Landscape into Jewellery

[Beth Legg]

I am researching how our 'Sense of Place' informs our Jewellery practice. As part of a practice-led PhD project I am asking jewellery makers to think about your personal 'Landscape' in its broadest sense and to answer the question;

How do you transfer the sensory experience of place into a tangible object?

If you are inspired by your surroundings I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts on this question and how you approach your materials, making process and research.

 

Thank you.

 

Beth

[Suzanne Cronin]

Hi Beth,

You might be interested in this post: Colour Code.

Good luck with the PhD.

 

[Melissa Cameron]

Hi Beth,

As a jeweller with a background in interior architecture I have a specific approach to your question of landscape. I have developed spatial entities within my work through manipulating the plan for my objects and literally raising and lowering different parts of that plan. I have said for a while that this methodology came to me as I moved cities; whilst living in the much flatter coastal landscape of inner-city Perth, (in Western Australia) my works were as they still are, all designed in plan on the computer, and revolved around removing metal from the plan, such as using engraving and etching. I had a series in which I raised sections of the plan, in  a very controlled way, making small silver boxes with mitred corners out of single sheets of silver. Thus the plane turned corners and became an object.

Moving to Melbourne, a much denser and chaotic city, with more undulating landscapes and strips of shops that rose above the traditional single story version that I had grown up with in Perth, was a life and practice-changing experience. It is hard to describe the difference, but the first thing that I notice when I get off the plane after flying into Perth is the broadness of the horizon. The sky is no longer letterboxed by competing edifices, as it is in Melbourne.

After many months spent living in this new city, and wrestling with how to work with my plans in three dimensions, I came upon the idea of nesting patterns inside other patterns. The planes would be attached to one another on guide wires and grow from the centre, outwards. It took still more time to figure out that the guide wires need not all be straight, that they could also undulate and weave within the piece.

I can attribute this change to two things; I conceive my works, and architecture, primarily in plan. So it was natrual for me to literally explode the plan to achieve height. But why did I want to explode the plan at all? Might I have stayed with 'flatter' works had I not moved? Who can say, as I moved to Melbourne, and had the desire to raise them. For someone who sees well in plan, the obvious way to order the elements in that plan, to give it structure and to privilege some parts over others, is to turn to the elevation, and to raise or lower different aspects of the design to achieve a harmony within those parts. Of course there are other ways - using colour, texture - anything might have happened to my works when I moved, but they went up. And I still believe that I can thank living in Melbourne for that.

[Beth Legg]

Thank you for your insightful comment Melissa, it is really helpful for me to get these different perspectives on personal processes and approaches. I wish you luck with your work. B x

[ruwani Rathnayaka]

Hi Beth,

Mainly considering the  sense that i experienced rather than the experience of physical context, when i inspiring to my work. Mainly trying to feel to the quality of that context as well as to catch that unique characters and language(s) of it. sometimes it can be a mood, feeling of that place. Mainly considering psychological way rather than physical direct touch via eyesight.

good luck with the PHD

[zubair zhzubair]

Hi there, Im new to Jewellery Making and would like to know if there are any courses or workshops in the Peterborough area to get me started!  

http://victoriajewellery.com.au

[Roxy Lentz]

It may be too late for this, but I am inspired by where I grew up in central Montana USA. It is rugged and beautiful. Where I live is very homogenized and bland. If you have seen a painting of CM Russell, you have seen where I grew up. 

[elizabeth shaw]

Hi Beth

I curated an exhibition a couple of years ago that touched on this area.  The exhibition Revisiting the Australian Landscape focussed on how contemporary Queensland jewellers use the Australian landscape in their work as a vehicle to express environmental concerns as well as ideas of political and cultural location. You can download the catalogue from here or if you want I can mail you a print version.

regards

elizabeth