My immediate thoughts are that the ethical dilemmas always are the most interesting ones. Those questions holds so many of the ingredients that are forming us as human beings. And there is no end to it either, the questions needs to be asked and responded to, over and over again.
For exemple, I am not using very much gold in my work but with the recent years awareness of environmental issues and war financing mining I don’t think I could make work without addressing the issue somehow. I would like to use certificately assured gold because it wouldn’t be coherent with my way of working to do otherwise. I have not thought about it very much before but if I think about how I work I use and count in a lot of meaning and values in the materials I use so it would be kind of illogical to ignore this information. The same way I “use” the idea and image of the tie as a mainly masculine attribute transferred by the tie fabric and patterns in some of my works, I might have to acknowledge that gold carries attributes that are heavier than the conventional idea of status and wealth…
I think that the different meanings of shading you mention goes very well with the theme of our blog. All connecting words, shattering, nuances and shading are saying something about the conditions of a migrant, good or bad! They can represent different angels of finding yourself in a new culture, understanding it and maybe longing to be understood within it.
When I say that wearability is intrinsic to how I work with my jewellery it is because it says so much about the frame I am working within. To picture a person wearing the jewellery and the reactions towards or with that person…Most of all it is how I read jewellery, who wears it? where? Do I want to wear it? And most important of all is the connotation of jewellery being a beautifying object, something that the wearer is proud of or somehow eager to show to others. This idea is something I very much count on while working. I am counting on that a wiever always has it in the back of hers/his mind when looking at jewellery. I do NOT mean that jewellery has to contain any of these qualities/ideas, only that they are constituting the back drop to how we read the work. That our concept of beauty and status differs between cultures is no news therefore I cannot claim another frame than the western world, specificly the north European one…
Considering what I just wrote there will always be a problem for a wearer to wear a problem! That is exactly the reason why I continue to work within the field of jewellery, because this is such a challenge. How can I part from an issue that is problematic and make it in to something a person wants to wear?
I think I will stop here for now and await your comment, looking forward!
Auli
