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Aurora Australis, Contemporary Jewelry from Australia

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How many artists: 
17

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Price Range: 
$275 to
$9000
Date: 
Friday, 1 June 2018 to Sunday, 15 July 2018
Opening: 
Friday, 1 June 2018 - 5:00pm

EXHIBITION:                          AURORA AUSTRALIS , Contemporary jewellery from Australia 

Place:                                               Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h

Curator :                                          Katie Scott, Gallery Funaki, Melbourne

Date :                                               June 1st  – July 15, 2018

For the first time in North America, an exceptional venue brings together 17 contemporary jewellery Australian artists. Invited by Noel Guyomarc’h, Katie Scott, owner of Gallery Funaki in Melbourne, acted as curator and selected recognized artists from various generations with diverse aesthetic and conceptual approaches to offer a current portrait of jewellery from Australia. Under the metaphorical title, Aurora Australis, this major exhibition, almost a museum exhibition, will be held from June 1stto July 15, 2018 at Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h, a unique opportunity to discover the creative talent from Australia. 

Invited artists: Julie Blyfield, Simon Cottrell, Anna Davern, Bin Dixon-Ward, Sian Edwards, Maureen Faye-Chauhan, Emma Fielden, Kirsten Haydon, Marcos Guzman, 

Marian Hosking, Inari Kiuru, Sue Lorraine, Carlier Makigawa, Sally Marsland, Blanche Tilden, Catherine Truman, Manon van Kouswijk.

This project, to display such exhibition, was born over the past few years when I invited Australian artists, Blanche Tilden, Simon Cottrell and Marian Hosking to collabore in thematic exhibitions. Exceptional landscapes, the unique diversity of nature and the encounter with indigenous art have been and still are sources of inspiration and reflection in art. Today other questions join our contemporary concerns: identity, the urban and natural environment, politics, the vision of reality ... Jewelry is also part of this movement. Geographical isolation probably justifies a lack of visibility on the North American scene. Yet this discipline is pretty dynamic in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra, to name a few cities where there are schools or universities, with many places dedicated to contemporary jewelry. For the quality of their work and ideas and imagery, these talented artists deserve greater visibility. After discovering the jewelry of Finland, France, Spain, Holland, Taiwan, Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h is pleased to present this exhibition to the public.

Katie Scott,guest curator, began working at Funaki Gallery in 2006. Originally opened in 1995 by Mari Funaki, an artist who shortly after completing her training at RMIT University, decides to offer a place dedicated to Australian and international jewelry artists. In 2010, Mari passed away after a long struggle with cancer. Katie then decided to continue the activities of the gallery with the same requirements and the same vision. She has also initiated the Mari Funaki Award for Contemporary Jewelry, a tribute to the artist, an award given to an established artist and an emerging artist who have distinguished themselves for the aesthetic, conceptual and design quality of their work. 

About this exhibition Aurora Australis, Katie Scott wrote: 

 

This exhibition brings together the work of 17 practicing Australian artists, each using material and form in distinct and individual ways. The works chosen reveal something of the breadth and quality currently at play in Australian craft practice, where a vibrant and engaged community of makers, educators and institutions operate. 

Exhibitions of Australian jewellery held overseas often focus on nature as an underpinning theme, as our environment is so central our identity on the world stage. However Australia, perhaps more than any other country in which contemporary jewellery thrives, is a location where such easy themes can be problematic. Though our (often fraught) relationship with nature plays a major role in our art history, it’s combined with the influences born from encountering the avant-garde approaches in, modifying and allowing them to evolve for our own market. Even in the 19thcentury, silversmithing and jewellery in Australia adopted a relatively liberal attitude, re-working existing designs from Britain and using new materials and motifs, but without the strict rules around hallmarking that typified the British craft. 

This liberal attitude, somehow in our DNA, is also found in our approach to contemporary jewellery. Long-time geographic and cultural isolation means Australian artists inherited a passionate curiosity for ideas and techniques from the rest of the world. In the 1960s and 70s, many young artists travelled overseas to Germany and Britain, bringing back skills and innovations that were subsequently developed here, and others soaked up the influences of visiting and migrating European jewellers such as Hermann Jünger and Wolf Wennrich.

Australian jewellery is increasingly less concerned with the native symbols by which we are so often defined. As well as modern European influences, most of us live in cities, not unlike any other cities in which nature is either artificially cultivated or from which it’s banished entirely, so our source material is not so different to any other city-dwelling maker. This said; it’s undeniable that our environment – cultural and historical often more than physical – can play a fundamental part in artists’ work. 

Marian Hosking and Julie Blyfield engage most directly with natural landscapes and botanical forms – Hosking through casting of botanical specimens and Blyfield through traditional techniques such as repousse and chasing. This work is never merely souvenir, however, as Hosking and Blyfield deal with ideas around femininity and craft, artefact and history. Inspired by her immediate environment, Carlier Makigawa creates fascinating architectural structures, playing with spaces, movement and lines, always in reflection with nature.

Other artists explore industrial and inner-city environments: Bin Dixon-Ward,for example, replicates the large scale block and grid systems of skyscrapers using 3D printing technologies, while Inari Kiurulooks closely at the smaller details of life in a semi-industrial urban setting – the flecks of sparkle in concrete, the sky above a factory or the subtle variations in the colour of steel. 

Kirsten Haydon’s research on Antarctica fundamentally informs her work, as she uses photography and enamelling to make sense of such an alien yet geographically near continent. Blanche Tilden’s work with glass and metal can be both site-specific (her Wearable Citiesseries encapsulated early modern steel and glass architecture as jewellery) and focused on basic geometrical forms as they relate to the body, as in her 2016 exhibition Clarity. 

For others, the Australian experience finds its way into their work in less obvious ways. Sue Lorraine, for example, articulates personal history with the same rigour and lack of sentimentality that she brings to bear on her earlier research into museum collections. Simon Cottrell’s practice – a slow and self-referential evolution – finds its origins in sources as diverse as experimental music, botany and machines yet his works don’t seek to illustrate any of these things. Instead, as Simon says, “the work doesn’t aim to tell a viewer anything; more simply I want to give the wearer and the viewer a personal sensory experience…”.  

Catherine Truman’s work is located in a fascinating space between the natural world and the interior spaces of the human body – her practice increasingly taking her into a parallel world of science laboratories and medical environments. Anna Davernuses found images and objects to interrogate and challenge accepted narratives around our colonial history and identity, and does so with a combination of irreverence and seriousness that is itself, peculiarly Australian. 

Sian Edwards creates snakes, crocodiles and lizards: uncanny, wearable objects that replicate the slippery scaly-ness of the real thing. As they speak to the essentialism around notions of Australian identity and our relationship to a dangerous ‘outback’, they simultaneously subvert these themes by using sequins, materials familiar both to the glossy world of fashion and to the ‘lower’ crafts of beading and bedazzling. In doing so she locates the pieces in the heart of an urban environment perhaps tinged with a yearning for our desert heart.

As well as themes and materials, the methods of manufacture embraced by Australian artists are diverse. Maureen Faye-Chauhanuses a combination of computer and hand-made paper modelling, then laser cutting and painstakingly welding by hand to make her complex, patterned forms. We are always aware of the presence of Manon van Kouswijk’s hands at the core of her work, as she manipulates ceramic beads in her ongoing research into the potentialities around the beaded necklace form.                 

The marks of Marcos Guzman’s hands though, are hard to find. Though hand-made, his work is machine-like in its accuracy and refined minimalism – the poetry of his ideas hinted at more by the titles he gives his work than the perfect simplicity of their forms. Emma Fielden, one of Australia’s finest engravers and an emerging force in contemporary art more broadly, seems engaged in kind of meditation with the surface of silver as she uses hand tools to meticulously mark each piece hundreds – if not thousands – of times. Sally Marslandtakes apart pre-existing forms found in second hand shops – wooden items common in the Australian households of the mid-twentieth century – and re-constructs them as contained yet dynamic forms, their quiet eloquence heightened with accents of colour.

In curating this exhibition at the invitation of Noel Guyomarc’h, I haven’t sought a single theme to bind the works together. Rather, it is the differences in each artist’s approach and concerns that I find most interesting – how a group of artists who have in common their education, environment and creative community can explore such varied ideas and materials using such distinct visual languages. 

It parallels a fundamental fact about this faraway nation: Australia is not just one place but many places, not just one nationality but many, not just one attitude but a complex tapestry of ideas, experiences and histories. Just as the southern night sky offers some of the best stargazing - though northerners rarely have a chance to see it - our studios house some of the most innovative and creative jewellers, whose talents are rarely seen outside our own backyard. It has been a wonderful opportunity to work with them, and I’m thankful to Noel Guyomarc’h for the opportunity to show this work to a northern audience. It’s a great pleasure to introduce our leading lights, our Aurora Australis.

Katie Scott

March 2018 

 

This impressive selection by Katie Scott invites us to travel, to reflect about this wonderful work, and to question about the jewellery expressive possibilities.

Noel Guyomarc’h warmly thanks Katie for giving us this unique opportunity and the artists who responded enthusiastically to the invitation, to share with us their fabulous work. 

 

For further information and for visuals:

Noel Guyomarc’h

Director, Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h

514-840-9362

info@galerienoelguyomarch.com

 

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About the gallery

Established in 1996, Galerie Noel Guyomarc’h exhibits outstanding collections of contemporary jewellery and objects created by Canadian and international artists. The only gallery in Canada dedicated specifically to contemporary jewelry, it has presented over 100 exhibitions in its space, which is considered to be one of the largest in the world. Noel Guyomarc’h has curated traveling exhibitions in Quebec, Canada, United States, Spain, France and South Korea. Since 2015, the gallery takes part in the prestigious art fair SOFA Chicago. This internationally acclaimed gallery is a must for collectors, museum curators and anyone who wants to discover and become acquainted with art jewelry.

 

 

Curator :

Telephone: 
1-514-840-9362
Venue ( Address ): 

4836 boulevard St-Laurent, 

Montréal, Québec, 

H2T 1R5

Canada

Other events from Galerie Noel Guyomarc'h

view
Aurora Australis, Contemporary Jewelry from Australia
06/01/2018 to 07/15/2018
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Coordenadas, contemporary jewelry from Catalonia
06/08/2017 to 07/09/2017
view
Biba Schutz, Maria Phillips, Sondra Sherman
05/11/2017 to 05/28/2017

 

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