Curiosity Corner:Summer 2015/2016
JASMINE WATSON: MANDALAM
This series of sterling silver and enamel brooches are made using hand piercing, casting, and the champlevé technique. They combine layered and intricately pierced silhouettes with delicately blended gradients, which can assemble to form elaborate ornamental sequences, repeating to infinity.
Enamelling is an ancient process and is known for its complexities, the beauty of the material and the challenging nature of the process continue to fascinate me.
1-29 March 2015
RACHEL BELL: A SELECTION, 2009-2014
Rachel Bell graduated from Unitec with a Bachelor of Design (honours) in Contemporary Jewellery in 2007 and gained a Masters of Design in 2011.
She works with both natural and traditionally precious materials, as well as the forms of familiar objects in order to consider notions of home, place, the domestic and the talismanic. This installation presents a selection of her jewellery, created between 2009-2014.
1-29 April 2015
JOHANNA ZELLMER: STATES OF CHANGE
Recent work by Dunedin-based jeweller Johanna Zellmer sits within a discussion of national representation. As a German citizen with New Zealand residency, the question of whether an object or design allows for identification with multiple cultural groups is especially pertinent.
In investigating how ideas of nationhood are constructed and proliferated, Zellmer looks to coins; familiar objects that carry national emblems and whose value is dictated by a national economy system. Unlike a national flag, the quotidian nature of coins as currency has naturalised their role as carriers of national iconography.
1-30 May 2015
SELINA SHANTI WOULFE: SKIN BOUNDARIES
Auckland-based artist Selina Woulfe creates jewellery — as well as photographic and video documentation — that considers social, cultural, and religious rituals surrounding the body, and the objects used to conduct them. Drawing inspiration from her mixed European/Polynesian heritage, Selina often uses her own skin as a sensory material to be tested, crafting a dialogue between the body and mind that foregrounds the physical and psychological experience for wearer and viewer alike.
6 June – 5 July 2015
KIRSTEN HAYDON: ICE FILTER
Melbourne-based New Zealand artist Kirsten Haydon explores the frozen terrain of Antarctica as a repository that provides a record of the developments and changes to our environment and atmosphere. Haydon creates ice samples, exploring new and innovative ways of depicting and communicating the experience of Antarctica through the making and locating of objects. Travelling as a New Zealand Antarctic Arts Fellow to Antarctica in 2004 has heavily influenced Haydon’s practice. This work shown in Ice Filter serves as a reminder of the precious state of ice, a natural wonder within our environment.
10–28 July
SARAH WALKER-HOLT: KITSET
Sarah Walker-Holt creates work that interrogates the relationships that jewellery can create. Using interchangeable parts and a short instructional video, her installation Kitset encourages visitors to consider, and partake in, a hands-on engagement with components that require assemblage to become wearable. The work blurs a number of assumed distinctions in galleries, allowing viewers to touch and visitors to share a role with the maker.
Find the accomanied essay Sum of the Parts, written by Auckland based artist and designer Deborah Crowe here.
1-28 August
LAURA JER: PAPER AND PUFF
Laura Jer is an Auckland-based jeweller who explores the materiality and potential of different metals through selected modes of manipulation. She notes that “pulling, pushing, folding, bending, twisting, rolling and hammering are some of the processes I use to create three-dimensional objects from a thin, flat metal sheet”. Paper and Puff represents Laura’s most recent body of work, made specifically for Te Uru’s Curiosity Corner.
1 November -13 December 2015
CHLOE ROSE TAYLOR: ICONSEED
Wellington-based jeweller Chloe Rose Taylor has quickly built a reputation for making irreverant jewellery that impishly responds to contemporary sets of realities. iConSEED is no different. Here, Taylor presents a new selection of rings cast in coloured resin and displayed in a custom-designed series of resin-cast apples. The installation draws upon a number of associated themes that the apple evokes, but in particular playfully pokes fun at the role of technology (specifically the ubiquitous reach of the ‘apple’ ipads, ipods, ieverythings) in everyday life.
01 March - 28 February 2016