Recipient of the Lowenstein Arts Management Prize.
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A BRIGHT FUTURE seeks to evoke new understandings of value, reuse, and material, centred around my utopian ideal of a sustainable future. Through methodologies of collection, frugality, and recontextualisation, my series of jewellery and objects open a dialogue on the ways new narratives can be ascribed to discarded resources. The process of recontextualisation is completed through the use of colour, scale, and installation—the bright and strange forms, when hung on the gallery wall or worn on the body, evoke joy and curiosity from the audience.
By engaging with the strategies of curator and art critic Midori Matsui’s ‘Micropop’ and philosopher Michel de Certeau’s subversive acts of the everyday, I question my position as an artist-jeweller and what role I play in the creation of a utopia. Drawing on the theories of philosophers Martin Heidegger and Donna Haraway on material agency, my jewellery elevates discarded materials and asserts their new role in a utopian future. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s urgent calls for the creation of utopia underpinned my radical reusing of collected material.
Harnessing the language of toys, child-like joy is invoked by the use of colour and humorous assemblages. In contrast, subtle dread permeates through the weight and scale of the pieces, sharpening the urgency for a solution to the problem of dwindling resources. This project is situated in an interlocking network of artists working with jewellery and sculpture, including contemporary jewellery artists Lisa Walker and Max Machaidze’s radical use of the everyday, and the collection practices of installation artists Pip & Pop and Portia Munson.
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