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