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Signs of Change

How Jayne Wallace helps unlock the past

Sep 21st, 2010
by Kevin Murray.
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Jayne Wallace 'Jewellery Box, My Dresses Brooch', 2010, photo by Bill Shaylor

Jayne Wallace 'Jewellery Box, My Dresses Brooch', 2010, photo by Bill Shaylor

One of the works for the Signs of Change exhibition as a jewellery box by Jayne Wallace designed as a memory prompt for those in the early stages of dementia. As a work of functional jewellery, it demonstrates how the intimacy of ornament can provide a powerful stimulus for recovering memory.

She spend a long time with her participants exploring their memories and how they might be triggered. This includes use of a camera, soft clay, prize rosettes, preserve jars, seed packets, dress patterns, pearls of wisdom and a ‘self-tree’. From these exercises, Jayne was able to fashion objects that could evoke strong past memories.

How did you become involved in the memory project?

The relationship between memory and jewellery has always been fascinating to me. We use jewellery objects as vessels so often – to hold memories, as objects to pour our feelings into about an associated ‘other’ be that a person, place, experience… or as comforters – something that connects us to other people or is comforting because it has physically accompanied us through our experiences. The nature of jewellery as such means it has rich potential when we think about ways to help someone hold on to or share aspects of their experiences – this relates to all of us – and naturally suggests people who are experiencing difficulties in doing this. To this end we wanted to work with people who were living with dementia and their close friends/family to make pieces of jewellery that could potentially help them share aspects of past and current experience and hopefully hold on to these over time.

Have you found out how the memory box has been working with Gillian and her family?

They have used the box to record music to each of the dress fabrics – music from the holiday when the dress was worn etc and are using the fabrics and songs as stimuli for further conversation and reminiscing to also record to the box. You’ll see from the film that the dress fabrics also prompted memories about the letters they used to write to one another when they were courting and they have been re reading these and storing those in the box too.

See a film with the participants in this project, Gillian and John.

Some other memory pieces by Jayne Wallace include:

Jayne Wallace 'A locket that can forget' (image degrades a little each time it is opened)

Jayne Wallace 'A locket that can forget' (image degrades a little each time it is opened)

Jayne Wallace is Research associate on the Newcastle University Digital Research Hub, centring on social inclusion in the digital economy. For more information, visit her website

Every brooch has a catch

May 11th, 2010
by Kevin Murray.
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Vicki Mason Oregano, Wattle and Rose brooches. Photo by Bill Shaylor

Vicki Mason Oregano, Wattle and Rose brooches. Photo by Bill Shaylor

Vicki Mason Oregano, Wattle and Rose brooches. Photo by Bill Shaylor


The other day, a curator from Papua New Guinea was telling me about a particular custom of hospitality she grew up with called ‘hamal’. In certain circumstances, if a visitor expresses a liking for something that you possess, you are then obliged to give it to them. Clearly, this is a custom suited more to villages than cities. It’s hard to imagine it happening in an urban context, or is it?

At the end of the Signs of Change exhibition, three lucky winners will have their names drawn to receive a brooch by Melbourne jeweller Vicki Mason. The brooches are modelled on the wattle, rose and oregano plants, beautifully rendered in powder-coated brass (sourced from a scrap yard) and recycled flexible plastics sourced as remnants from the stationary industry. These plants are common features of suburban gardens in Australia, but Mason argues that they represent a common bounty, which she links to the elusive prospect of Australia becoming a republic. As she says:

If Australia is one day to become a republic then a new style of gardening to accompany a new style of governing seems possible. The work for this exhibition has the symbolic potential to promote the social value of gardens as reflecting notions of community, that is the essence of republicanism.

So if you receive this brooch, you also take on a republican vision. But there’s a catch. If someone praises the brooch while you are wearing it, you are obliged to give it to them – as long as they will agree to the same conditions as you. Easy come, easy go. Members of this chain are encouraged to leave comments on a website to record the transaction and reflect on its meaning.

The exhibition still has a couple of weeks to run. Tune in to her website at http://broachingchangeproject.wordpress.com/ to monitor progress. Who knows, you might end up as one of the links in the chain.

Mason’s work is a bold attempt to engage with the relational dimension of jewellery as a precious object that can link people together. Her work resonates back to situation in PNG. The anthropologist Malinowski describes a parallel arrangement called the kula, where villages organise their world around exchange of shell necklaces:

Perhaps as we read the account of these remote customs there may emerge a feeling of solidarity with the endeavours and ambitions of these natives. Perhaps man’s mentality will be revealed to us, and brought near, along some lines which we never have followed before. Perhaps through realising human nature in a shape very distance and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own.

Perhaps the past has a future too.

Reference

Bronislaw Malinowski Argonauts of The Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes Of Melanesian New Guinea London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987 (orig. 1922), p. 25

The Baci ceremony, with strings attached

Mar 12th, 2009
by Kevin Murray.
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I was at the Selling Yarns market in the National Museum, chatting with Valerie Kirk, head of textiles at the Canberra School of Art. I noticed she had some string tied around her wrist. At first I thought it was some practical material related to a workshop she was assisting on the day. But when I inquired about it, she revealed a very different story.

Valerie had been given this string at a ceremony in Laos, where she had been visiting a silk farm. The ceremony is known as Baci, and consists of 32 pieces of string that are tied around the wrist. The purpose of the ceremony is to coax back the 32 spirits (kwan) that animate the body. These are wayward spirits who often need bribes of food, drink and chants to make their way back home.

The Baci ceremony is performed at times when a person is likely to be needing extra support, such as a woman who had recently given birth, or a young child going to a distant school. In Valerie’s case it was the mark of respect for a distinguished visitor.

In a way, it seems similar to the Brazilian braided friendship bracelet, which is usually fastened on the wrist as a mark of solidarity with someone else. In both cases, the bracelet is ideally worn until it falls naturally from the body. This finite time is appropriate to a relationship that cannot endure indefinitely without some further contact.

Jewellery like this tends to come to us from exotic places. It is often without cost, but we value it greatly for the tradition and warmth that it brings. It should make us wonder whether anything like this might emanate from a capitalist society like our own, when most public things tend to be commodified.

But perhaps things are changing. Maybe this is something we can look forward to.

Buddy, can you spare design?

Jan 29th, 2009
by Kevin Murray.
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There’s a raging debate in the US media about the call to bring design into account for its recent elitism. Echoing the recriminations over reckless financial dealers on Wall Street, Michael Cannell argued in the New York Times that the indulgent excesses of celebrity design will be a natural victim to the economic downturn. He says this is something to celebrate:

The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

Naturally, there were many designers who took umbrage at these remarks. Murray Moss lead the defence in Design Observer to argue that one-off works like Campana Brothers $9,000 Corallo Chair represent great creative achievements that all should aspire to.

We are the fortunate benefactors, not the dupes, of design’s evolution since our recovery from the last Great Depression. We should defend that progression with resolve. We should push forward, in whatever ways are still possible, even more strongly. We should lock arms and support one another. And we should not hesitate to challenge those, like Mr. Cannell, who would somehow, mistakenly and punitively, equate the current global economic meltdown with design’s recent surge. We should, and will, refuse to go back into the box.

What seems missing from this debate is a sense of the creative possibilities of egalitarian design. This involves changing the social dynamic of design from individual distinction to collective identity. That’s kind of transformation has certainly been successful with online networking. We can only imagine what kind of promiscuous design it might foster.

A day for the makers

Jan 21st, 2009
by Kevin Murray.
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Barack Obama marks the inauguration of his Presidency with a homage to labour and ‘the makers of things’:

Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Does this signal a move away from the spectacle of wealth and celebrity?

Global prosumerism

Jan 19th, 2009
by admin.
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The Americans have a love of coining new phrases. To antipodean ears, they can seem verbal gadgets, eagerly assembled for momentary pleasure. The term ‘prosumerism’ is a combination of consumer and producer. Bringing them together seems a ‘neat’ way of having best of both worlds – continuing the pleasures of shopping while assuming the authority of a creator.

Yet while we often dismiss these corny notions, we can’t help being curious about the new fangled ideas that emerge across the Pacific. At least they give us something to react against.

The US jeweller Gabriel Craig is a particularly eloquent source of new perspectives. In his blog Conceptual Metalsmithing recently he writes about the ‘plural genius’ of the 21st century.

You walk into a gallery, you choose a piece you like, you buy it, and then that unique piece stands for your uniqueness. In the prosumer paradigm, the participation of the consumer is not passive – I choose that one – but active, I made this. Prosumer jewelry is asking for the consumer and the viewer to become an active participant. It is not quite a regression to the pre-choosing identity paradigm, but a shared middleground between choosing and making. Again the responsibility for the object and what it represents resides in multiple entities.

The relational paradigm is a particularly important source of threat and opportunity for contemporary craft. There’s the fear that we are lured into an ‘audience-friendly’ concept of craft only to find the very specialist skills on which the medium depends wither away.

But I tend to see it as something that can extend a craftsperson’s capacities. At first, there is the direct challenge of constructing an object on a modular basis for re-assembly (the same challenge faced by designers in IKEA). Like a good composer, you need to know the capacities of your orchestra. And then there’s the matter of working at the sociological level of human relations, and the key role that objects can play in constellating social bonds in the here and now.

It doesn’t mean jumping on a bandwagon, but it can mean that the construction of the bandwagon becomes part of our business.

The Kula model of jewellery exchange

Jan 7th, 2009
by admin.
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Non-western jewellery provides intriguing possibilities for contemporary ornament. In 1920, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski published an account of an elaborate jewellery trading network in eastern New Guinea, known as Kula.

Kula entails the exchange of two different sets of ornament. In a clockwise direction, long necklaces of red spondylus shell (soulava) travel from villages to village. In the opposite direction travel bracelets of white shell (mwali). When someone receives one of these ornaments as a gift, they are then indebted until they can reciprocate with the alternative good.

Though an ornament can be ‘owned’ by an individual, its destiny is to circulate through the region. Malinowsky makes the comparison with the English Crown Jewels that whose value lies in their symbolic rather than aesthetic function. He compares the ornament to a trophy that is won in a competition, but will eventually move on to the next winner in due course.

Thinking of the Kula sheds an interesting light on our economy of jewellery. In a Western society, ownership is final. An object can be exchanged for money, but we don’t tend to think of ourselves as a temporary custodian of our things. We own things for life, unless we decide otherwise.

So could a contemporary jeweller build into their work a principle of exchange? Perhaps their work creates a network of owners who can circulate jewellery between themselves?

  • Bronislaw Malinowski Argonauts Of The Western Pacific: An Account Of Native Enterprise And Adventure In The Archipelagoes Of Melanesian New Guinea  London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987 (orig. 1922)
  • Roger Niech and Fuly Peraira Pacific Jewellery And Adornment Auckland: David Bateman, 2004

Zulu Bead-Mail

Jan 4th, 2009
by admin.
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South African craft is characterised by an abundance of beaded products.  One of the most charming is the Zulu Love Letter, which according to legend developed when Zulu men began working in the mines. As they were illiterate, communication from sweethearts back in home took for the form of ornament, where particular coloured beads signified different emotions.

The meanings of the colours depend as much on their combination as individual symbolism. This is a rough glossary:

COLOUR MEANING
Black Marriage/separation
Blue Trust/hatred
Yellow Luck/misadventure
Green Happiness/sorrow
Pink Powerful/lowly
Red Love/heartache
White Purity

The status of a Zulu woman is readily identified through her ornament – her marriage status, the status of her sisters and her home region.

According to the grammar of ornament, the triangle represents father, mother and child. The meaning of the triangle changes with orientation.

ORIENTATION STATUS
Inverted, apex downward Unmarried man
Apex downward Unmarried woman
Two joined as diamond Married woman
Joined with apexes meeting Married man

For a woman to express her love for a man, she would place a white triangle with apex down enclosing a red triangle with apex up.

Today, Zulu love letters can be obtained in tourist shops as a cheap gift. But in the context of contemporary jewellery, it does suggest particular possibilities of ornament as a communication device. While different coloured ribbons represent alternative good causes, the possibility of colour combinations has yet to be realised.

It could be objected that the meaning of any such system depends on its widespread use – something that jewellery today cannot attain. However, ornament is often the prompt for the dialogue between individuals. Translation of meaning is at least one kind of enunciation.

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Really? You don’t say.

For more information, see Beadwork in the ZULU cultural tradition.

Signs of Change – are you interested?

Nov 18th, 2008
by admin.
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The election of Barack Obama seems to have galvanised the world at a time of great social risk. Some have seen the current financial crisis as an important opportunity to ‘re-boot’ the system, to develop more constructive bilateral relations and initiate more inclusive policies. With the glow of change in the air, there is a new jewellery exhibition in development. It has the working title, Signs of Change: Jewellery Designed to Make a Better World. Developed by FORM to coincide with the next JMGA conference in Perth, it provides the opportunity to re-think jewellery as something for the many, rather than the exclusive few. They are currently calling for expressions of interest, due end of January 2009.

Here’s a brief outline (the full document is available here):

Exhibition Curator: Elisha Buttler/FORM (elisha@form.net.au)
Exhibition Guest Curator: Kevin Murray (change@kitezh.com) Exhibition venue and dates: April-June 2010, Midland Atelier, Perth

Can jewellery function as an instrument of change?

Jewellery is expanding in scope. Traditionally, the production of a beautiful adornment served as a marker of individual status. Emerging trends in jewellery and related object design are beginning to challenge many customary ideas of jewellery. The creative power of the jeweller is extending beyond the bench to the world which the object will inhabit.  This includes jewellery as a functional device, an agent of social change and a way of bringing people together. These trends provide the basis of a FORM exhibition in development for 2010.

Concepts such as ‘functionality’ and ‘change’ are open to multiple interpretations. However for the initial purposes of this exhibition, they have been grouped into two key categories:

1. Function and Technology

This category includes jewellers and related designers who create products possessing tangible functions or new technologies which aim to deploy specific benefits to individuals and/or the broader community. Emphasis will be placed on designs that point to long-term benefits, rather than one-off, largely conceptual pieces.

2. Sociology and Symbolism

This category includes the less tangible elements of contemporary jewellery which have potential to alter perspectives and promote action through their symbolic connotations. Like the Function and Technology category, the underlying themes here are designs which focus on benefits and heightened social awareness for individuals and the broader community.

The exhibition will explore jewellery that fits into either (or both) of the above groups, while focusing on the varied levels of ‘change’ jewellery can wield; namely in the areas of health, technology, sciences and community.

This is a relatively new area of development but one which possesses immense potential for groundbreaking innovation and cross-disciplinary, cross-industry advancement. A central aim of the exhibition will be to highlight this potential for innovation and cross-sector collaboration through jewellery design, and the strategies, investment and other conditions required to foster these new directions.

Also key to the exhibition will be examinations of the crossovers between the two categories, and the relationships between aesthetics and practicality.