain white background set into a larger wooden panel with the names of institutions in vinyl lettering. (These are the standard exhibition cases that all exhibitors at The New Zealand Jewellery Show use.)
Fingers Jewellery shared a stand with the Manukau School of Visual Arts and Hungry Creek Art and Craft School.
Next up was handSTAND, snaking across the space in four display units with a total of 16 individual display cases. Most of the jewellers had a case to themselves, and a few shared.
This was followed by display units showing work from the students of Whitireia Community Polytech, Unitec and the Otago Polytechnic School of Art, and then the finalists of the Regal Castings Jewellery Design Awards, featuring 36 works by 36 makers.
Finally contemporary jewellery was represented by a series of stands featuring individual makers who fit on the edges of the contemporary jewellery scene, working in ways that are allied with contemporary jewellery rather than what the organisers of The New Zealand Jewellery Show politely and euphemistically call Fine Jewellery.
In some ways it is hard to review this exhibition. After all, it isn’t much removed from student work, and there are legitimate questions about what standards you should hold such jewellery accountable to.
In his catalogue essay Peter Deckers writes that ‘I like to see jewellery with guts, on display, in exhibitions, in books, magazines and catalogues, and on people. I like to see jewellery breaking through its own tradition, its own code, and its own sanctuary – the more it happens the more exciting it becomes. . . . All these thoughts motivated me to give the emerging NZ jewellers a chance to shine on their own turf, not only to counter the lack of exposure they usually experience, but more to introduce the public to new thinking and ideas from the next generation.’
For my part I wouldn’t expect anyone who is just out of art school, at the start of their career, to be producing brilliant jewellery. (To be honest, I don’t even expect most New Zealand jewellers to be doing this.) Yet I think that Deckers optimism was rewarded, since there was some intriguing jewellery in this show.
As well as winning the opportunity to be included in the show and thus have their work seen by a large audience and featured in the handSTANDexhibition catalogue, the selected jewellers were also eligible for three prizes: first and second prize in the Top Mark Award, and the Resene Award with just one recipient.
Vaune Mason took out first place in the Top Mark Award with Control, a pendant that mimics the form and function of a camera, acting as a locket in which printed acrylic ‘negatives’ are stored. Her artist statement states that ‘I wanted to investigate ideas of the familiar, and of identity, creating an unfamiliar place for my own identity, as well as a more visual link between the artist and a potential owner.’
The images are of Mason herself, which forces the jewellery in an interesting direction by testing the wearer/owner’s commitment to having a ‘name’ around their neck. After all, Mason is an up-and-coming contemporary jeweller who may or may not make it to the big time. And while there is a necessary relation between maker, wearer and viewer, this pendant puts Mason as an individual, rather than Mason as an artistic brand, firmly into the picture. That is a rather aggressive intrusion into the semantic triangle.
Second place in the Top Mark Award was won by Vivien Atkinson’s Suite: Illusions. While to my mind the end result, the jewellery itself, was insufficiently elegant and fully realised as an object, the process and concept of adorning the bride with a temporary confection of sugar paste, icing and diamonds is very funny and quite apt.
The Resene Award was won by Jhana Millers with her Charm Bracelet necklace, created from advertising brochures glued together to form a chain and variety of charms that suspend from it: a bottle, a cell phone, a car, an i-pod, a takeaway coffee, a digital camera, a sneaker, an Apple laptop and a handbag. It is a very appealing work, sparking conceptually – it looks like Miller has used brochures advertising the object in question – and having great object appeal – Miller mixes up spot-on hand-made versions of the items in question with the charm bracelet ‘look’ (slightly conventional, dinky). While she is clearly wishing to take a critical stance and make a point through the dubious efficacy of her charms, she has also taken the time to labour over these advertisements and create her own little version of the consumerist dream. It is a delightfully ambivalent and complicit performance.
Apart from these prize winners there were some other notable inclusions in handSTAND. Here’s what I picked out from the 21 participants, in no particular order.
Jacqui Chan’s Brooches, which she describes as ‘Chinoiserie in the age of globalisation: jewellery from the Chinese supermarket’ are also very nice: sharp, light on their feet, nicely executed. It’s wonderful how the punctured holes both dematerialise the metal, and produce the cheap glitter and glamour of the pieces.
Selina Woulfe’s Graftification series, in which she describes graftification as ‘an invasive procedure performed on the body with surgical wire and silver grafts: superficial enhancement used as psychological bandage’, gestured towards something interesting, even as the works themselves wimped out. (We needed photographs of the brooches in action, stitched to the body.)
Genevieve Packer’s Full Cream Beak (2009), silver lips for old glass milk bottles, were perfectly judged objects, subtle and beautiful, with none of the clunky-ness and trite politics of her knuckledusters. Lynsay Raine’s Apparatus were also nice, a nod to medical technology and stubborn objects that resist easy interpretation and thus offer themselves, in her words, as objects that are ‘Encapsulating the ephemeral to prompt emotional response’. I also liked Sarah Read’s Anagram brooches, with their mix of materials and curious hybridity, bringing together the natural world and the codes of conventional and contemporary jewellery. This jewellery, especially when seen en masse, was thoughtful and strange, the kinds of objects that keep you interested and offer a complicated viewing experience. No easy interpretation here.
And of course there was a fair bit of half formed ideas, some badly digested references to international jewellery, and some weak reliance on materials and techniques to get the objects through. In deference to the particular circumstances of this exhibition, identified above, it doesn't seem fair to name names. But what surprised me is how impressed I was overall, how I came away thinking contemporary jewellery has some surprisingly mature young makers who are really taking themselves and their work seriously.
That feeling was reinforced after seeing the Regal Castings Jewellery Design Awards. This is the award for the best fine and contemporary jewellers at work in Aotearoa, and if handSTAND represented the future, then this selection represents the present. Based on this evidence, contemporary jewellery is in a little bit of trouble. It’s not so much that I would have chosen the award winners differently, but I found it all quite ho-hum. Most of this work looked like jewellery for the sake of jewellery, lacking much in the way of grit or purchase; and in a sea of mediocrity, the few objects that do represent practices of substance, that do stack up, that have ambition, didn't improve by being viewed in this company. I know this is an award and in no way shaped beyond the decisions that individuals make to enter their jewellery; and as such it is unfair to treat it as an accurate representation of contemporary jewellery in this country. But I came away from this display feeling dispirited if not depressed. In contrast, for all the failings of some of the work in handSTAND, the overall experience was positive, hopeful. I find myself rooting for the best of this new crop of graduates.
Finally, I think it is necessary to mention the handSTAND catalogue. While perhaps not the most beautiful publication, it is a remarkable accompaniment to the show. There are essays by writers like Kevin Murray, as well as statements from lecturers at the five tertiary institutions with courses in jewellery; information about the Top Mark and Resene Award winners from judge Matt Blomeley; artist statements by each jeweller in the show, and short, pithy texts about these jewellers by a range of individuals who know their work. All this and plenty of images, including photographs of the jewellery being ‘worn by people attending to their daily domestic routine’, as Deckers puts it. It is remarkably substantial for a project that did not receive Creative New Zealand funding, and a testament to the ambitions and hard work of curator Peter Deckers.