Precious

7 March - 6 April 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Seven Wellington Jewellers

Precious samples the current work of seven Wellington-based jewellers. Wellington boasts a healthy and largely emerging jewellery scene with a generation of practitioners fast establishing names for themselves, alongside jewellers such as Peter Deckers who is well known nation-wide as a senior practitioner and jewellery teacher. The work in Precious does not explore a common theme, but rather presents a body of work from each artist that shows a consistent treatment of materials and exploration of ideas.

Like the General in Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude who absorbs himself in the making of tiny silver fishes, finishing a perfect fish only to melt it down and begin again, the work in Precious demonstrates not only formidable skill on the part of each jeweller but also a love of making. Take, for instance, Matthew McIntyre Wilson’s fusing of copper and silver, and his fascination with the patterns created by rolling and slicing his material in different ways. Or notice Frances Stachl’s crafting of every individual silver strand and link in her long chain, Steph Lusted’s perfect rendition of old-fashioned medical implements in precious and industrial materials, or Suzanne Tamaki’s dyed and assembled rooster feathers. Even Craig McIntosh’s seemingly simple treatment of beach detritus—old bottle-caps and pieces of plastic—belies a skilled craftsmanship evident upon closer inspection in each brooch’s burnished silver setting and the necessarily slow hand-sawing of each plastic ring in the two necklaces.

Peter Deckers’s work, The Reproduction Guild, demonstrates both a finely honed craft and a firm commitment to jewellery as a means for conveying concepts. Incorporating objects and sound, the four groups of work in Deckers’s installation investigate aspects of contemporary reproduction processes—digital, manual, manufactured and processed. Léola Le Blanc’s series of brooches also has a strong conceptual basis, drawing on symbols central to the Catholic church to investigate the religious origin of native French Canadian people’s swear words.

Of course, our common experience is of jewellery as wearable objects of personal significance and adornment—and this too is celebrated in Precious. Craig McIntosh’s work, for instance, carries a certain irony as it is his restrained interventions which turn what would otherwise be rubbish into objects of adornment and value. You might imagine Frances Stachl’s version of a feather boa in silver being worn to the Oscars, and the mind boggles at the stir Suzanne Tamaki’s feather creation—choker, bikini and g-string—might cause…

Rebecca Wilson