Cryptocurrencies have revolutionised the way of making and trading money, generating new ventures and businesses, but traditional currencies have definitely inspired quite a few artists throughout the decades.
The KLF burnt a million quid in 1994, entering the history of performance art with their grand yet recklessly crazy gesture; other artists launched their own currency to finance their projects or employed coins to create sculptures and symbolical maps to question economic and political issues.
The world of accessories also saw some designers using banknotes and coins to create innovative jewellery pieces, designs that could be conceived as a critique of our times and a comment about the concept of value.
Artist Stacey Lee Webber is another clever currency converter: she employs indeed American dollar banknotes and coins to make art and interior design pieces, but also statement jewelry.
Webber uses banknotes as canvases or textiles: some of her banknotes incorporate hand-embroidered geometrical patterns and motifs that erase or hide the original images with elaborate stitches that destroy the main function of the banknote.
But she also uses her embroidered motifs to play with the very serious look of the portraits on the bills, radically transforming them: these unsmiling figures - from Abraham Lincoln to Alexander Hamilton, from Gandhi to Galileo Galilei and Nikola Tesla - are transformed from very serious figures into colourful clowns, rebellious punks and Frankenstein-like monsters, while Chairman Mao is turned into an Andy Warhol-like character complete with white wig and Albert Einstein gets a makeover in Carmen Miranda style with signature fruit hat.
But, while these pieces are inspired by Webber's imagination, others move from current events: the 2021 US Capitol building siege in Washington DC inspired her banknotes with the building enveloped in flames and with the White House partially obscured by an unfinished brick wall.
The themes explored in these banknotes are reimagined also in her Uncut Sheets series: hinting at anger and turmoil, the uncut sheets of money are employed as larger canvases incorporating abstract geometrical motifs at times reminiscent of graffiti.
Playing with hard (the banknote paper) and soft (the threads) materials, Webber uses traditional stitches to redesign the banknotes, covering their muted colours with bright threads and subverting in this way the purpose and value of the currency.
The banknotes lose their purpose and value to re-acquire a completely new aim and objective: from a medium of exchange for goods and services, the banknotes become works of art that capture our attention, make us laugh or prompt us to ponder about contemporary political, financial and social issues.
Webber trained as metalsmith, though, rather than an embroiderer and in her studio located in an old industrial building in Philadelphia (you can check out her Instagram page to get an insight about her work in this space), she produces different pieces soldering coins together to create larger artworks or carving the central motifs of coins and covering them in colourful vitreous enamel, a material made by fusing powdered glass to a substrate by firing in a kiln.
Webber employs this technique to create wall pieces or jewelry characterised by a smooth, durable, vitreous and bright coloured coating.
Quite often the artist and designer employs the elements she carves out of the coins to create her pieces for her own collections or for collaborative projects: for Oscar de la Renta's S/S 19 collection she made a wide-range of necklaces, earrings and rings with antiqued vermeil coins that at times evoked ancient Roman and Greek jewelry.
But there is more behind Webber's practice (check out her shop to get a quick idea of her current/latest pieces) as a currency converter: throughout the years she has used American and international coins to create delicate landscape scenes inside circular frames and has turned copper and silver coins (the latter were often given to her by the clients who commissioned her the pieces) into unique objects such as vessels, tools that question the value of labor and time inherent in the object, sculptural pieces, or objects contained within the home of a nine to five laborer (the artist celebrated the American working class also through a series of flowers made with oxidized brass screws).
Exchange rates are derived from state economic policies, international negotiated regimes, agent activity in the foreign exchange market and macroeconomic fundamentals but, through her pieces, Webber establishes new exchange rates based on personal art variables (the techniques she employs). In this way money loses its purchasing power while banknotes and coins turn into unique works of art and accessories.
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