Jewellery's baggage makes it a difficult artistic medium says - Courtesy of The Dominion Post

By Mark Amery

JEWELLERY is a most compromised art form. It comes with a lot of baggage. It is worn as a badge of status or wealth, individuality or affiliation, and is always a carrier of deeply personal stories for its owner. The way we consider a piece of jewellery then is profoundly affected by the value it has to us as wearer or as' passerby.
Jewellery's baggage makes it a difficult artistic medium says - Courtesy of The Dominion Post

By Mark Amery

JEWELLERY is a most compromised art form. It comes with a lot of baggage. It is worn as a badge of status or wealth, individuality or affiliation, and is always a carrier of deeply personal stories for its owner. The way we consider a piece of jewellery then is profoundly affected by the value it has to us as wearer or as' passerby.
Most jewellery doesn't want to confuse you with complex ideas. It states its identity baldly and plainly - a precious reproduced object around which our own complex feelings of self and identity can then be amassed.

It takes a strong artist therefore to make jewellery that also succeeds as art. To be able to create objects that retain jewellery boldness and finesse, yet also have the depth of life and mystery of great art.

Peter Deckers is one such New Zealand jeweller; one of a select few who can be considered as fine a contemporary artist as he is craftsperson. Ideas rather than beauty drive Decker's practice. Not that his objects aren't exquisite, but what's distinctive here is that his work is often (and when it is most successful) actually about the ideas that surround jewellery.

Presented beautifully in installations in public galleries employing light, sound and other elements, Deckers' 'work explores the value of those things we carry in public as signatures of personal and political identity.

A comparatively simple example of his is the sound/ jewellery installation: ' Now Then, Who what?!' Accompanied by the sounds of people talking about the importance of their jewellery, three rings are presented. The first is a ring found by Deckers in a secondhand shop, the second is the same ring but with the shapes and colours. boldly accentuated to represent how others might see the ring in their mind's eye, and the third ring has the shapes' and colours accentuated as crystal like forms to represent how, with memories encased in it, it might have been seen by its past owner.

This work is included in Customised, a survey of Deckers' work created in the 20 years since he emigrated to New Zealand from Holland. To engage with this survey in a small room at Pataka is to deal with an exquisitely packed collection of ideas that expand rapidly as you consider them. As a jeweller used to dealing with the world in exquisite miniature, Deckers is also an artist able with installation to create a network of conceptual worlds that are far bigger than a gallery space this size should by rights be able to hold.
In the installation The Reproduction Guild moral codes surrounding reproduction of all kinds have broken down, touching on as diverse a subjects as digital manipulation, genetic engineering and artistic authenticity. The latter is represented through 'signet rings that bear the signature of famous artists, as if one might buy one, wear it and imprint fancy signature on to whatever you fancy.

Deckers' work is rarely about creating individual objects. Each piece leads on to the next in a constant exploration of the manipulation of material at hand to find out what more he can reveal about the way our culture operates.

Through installation in public galleries Deckers emphasises that his pieces are not created as individual objects, awaiting a buyer and their stories, but rather each is part of a community of pieces and a network of stories.

Underpinning all of his work is also an examination of the morality behind how symbols are used and abused: by the individual, the artist, the corporate and the state. Strong tensions are played out in the best work: between two cultures, organic cultured shapes, or between the freedom of speech and the abuse of languages. This is a kind of activism, but that occasionally (in a series on the Chernobyl disaster for example) lacks a complexity in its exploration that sees it become showy and didactic.

Yet the work is also always playful and accessible to engage with. Like a great pop artist, Deckers is king of the great quip. He's always hooking you in to his concerns with an attractive, nifty idea that turns what you expect from a piece of jewellery on its head.

In Ricochet, headshots of the "good" (Mandela, Mother Teresa) and the "bad" (Hussein, Hitler) are alternated within a brooch, shaped as a bent arrow, wittily, questioning our simple judg ¬ments of people's worth. In the Shut-Up Series the mouths of dictators have been cut out from their faces, put in brooches and then locked in a cabinet. Two keys are presented for the cabinet, one made of gold, the other rusty.
Deckers often cuts out birds, faces and other icons out of coins, setting these symbols fee to speak in a wider socio-political context, or within new cages the jeweller makes for them.

Language is at the heart of all this work. The way social and political codes are communicated through the symbols that we carry on our person as currency- be it coins or jewellery'- to assist in making transactions in life.

Review by Mark Amery Dominion Post (B16), Friday 23 Aug, 2005