Speaking of Place

Kiff Slemmons, Starfish Memory Necklace, 2009

Velvet Da Vinci in San Francisco recently had an interesting exhibition called Puako: Jewelry by Kay Sekimachi and Kiff Slemmons. Sekimachi is a well-known American fibre artist, and Slemmons is a well-known American contemporary jeweller, and their show was essentially an American equivalent to the Bone Stone Shell movement. (You can read more about the exhibition by clicking here.) Puako is a bay on the big island of Hawai’i, and most of the materials used in the jewellery was gathered from the beach by Sekimachi and Slemmons – a beach combing to rival all that traipsing on the sand that kept some contemporary jewellers in Aotearoa busy throughout the 1980s.

I’m planning to do a more comprehensive review of the exhibition and post it on this website, but suffice it to say that it was quite interesting observing how Sekimachi and Slemmons worked with their natural materials, and the ways in which they activated the various senses of place in their jewellery. Indeed, it was really interesting not having the necessary cultural cues to be able to place their work effectively. Do Americans have a beach combing culture? Do visitors to Hawai’i collect shells and bring them home? How – or even are - these two jewellers constructing a connection to indigenous Hawai’ian art in their jewellery? What are the nuances of Hawai’i in the popular imagination of Americans, and does the exhibition Puako play with these kinds of issues?

Most of these questions I can’t properly answer, but I do know that seeing this work reminded me again of the excellence of New Zealand contemporary jewellery when it comes to using natural materials. Take a long tradition of Pacific adornment, add thirty years of contemporary jewellery experimentation, and the end result is kind of remarkable.

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