Contemporary jewellery is widely considered as a form of art, even though it's still an "unknown field", a category that is usually excluded from museum collections, states Widar Halén, Director of Design and Decorative Arts at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, in the introductory essay to the volume From the Coolest Corner: Nordic Jewellery (Arnoldsche).
Yet, Halén highlights, this is not the case in Nordic countries where unique jewellery pieces are created and often exhibited in museums.
The volume From the Coolest Corner: Nordic Jewellery is indeed not just a compendium of the most interesting jewellery designers and artists from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, but also a catalogue that accompanies a travelling exhibition comprising 159 pieces by 61 artists. The event, currently on in Oslo will reach Munich in 2015.
This exhibition is a new and updated version of two major events launched in 1995/1997 and in 2001/2002, and tries to discover what's the state of a phenomenon that originated in the '80s.
Judging from the variety of the pieces included in the volume and in the exhibition, Nordic jewellery is not just alive and kicking, but it's thriving, also thanks to various universities and institutions offering courses, workshops and exchange programmes that allow designers to spend periods of time abroad and mix in this way their skills and traditions with inspirations coming from another background.
Jewellery, art and fashion fans will discover in the pages of this volume (or in the exhibition if you get a chance to visit it) pieces characterised by experimental shapes and made with the most disparate materials, from natural to man-made.
Examples of materials employed in the designs include second-hand bits and pieces rescued from shops and flea markets (Paula Lindblom), precious and semi-precious stones (Kadri Mälk and Julia Maria Künnap), ceramic (Annika Åkerfelt), paper (Janna Syvänoja), insects (Märta Mattsson), grass (Anna Unsgaard), carbon and horsehair (Agnes Larsson), calfskin and leather (Julie Bach, Sanna Svedestedt), plastic or plastic bags (Aino Favén), pebbles (Lina Peterson), iron and wood (Tobias Alm, Annika Pettersson, Nicolas Cheng).
The result is a selection of very diverse jewellery that renews and revitalises more traditional materials such as wood (Kim Buck's “Bonsai” for example is a series of five trunks ending in a carved ring that can't be worn) or techniques like crocheting and embroidery (Elise Hatlø), taking them to another level and reflecting the taste, style and state of mind of the artists who created them.
Inspirations for these modern pieces come from various sources, including the legends, myths and history of the artists' native countries, but also urban scenes, settings and features (think about Marie-Louise Kristensen's ironic benches covered in graffiti, her scaffolding and trash bin brooches), nature (Anna Talbot, Hanna Hedman), architecture and the wish to allow the wearer to interact with a piece (Lillan Eliassen's ornamental casting clay and copper objects are for example suspended between sculpture and performance art) or to tell a story through highly conceptual materials.
Some designers employ more traditional goldsmithing techniques to create pieces and compositions characterised by variety, vitality and dynamics (Peter de Wit, Margareth Sandström).
In most cases the visual language created is new and innovative and is often generated by using a semantic field that doesn't belong to art but to other disciplines (such as carpentry and iron casting).
The volume also features essays about the history of Nordic jewellery and of experimental jewellery in general – from Gijs Bakker and Emmy ban Leersum to Peter Skubic and Berhnard Schobinger – and writings that analyse the advantages and disadvantages implied by the transition from "New Jewellery" (a term coined by Peter Dormer and Ralph Turner) to "Author Jewellery" and the fact that Nordic artists skipped the first phase since Scandinavian design was internationally considered as modernist and functionalist and therefore not in desperate need for experimenting.
The most original pieces in the volume are the ones in which new combinations of materials, techniques and functions generate innovative solutions and an entirely new aesthetic.
Icelandic jewellery remains the most unkown with just four designers included (two of them Hildur Ýr Jónsdóttir and Hulda B. Ágústsdóttir experiment with unusual materials such as liquid porcelain and dyed nylon threads), even though, as pointed out by independent writer, curator and jewellery lecturer Liesbeth den Besten in the volume, Swiss Fluxus artist Dieter Roth settled in Iceland in the '50s and created some of his most experimetal and cutting-edge pieces as early as 1957.
Readers and exhibition visitors may find it difficult to define some of the jewellery featured: some have a merely decorative purpose, others are genuine installations; some are funny and ironic, others hide a kind of dark drama behind their beauty; some are very minimalist pieces, others are extremely exaggerated, yet all of them can be filed under art, and all of them reflect the diverse backgrounds, skills and personalities of the artist who created them and their needs and desires to express their own messages through a variety of materials and techniques.
From the Coolest Corner: Nordic Jewellery, ed. by Widar Halén (Arnoldsche) is out now.
Image credits:
Lillan Eliassen (NO), necklace Every Road Is Just Another Way Home, 2012, casting clay, silver, 140 x 240 mm
Anna Talbot (NO), necklace Oh My Deer, 2011, ready-made, anodised aluminium, silver, lacquer, brass, 150 x 170 x 80 mm
Julie Bach (DK), Big Berry Bracelet, black, 2010, Japanese calf skin, lamb nappa skin, cotton stuffing, 60 x 100 x 120 mm
Kim Buck (DK), Bonsai, 2012, series of five birch trunks ending in a carved ring, H c. 150 mm each
Marie-Louise Kristensen (DK), brooch CPH: Park Bench, 2011, brass, wood, 60 x 70 x 20 mm
Janna Syvänoja (FIN), necklace Untitled I, 2012, paper, steelwire, 300 x 170 x 90 mm
Margareth Sandström (SE), ring Wearable Object, 2011, silver, 48 x 23 x 41 mm
Märta Mattsson (SE), necklace Fossils, 2012, cicadas, crushed azurite and pyrite, resin, silver, 400 x 700 mm
Agnes Larsson (SE), necklace Carbo, 2010/2011, carbon, horse hair, 500 mm
Hildur Ýr Jónsdóttir (I), necklace Knots, 2010, Herend porcelain, rusted iron chain, 310 x 210 x 40 mm
Kadri Mälk (EE), brooch Very Guilty, 2010, Siberian jet, black rhodium plated white gold, spinel, tourmalines, 115 x 66 x 12 mm
All images from the site From the Coolest Corner: Nordic Jewellery
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