I have prepared this short talk using the library at Craft Victoria where I am curator. The library has a history almost as long as the organisation and in its heyday was staffed by three librarians – almost the number of people who work fulltime at Craft Victoria today. While the library is rarely added to these days I will use this enforced framework to look at the history of contemporary Australian jewellery in light of our theme today, focusing on the 1980s and '90s but ending with a note on jewellery and nature today.
I selected three key exhibition catalogues and a more general, though respected, history of contemporary Australian jewellery. In looking at these books in relation to today's topic – Forest or the Bush: What Jewellers Tell Us About Nature – I have made some intriguing discoveries. Namely, that if you took the surveys of contemporary practice I did, you would come to the conclusion that, ironically, very few Australian Jewellers have any interest in the Australian bush or the European forest at all. Instead, these books are dominated by images of hard, geometric and abstract shapes in a range of industrial materials, found materials as well as references to the human body and architecture.
To begin, I took Patricia Anderson Book Contemporary Jewellery: The Australian Experience 1977–1987 for its historical overview of jewellery and she writes:
Fifty thousand years ago hunting man wore the teeth and claws of animals to transfer their ferocity and strength to himself. By the time agricultural and urban communities were established throughout the Near East and around the Mediterranean, there was the belief that the … natural world could be controlled … by votive gifts of jewellery to the gods and the adornment of temple statues.1
In other words, from the beginning we have evidence to suggest that nature dictated that there would be jewellery, rather than jewellery that recreated the signs of nature. According to Anderson, it is not until the Renaissance that we see signs of nature in jewellery. The key features were sea monsters, mermen and animals from the New World which suggested a restless spirit craving the unknown.2 Later, in the 16th century, while Queen Elizabeth was being courted by Henry of Anjou, little jewelled frogs were all the rage because of her habit of referring to him as her "little frog". Existing inventories tell us of birds, bees, flies, butterflies and parrots, executed in diamonds and other precious stones.3 In the 20th century, during the Art Nouveau period, jewellery regularly took the form of the serpent, orchid, dragonfly or peacock.4 Then, in the conservative years of the 1950s, there was a return to the designs popular just before WW2, such as floral sprays and bouquets.
Still looking at Anderson's historical text, in Australia during the 1970s and '80s saw jewellers who had predominately trained in art schools, rather than workshops, once again look at the natural world as a close source of inspiration. They produced specifically Australian works in an abstract mode. These designers used handmade paper, grass, bleached tree roots, feathers, stone and palm fronds, as well as gold and silver and other metals, to reproduce the Australian landscape, and often the Australian bush more specifically, in its textures, colours and forms.
However, if we now turn to the three exhibitions catalogues it is the content of these large scale, well funded, often international touring shows, that become a time capsule of contemporary practice in this country.
The first major exhibition of contemporary Australian Jewellery was Objects to Human Scale in 1980 which toured Japan and Asia. A follow up exhibition, Australian Jewellery , was created with that show in mind and toured Europe in 1982. In 1991 Anne Brennan curated the First Australian Contemporary Jewellery Biennial and wrote that her exhibition used these two past exhibitions ‘as a historical framework against which to construct other narratives about contemporary jewellery'.5
Jeweller Margaret West, then Jasulaitis, wrote in the catalogue to that first exhibition, Objects to Human Scale , that:
There is some evidence of blatant ‘Australian-ness' apparent in the use of nationalistic symbolism – maps of Australia, kangaroos, gum trees, Sydney harbour bridge. There are also implications of a more subtle nature in the use of imagery more suggestive of beach or bush.6
West notes that these kinds of works are, however, ‘isolated instances'. Indeed, only a handful of the 70 artists represented actually exhibited work using Australian animals, gumtrees and leaves or the Southern Cross.
In Australian Jewellery , the catalogue essay starts with a history of Australian Jewellery in the 19th Century, a period dominated by jewellers, according to the essay, ‘obsessed with the idea of finding symbols or emblems to express their newly acquired Australian identity. They used Australian flora such as native pear, banksia and fern as decorative motifs and Australian fauna, particularly the kangaroo and emu. Again, when writing about contemporary practice, writer Anne Schofield notes that these early themes ‘have continued in the work of a small group of contemporary jewellers but they are no longer dominant'.7
In only a few instances do we see the use of references to the Australian bush in this next exhibition and they are all from the same jewellers who exhibited in Objects to Human Scale , as if to suggest the theme had stagnated. The only new addition to this area is Peter Tully's humorous Floradora Pendant which brings together acrylic leaf shapes with painted gumnuts to suggest that using Australian motifs means an engagement with amateur handicrafts – a position that Tully used to ridicule jewellery's preciousness.
By 1991 and the First Biennial of Contemporary Australian Jewellery there are no signs of the bush or forest at all. They been remembered, according to curator Anne Brennan, as the ‘naïve, literal, representations of landscapes of the early eighties'.8
But what kind of story do these catalogues and their essays tell us about nature and jewellery in Australia? Indeed, do they question the definition of nature itself and its ability to be anything other than the most obvious references to cultural stereotypes; can't nature be found closer to home? What about those jewellers investigating sustainability and environmental issues? We need to ask, do these arguments leave open the suggestion that within nature itself there is design?
Lately a number of contemporary Australian jewellers have begun to use the motif of the Australian bush and the European forest, and their inhabitants – the kangaroo, the gum leaf, the deer and the fir tree. But this use of flora and fauna do not always indicate an interest in nature's bucolic scenes and it is clearly important to distinguish between form and content. Frequently, in contemporary practice, the bush and the forest appear as wholly re-interpreted subjects in materials such as mirrored acrylic or brightly coloured plastics. Arguably, it impossible to have a genuine re-engagement with nature after its image has been subsumed by cheap milk-bar calendars and Hallmark Greeting cards. Nowadays it's easy to scoff at those awestruck by dusk and dawn9, because, as Susan Sontag said, ‘they now look, alas, too much like photographs'.10 We cannot but help see today's jewellers who reproduce the innocence and quiet of deer, owl, bird and wolf as well as kangaroo and koala as revealing an irony and even insincerity in their encounter with nature. It is a thin romantic line between sentimentality and kitsch.
Perhaps Kiko Gianocca's work Sand to Wear is some kind of alternative to the bush or forest question. Nature is at the heart of Gianocca's work, in fact, it is the work – the jewellery accessory is sand that the artist ‘asks us' via a simple graphic to pour into the back of our shoes. The gritty encounter evokes memories of the beach while also suggesting alternative values and dress systems where sand is a valuable enough commodity to buy from a jeweller and important, beautiful and interesting enough to wear. In this work nature is seen in a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version as the world is experienced in miniature, captured within a tiny plastic bag11. Simultaneously, it can be seen as a contemporary material, reincorporated and refigured to form a new way of thinking about jewellery altogether.
Notes
1 Patricia Anderson, Contemporary Jewellery: The Australian Experience 1977–1987, p. 10.
2 Patricia Anderson, p. 12.
3http://www.ladysmaidjewels.com/Articles/animals.html Accessed 19.4.07
4 Patricia Anderson, p. 14.
5 Anne Brennan. Both of these travelling exhibitions from the 1980s were intended to show the range and diversity of jewellery being made in Australia by practising jewellers, jewellers who held lecturing positions, and recently graduated jewellers from art colleges and institutes. (Anderson, p. 16)
6Objects to Human Scale , p. 79.
7 Anne Schofield, Australian Jewellery , p. 9.
8 Anne Brennan, First Biennial of Contemporary Australian Jewellery , p. 5
9 Dan Fox, ‘Another Green World', Frieze , p. 80.
10 Susan Sontag, On Photography , Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1977, p. 85.
11 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collective , Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993: 68.
