I had a call from the nice people at Griffith Regional Art Gallery today – which is in rural New South Wales for those of you who aren’t local. I’d submitted a couple of pieces for consideration for the National Contemporary Jewellery Award the Gallery hosts every couple of years and which opens in a few days.
They called to let me know that both have been accepted and will be part of the exhibition, which is great. I very much doubt I’ll win an award, but I’ll be in the ‘non-precious materials’ category with the other entrants, so we’ll see.
The two pieces I made are quite a diversion from a lot of the exhibition work I do – and were created in a really organic way without a really clear concept in mind. I wanted to create something with fairly dense pattern given my current mild obsession with it, but I had no idea what. Somehow I came to the conclusion that cutting patterns out of relatively thick tracing paper was the way ahead – a material I love as it’s so contemporary and crisp looking. I have always wanted to do something interesting with it.
So I spent a weekend with a cutting board and a scalpel and a Victorian-looking ironwork pattern I really like, not really knowing where I was heading – I’d been working so hard on this enormous web upgrade I’m in the middle of that I just needed to do something totally different, soothing and repetative.
Eventually I ended up with a number of square cut out panels and decided upon a choker with the pieces stitched together with silk thread at the corners and strands of silk to close it together. And that’s what I ended up with – as you can see.
However, after this exercise, all over my floor were interesting little cut out shapes of tracing paper – the negative spaces I’d removed for the choker. I ended up using some attached to the silk of the choker and then decided I would make a piece from these negative shapes and threaded them onto very very fine nylon threads to form another simple choker.
So the first piece is called Tracings (positive), the other Tracings (negative). Click on the images above to see larger versions.
Neither of these pieces are particularly easy to wear, but that’s not really the idea – a lot of my exhibition work alludes to being wearable but isn’t really. They’re much more about a play with materials and pattern and repetition.
The exhibition is on from 7 to 30 September 2006 with the judging taking place on the first day. I’ll let you know if I win anything!
