A further thought after my last post: someone - I think Sofia Bjorkman (of the
Platina Gallery in Stockholm) - suggested that working with materials you don't like is a really good exercise. Your resistance to re-imagining and transforming them is reduced, which can only be a good thing. After my experience in the Robert Ebendorf workshop I can believe that, and it's something I will return to.
This reminds me of a talk by Maria Militsi, a jeweller who works with found objects and who often bases her work on pieces that are broken or damaged. She makes replacement pieces for the missing elements and these pieces are wearable. It's a really imaginative approach to jewellery design.You can see an image of Maria's work
here.
Another thought from Sofia was that jewellery in the spectrum of visual art, is the equivalent of poetry in writing. Very apt. The remit for jewellery is very specific, and I can see the parallels between different forms of poetry and different pieces of jewellery.
I guess the aim of a
good conference should be to get you thinking about things in different ways, and as you can tell this one did! Thanks
ACJ!
