2013 – Unnatural Acts & Unnatural Tendencies – 27/8/13 – 14/09/13

Please join us for celebratory drinks on Saturday 31st August 2013 between 4-6pm

Unnatural Tendencies – new & collaborative work by Lauren Simeoni & Melinda Young

Lauren Simeoni and Melinda Young have been working together on their ‘unnatural’ contemporary jewellery project since 2008. United by a love of frippery and fakery and a shared aesthetic sensibility, they have been actively sharing a sketchbook and materials – specifically artificial plant foliage, whilst enjoying the creative stimulation and fruits of a long-distance collaboration between their hometowns of Adelaide and Sydney. This has developed into an ongoing, constantly evolving body of work. Since Simeoni and Young’s first showing of their collaborative project in Sydney in 2009, they have travelled widely with the project in both Australia and New Zealand, exhibiting and conducting workshops. In 2011 they curated a group exhibition, unnatural Acts, for Velvet da Vinci Gallery in San Francisco, for this they invited eight other Australian jewellers into their fake foliage world, challenging them to create work from the same limited palette of materials, encouraging the artists to push the boundaries of their regular studio practice. unnatural Tendencies at Studio 20/17 is the latest incarnation of Simeoni and Young’s collaboration and marks the fourth anniversary of their first exhibition together under the ‘unnatural’ moniker.

Simeoni and Young’s project has seen some interesting developments in their work as they, naturally, have been influenced by each other through shared dialogue and material use. Whilst retaining their individual aesthetic sensibilities and signature touches; increasingly some works present a stylistic melding as they finish each other’s visual sentences. Until recently Simeoni and Young have worked individually on each piece, since 2011, they have pushed the collaboration one step further and worked on the same pieces together.

Unnatural Tendencies sees Simeoni and Young draw inspiration from a new collection of shared unnatural materials and the imagined narratives that they imply when deconstructed and also from the subtle, unnatural shifts between the inner suburbs of Adelaide and Sydney – the botany, architecture, people and sensibilities at once so similar, yet slightly strange. Creating works which are distillations of conversations, drawings and time spent exploring together the back ways and byways of inner suburbia. Their explorations reveal things that are natural – yet not, just like their work, where there is a sensory shift in place and constant inspiration taken from surroundings, then filtered through time and space into wearable concoctions of strange beauty.

un•nat•u•ral Acts – a contemporary jewellery project

Lauren Simeoni and Melinda Young have been working on a collaborative project together since 2008 in which they share found materials (mostly artificial plants) and rework them into contemporary jewellery. For this exhibition, unnatural Acts, they have invited eight other Australian jewellers to join their project; Anna Davern, Caz Guiney, Kath Inglis, Bridget Kennedy, Peta Kruger, Sim Luttin, Natalia Milosz-Piekarska and Mark Vaarwerk. Each has their own individual style, unique responses to materials and rich conceptual underpinnings in their practices. The concept for this exhibition is grounded in Simeoni and Young’s ongoing collaborative project and also the unnatural jewellery workshops they have conducted alongside their exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand. Each jeweller was sent a bag of the same materials – an odd collection of fake fruits, vegetables and other plant matter. The brief was simply to make a small collection of wearable jewellery using or responding to the contents of the bag. For most of the participants the brief did indeed require an ‘unnatural act’ to be performed outside of the comfort zone of their usual making. The results are diverse and exciting. (The onions were strangely popular).

unnatural Acts was initially developed at the invitation of Velvet da Vinci Gallery in San Francisco, where it was shown in July 2011. Since then it has been exhibited at craft, Melbourne; The National, Christchurch and most recently at Artisan in Brisbane.