Friday 22 November 2013

Jewellery, the urban milieu and emergence

Jewellery, the urban milieu and emergence
Jacqui Chan

Host A Brooch, making process, 2011.
Photography: Jacqui Chan craft+design enquiry Issue 5


Abstract: This paper traces a practice-led enquiry into the question of how jewellery — as a practice and an artefact — can engage the city in terms of emergence. While jewellery is often understood to have a decorative, symbolic or communicative function, this research explores jewellery’s immersion in and emergence from the urban context. Coming from a background in architecture, I am interested in approaching the city as an extended site for jewellery: both the lived situation within which jewellery is worn, and a rich material resource for its production; and, where jewellery is sited between mobile bodies and these urban surroundings.

This practice-led research adopts the analogy of the saprophyte — an organism that decomposes organic matter and recirculates nutrients through its ecosystem — as a logic for exploring how making and wearing can feed off and back into the material ecology of the city. This paper shares four projects that respond to specific urban situations — Melbourne, Ramallah (Palestine), Chinatown (Melbourne), and Christchurch — discussing what emerges within each situation, and what these projects offer for thinking about jewellery — as a practice and an artefact — and its relations with the city. Read complete paper


Abstract from, Jewellery, the urban milieu and emergence  
Full paper published in craft+design enquiry ; Issue 5 A World in Making: Craft Design 

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