hanging

Laura Bradshaw-Heap

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind… If you change your mind, you can change your life.

- William James.

  

My process.

My practice seeks to create a social experience within marginal community groups with little or no experience of the creative arts. For me, the end product is not the jewellery produced by the group. Rather the producing of jewellery is a means for developing a social experience within the group. It is these social experiences, of which I become a part of, which then inform my work.

This is me; a project.

The ‘this is me’ project was developed through a series of informal jewellery workshops with a group of women from the Irish Traveller community based in London, in co-ordination with Brent Irish Advisory Services (B.I.A.S.).

The aim of the women who took part was to show an alternative side to Irish Traveller life; one very different to that shown in the Channel 4 series “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding”. B.I.A.S.’s aim was to create a coffee morning which would give the women a place to meet outside their site once a week, to offer new experiences and to develop self-confidence.

My aim as an artist was to create a shared dialogue with the women through the creation of jewellery; to gain a small insight Irish Traveller culture and to develop a collection of jewellery pieces which reflected the themes that emerged through our informal conversations.

My resulting jewellery pieces look to embody these themes. They are informed by the womens’ sense of colour and fun; the objects created during the workshops, and the processes used to create them.

 Without these women, these pieces would not exist.





Michelle Kraemer

http://www.michellekraemer.com/

 When I graduated from school in Luxembourg I knew that I needed to go abroad to study. Spontaneous decisions have been a big part of my life so far. That’s how I decided that I didn’t want to study film making after all, but wanted to work more with my hands. So I started a course in Three-Dimensional Design in at the University of Portsmouth during which I discovered my love for jewellery. When graduated I had done a little bit of everything, but not much of anything, I needed to deepen my understanding in the field of contemporary jewellery. When I found a little school in Florence, Italy, by the name of Alchimia I knew that’s where I needed to go. So I moved to Italy. During the 3 years I spent in Florence I discovered that also with jewellery spontaneity is a valuable tool. 

After I finished the 3 year course I again moved, to Vienna, Austria, this time, where I’m still working and living now. I had found the studio and artist community STOSSIMHIMMEL, that has proven to be a great support for me and my work. During the first year in Vienna I decided that I also wanted to do the fourth year of Alchimia, called Quaternitas. I chose Ruudt Peters as my tutor and he showed me that I needed to leave my comfort zone in order to make good pieces, hence the title “ Have you got the guts?” The pieces shown in this exhibition are a part of the outcome of that year.

Anatomy…Shapes…Materials…Transformations…

Jewellery is something that needs to be touched. And this is how it all starts, intuitively manipulating materials…leather… textiles… wood…stone…latex… Sometimes I let them decide themselves what they want to be and sometimes a specific idea calls for a specific material. The challenge, for me, is to transform the material in such a way that it changes completely, it becomes something else entirely, until it becomes jewellery...

Skin – the barrier between our self and the world. Worn outside of this barrier, these pieces become like an extension to our self. Like adding a protective layer to our self or slipping into someone else’s skin, mimic of reality or the chance to be someone else. Or like the phrase “being thin skinned”, meaning being sensitive and in need of a thicker skin, or protective layer. Being inspired by the body itself, they create a sense of confusion in us. Fascination and disgust, they are in a way a part of us, but at the same time they are like a disfigurement that we catch ourselves staring at. Or like a repressed feeling that materializes in form of a growth or a tumour, for us to carry with us.

Margherita de Martino Norante

Margherita is from Florence and really loves to live in her home town. She took her degree in Idustrial Design and then studied Jewerly at Alchimia and hand engraving at Le Arti Orafe. As teachers she’s had Manfred Bishoff, Manuel Vilhena and for short workshops Bernhard Schobinger and Arline Fish.

In 2010, together with her friend Eugenia Ingegno, she has started 1x1 collective, a project with the aim of spreading and showcasing contemporary jewelry in an simple and direct way. She has organized some exhibitions for the collective and took part in others like: Alchemic Experiences (Lorber Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel), Conceptual Jewelry exhibition (Gallery Putti, Riga, Latvia), Premio Fondazione Cominelli (Cominelli Foundation, Cisano di San Felice, Brescia, Italy), JOYA Fair (contemporary jewellery week Barcelona with 1x1), and she has been selected for Schmuck 2012 (Munich, Germany). Her work is also present in some private and public collections.

About her work:

I like making single standing pieces of jewellery. They are all different but have a common starting point: the idea that jewellery talks about the wearer.

A piece of jewelry is a powerful instrument of communication. It is worn on the body or on top of clothing so it's directly between our self and the world. Not only is the first thing to be seen, but more than clothes, it is superfluous and one makes a conscientious decision to wear it.

So I make puppets, reproduce undergarments, play with fetish and icons coming from my culture, education and everyday things.

My pieces are my way of ironically reflecting on human frailty and on those contrasting wishes of revealing, hiding and disguising oneself that each of us recognises.

Andrea Coderch

Andrea Coderch's pieces are part of the collection based on Heronymus Bosch's picture “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.

The author's irony is shown through one of the picture elements: a pig dressed like a nun.

These pieces are based on this part of the picture and they have been made with a mixture of valuable materials and less valuable ones.