If you’re a lover of beautifully designed and made jewellery, then there’s an exhibition on in the capital you won’t want to miss.
Bodywork: Australian Jewellery 1970–2012 is an eye-catching collection of the work of some of Australia’s most important contemporary jewellers, including four who call Canberra home.
On now at Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre, Bodywork inspires, intrigues and informs. This travelling exhibition attracted thousands of people in five states before coming home for its final showing.
Bodywork features the work of no fewer than 42 Australian designers, hand-selected for this unique exhibition by Dr Robert Bell AM, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, National Gallery of Australia (NGA).
Pieces include brooches, arm bands, lockets, rings, bangles, and pendants created out of a wide range of materials to produce highly desirable and durable objects. Materials include gold, sterling silver, copper, coral, aluminium and polypropylene. Fragments of manufactured objects pop up, as do other recycled materials.
No matter what your taste, you’ll find each item of jewellery intriguing and will be amazed, when you take a close look, at the detail in each one.
Dr Bell says Bodywork covers a ‘rich period of Australian jewellery design’. The collection is beautifully displayed in six specially designed cases and grouped under six themes—Romanticism, Interpreting the Vernacular, Encapsulating Nature, Technics, Social Message and Sculpture for the Body.
The four Canberrans featured in Bodywork are Simon Cottrell, Head of the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop at ANU, and Robert Foster, of F!nk + Co, who are both Accredited Professional Members of Craft ACT, as well as Helen Aitken-Kuhnen and Johannes Kuhnen of Bilk Gallery.
The collection is highly diverse, Robert’s Bandaliero II 2009, for example, is to be worn over the chest and is made up of bright orange containers that the wearer can carry items in, like keys, a wallet and mobile. The containers are ‘out there’ and even glow in the ultraviolet lighting of bars and clubs.
Simon’s ‘Round and back’ monotone brooch (2010), made of monel and a hard nickel alloy, has been described as an ‘architectural miniature’ that ‘engages the eye’.
Helen’s ‘Ocean blue’ necklace (2009) is created with sterling silver, stainless steel and glass that is finely crushed and mixed with other materials to form a paste, which is then put into a mould and heated to fuse it together.
Johannes’s brooch (1988) was created from granite, anodised aluminium and stainless steel.
Craft ACT was chosen to be part of the travelling circuit for Bodywork because the exhibition fits perfectly in with its strong outreach program.
