‘I AM HERE’
Dick Institute, Kilmarnock.
The exhibition is running until April 29
I AM HERE, a Crafts Council Touring Exhibition of portable art, wearable objects and jewellery since the 1970s features 98 pieces of studio jewellery by the most significant European makers from the last five decades.
Starting with pieces from the most radical era of making in the 1970’s, I AM HERE tells a story of jewellery through the work held in the collections of Crafts Council, mima, Galerie Marzee, Gallery S O and Pangolin London.
The New Jewellery movement of the 1970s saw jewellers using non-precious materials and experimental design to highlight contemporary social and political issues. This shifted our idea of what jewellery could be and had a profound impact on future making both in the UK and beyond.
The exhibition includes work by Susanna Heron, one of the first jewellers to use Perspex in the early 1970s, a film of an arm piece made of ice by Naomi Filmer and a bejewelled fur-coated emperor penguin brooch by Dutch jeweller Felieke van der Leest.
Other jewellers include Gijs Bakker, Caroline Broadhead, Tatty Devine, Gerda Flöckinger, Karl Fritsch, Rudolf Kocea, Ted Noten, Dorothea Prühl, Mah Rana, Hans Stofer, Emmy van Leersum and David Watkins.
The exhibition’s title comes from an essay by the anthropologist Ted Polhemus in which he says, ‘Lost in an increasingly undifferentiated, homogenised global universe we urgently need visual adjectives which proclaim ‘I am here’. The essay was commissioned for the catalogue of the 2007 Jerwood Applied Arts Prize.
