Artist Statement – Diamonds, Diamonds? Series of two works
Reuse and remaking have become central to my practice, both in my own work and through Remade-Reloved, an ongoing curatorial project that invites contemporary jewellers and object makers to respond to discarded and donated costume jewellery.
One of the things I enjoy about working with existing jewellery is that the material becomes the starting point. Sometimes I have a clear idea of what I want to make; sometimes the materials have other ideas. I’m interested in that process of working things out through making, and in allowing unexpected outcomes or material resistance to shift the direction of a work.
Repetition, sorting and ordering often find their way into my practice too. There’s something calming in these processes, they give me time to think, while also providing a way of bringing disparate objects together and finding new relationships between them.
Remade-Reloved has become an extension of this thinking. At its heart is a fairly simple proposition: what happens when we take something that has been discarded or no longer valued and look at it again? Through both the project and my own making, I’m interested in how acts of reuse and transformation can shift our ideas about material value, preciousness and what is considered worthy of keeping.
Diamonds? Diamonds grew from this ongoing enquiry. I’m not particularly drawn to glitzy jewellery, and my original intention was to completely cover these small rhinestones with enamel or electroformed copper. But the materials didn’t want to cooperate. Rather than force them into what I had imagined, I let the process determine where the work landed.
There is also a slightly tongue-in-cheek play with materials running through the work. Gold and silver nail enamel paints sit alongside actual gold and silver, allowing an inexpensive imitation of precious metal to occupy the same space as the ‘real’ thing.
Along with the resulting field of repurposed rhinestones there sits a single diamond, almost impossible to distinguish from its neighbours. Like the rhinestones and the diamond, the visual similarities of the paints begin to blur distinctions between what is precious and what merely appears to be.
By placing the precious and non-precious side by side, without telling the viewer which is which, Diamonds? Diamonds playfully asks where value actually resides. Is it in the material itself, in knowing that something is precious, or in the stories and systems of value we’ve built around it?
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