A World We Left Behind
Do you remember your dreams upon waking? What is the earliest memory you can recall?
This project is intently concerned with memory, but doesn’t aim to depict any type of overt imagery related to existing memories. I am primarily interested in converting emotion and ‘feelings’. The idea of Enargeai is particularly intriguing to me – it describes a quality of intense ‘present-ness’ or vividness that people often feel when reading a novel or listening to transportive music.
This quality is something I am intensely interested in bringing to my jewellery work and through the use of a wide variety of materials and techniques I have explored how this is possible. It is important in jewellery to always be considering the ‘best’ way to accomplish a work. The best brooch mechanisms are the simplest, and when attempting to convey a conceptual thought this applies in the same way. I have found it greatly important to explore as many ways of making as possible in an effort to create effective works and this project has become a culmination of that.
As I touched upon, this work is not overt, it is purposefully ambiguous, but not too ambiguous that its intention isn’t clear. For many people the works provide a sense of mystery, once coupled with the exhibition title ‘A World We Left Behind’, there begins to form this idea of a narrative; That these objects are relics of the past – This poses the question “what past?” And the viewer leads onward from there, creating their own interpretation of the material. There is not a more personal art form than jewellery – which by nature clings to the body and holds us as we hold it. It is irrefutably intimate and many of these works feel that way – as if they were made for a particular person or tied intangibly to a place.
