Manfred Bischoff - Gold, coral
I will be uploading post after post after post about contemporary jewellery artists and their work every single day here, I promise you. So, just in case you’ve stumbled in my newborn web site by accidentally misspelling another word for ‘scorn’, there might be one thing you might ask yourself before you click that back button:
What is contemporary jewellery, anyway?
I don’t believe that this question could be answered in one single post. Or one single blog. Or one single universe for that matter. And I’m not even pretending to be able to explain what it is myself. Trust me, not even I am so pretentious… But let me see if I can list a couple of things that contemporary jewellery is NOT, yet somehow most people, especially here in Greece, where I am living at the moment, seem to find very difficult to accept.
Contemporary jewellery is NOT:
- beading
- soldering metals with calay
- taking silversmithing classes where you endlessly copy old-fashioned designs, other people’s designs or little cats or stars or butterflies on metal or wood or rubber or paper or stone, or any other material known to man
- grabbing any given amount of mixed media, pigment, acrylic, seeds, or whatever else you’ve got in your kitchen or find on the beach, and throwing it in backets full of epoxy resin…
You see, contemporary jewellery could be all these things, if only one simple aspect were thrown into the equation: the maker’s soul…
And before the real contemporary jewellers come after me with their torches, you need one more thing: endless years of experimenting and meticulously learning the art of gold- or silversmithing.
But let’s not discourage the few of us that have absolutely no possibility of visiting a contemporary jewellery school full-time, ok?
Peter Bauhuis
Doris Maninger
Lucia Massei - Brooch. Silver, paint, fine gold
Ruudt Peters
Daniela Boieri
Marzia Rossi
Yoko Shimizu