tea cup – pellizco – flowers
tea cup – pellizco – flowers from Gemma Draper on Vimeo.
tea cup – pellizco – flowers from Gemma Draper on Vimeo.
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Twochairsandatable-Jewellery Agency, is the journal of the 2nd half of my time as a Senior Lecturer at Teesside University and Jeweller in Residence at MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2013-2015). A way to capture and share my everyday activities.
Wandering Monograms, 2015. Series of 6 broches. Fold and welded steel wire.
Trinkets, 2015 Fold Japanese paper.
While seating in a terrace with my Endotic team colleagues, at the end of the last day conference presentations, I’m called by a luminous sign blinking from the corner of my vision field. I grasp the phone, turn the camera on, and run to capture what seems like a ghostly dream.
I’m interested on keep exploring how objects might set its context’s conditions. To do so I decided to take our bathroom mirror outside the intimate space of the house. The mirror acts as an immediate interactive canvas, intense and indomitable in this plein air situation. It performs as a wild and overwhelming representation machine. I’m carrying a medium size mirror but feel like riding an untamed horse. If its materiality is already a body of given limitations and possibilities, how can I address any idea of displacement? Or, if there is a sense of completeness that wraps any object up, how to interact if not by transformative contamination or by destruction? Where is the “now” of an object to be found? “Consider the use of things as analogous to the speech act within the linguistic system” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980
I’m cutting silk to think about (broken) pearl necklaces.
Exploring jewellery with Teesside University Dance students at mima’s jewellery gallery. Jewellery motion explorations on a white table.
Thesaurus, 2015. Two brooches and a book Paper, ink, steel wire. For this special commission the focus has been to create a jewel that could communicate what is valuable for us. What could be more precious than the possibility of understanding and sharing our human experience through language? Thesaurus is the Greek word for treasure. These two brooches are physically made from the richness and the joy of the language: paper, ink, and meaning. Each ovals, a shape that is deeply rooted in the language of jewellery as one of the most traditional forms used for cameos and faceted stones, has been carved in the materiality of words to reveal and to celebrate both its simplicity and its complexity. What a light way of carrying so much! My approach to this search for what is worthy and can be shared as a common good has been kept intentionally simple in terms of materials and technical solution. A simple steel wire holds the shape and allows the work to be worn as a brooch. One of …
Today I have been introduced to these beauties!…Thanks to all the technicians at the product design workshop… you are the best!