Nothern Exposure
December 21, 2009
One of the things that really stood out for me during my recent trip to Sweden is that Swedish contemporary jewellery (and craft) has been, until relatively recently, quite isolated from the rest of Europe. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the first exhibition of contemporary jewellery from other countries took place in Stockholm, and the contemporary position of Swedish jewellery as important and interesting – and the sense of connection to the rest of Europe – is something that has developed in the last decade or so.
This surprised me a great deal, and was one of the unexpected similarities between Swedish and New Zealand contemporary jewellery. I had assumed that Swedish craft in general would be highly connected as a legacy of the international reach of Scandinavian modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. (Even in Aotearoa we knew about Scandinavian modernism, and the most fashionable of our citizens aspired to, and purchased, Danish furniture, Swedish glass, etc.) Now, my knowledge of this is pretty shaky, but it seems that this fame was a result of corporate activities, generated by the efforts of a few large producers. It did not involve a network established on the level of individual craftspeople. After Scandinavian modernism ran out of steam (or favour) in the 1970s, Swedish jewellery remained fairly insular, much as it had been before the burgeoning of Nordic design in the mid 20th century.
I guess the larger lesson of this is that you don’t have to be living at the bottom of the world to feel left out. There is a definite sense that the Nordic countries exist on the edge of Europe, and the kind of fellowship it seems that all Europeans experience (from the perspective of Aotearoa) is not a very accurate representation of the situation on the ground. I take heart from the example of Sweden, since if Swedish jewellers can establish engaged and critically respected practices that matter on the international stage in less than twenty years, then there is no reason why New Zealand jewellers can’t achieve something similar.
