I’ve decided to keep the rest of the website going, and I will try and add research, reviews and essays whenever I get a chance. The book I’m writing with Kevin Murray about contemporary jewellery in Australia and Aotearoa is coming along nicely, and I’m sure this project will generate some good primary and secondary material that I can put on Paua Dreams. I will also be working on an exhibition of Kobi Bosshard’s jewellery for Objectspace, which should bring to light some vintage material. And, partly as a result of my job with AJF, I should be able to get overseas a bit more, and I’ll try and keep publishing reviews of exhibitions that I encounter during my travels.

In her abstract Plimmer writes:

The collection of studio jewellery and art metalwork by public institutions and private persons is scrutinised and a thesis is postulated: that much of the work produced by the studio jewellers of that time is held in private collections, on the basis of sentiment, rather than on an appreciation of its true worth. The jewellers and art metalworkers who produced the work are largely forgotten and their work unrecognised, except where it is held by the families of the makers. The reasons for this lack of recognition are speculated upon. The thesis is confirmed when someone stands on a pair of earrings.

That last bit is a good example of Plimmer’s sly sense of humour, which I am sure any reader of this thesis will warmly welcome.

There is much to like here. As well as filling in a part of local jewellery history that has been missing from our record of studio jewellery in Aotearoa, Plimmer combines academic research and speculation with a maker’s awareness and engagement with the jewellery itself. Indeed, this is probably the most interesting part of the thesis, or at least the aspect that I found both surprising and enriching. Here, for example, is Plimmer writing about a paua and sterling silver tie pin by Alfred Atkinson:

The back of the brooch is always the side of most interest to jewellers – the findings, a collective term for the working parts of an item of jewellery, are where the true craftsperson is revealed. Alfred’s finding, in this instance, is perfectly functional but not exquisite. There are shadows at the base of the book and the pivot that speak of more filling and sanding being needed to remove the last of the excess solder. The hook and pivot are made of brass. In the centre there is a bar of sterling silver that has been milled and hammered to flatten it from the round or square to the rectangular. One can discern a slight curve to the centre of this bar, where the metal is thinner than at the edges. The curve was created by the hammering that was done to spread the bar wider; if the hammer blows are even slightly off-centre, the metal expands more on the side that is being hit and contracts on the other edge. This creates a curve in the metal. The silver bar has two “wings”, small semi-circular pieces of silver plate, attached by solder with, notably, the excess filed and sanded into a sweeping curve that flows seamlessly to the bar. The wings form a solid platform that supports the elephant and allows it to be riveted to the bar that holds the mechanism. Paua, indeed all stone, bone and shell, cannot be soldered – the heat cracks the stone or burns the shell, hence the need for a cold form of connection and a rivet is one of the simplest methods. Care needs to be taken however, as paua is fragile and can easily crack or shatter if the artist hammers the rivet too firmly.

Plimmer examines the careers of Alfred Atkinson, Louisa Atkinson, Mollie Atkinson, Zelda Paul, Peggy Proffitt and Edith Morris, in the process adding to Ann Calhoun’s previous work about the Arts and Crafts movement in New Zealand craft. Given the paucity of historical research on jewellery in Aotearoa, I would highly recommend Plimmer’s Family Jewels, and extend to her my (belated) congratulations on a thesis well proven.

Shareholders of the Wellington-Manawatu Railway Company conferred a free life pass on John Plimmer, one of the first promoters of the railway and for 18 years a director of the company. The unmarked medal carries an engraving of Plimmer. Prime Minister Richard Seddon held a gold railway pass in the form of a tiki, and a similar one was used by Sir Maui Pomare. A railway pass for the member of Patea is edged with mouldings of Maori carvings and embellished with a kiwi and a Maori waka in the central field. It possibly belonged to the member for Western Maori. A similar medal was used by Sir Maui Pomare, who also held a gold pass in the form of a patu. Yet another was for Rewi Maniapoto.

The oldest known is a sterling silver tiki, ca 1870s, issued to the Hon. J.D. Ormond, Superintendent for Hawke’s Bay, and New Zealand’s first Minister of Finance.’

Winsome Shepherd, Gold & Silversmithing in Nineteenth & Twentieth Century New Zealand. Wellington: Museum of New Zealand, 1995, p.122.

At first things went well. Dad acquired a black Morris 25 and a black homburg hat. He travelled both islands his with shiny black sample case unloading hundreds of tiny hand-painted old masters on a public hungry for luxuries. They could hardly get enough of them. My mother struggled at her desk long into the night to keep up. Then disaster struck. The invisible hand of the market delivered the whole enterprise a fatal blow. The newly elected National government dismantled import restrictions on jewellery (but not, for some reason, on art) and almost overnight the moderately priced kitsch Dad was peddling found itself competing with similar kitsch from Europe at half the price. The punters lost their taste for the local product. Dad and Dermot Holland struggled on far too long and eventually went to the wall. Colin McCahon and my brother went into partnership making even more outrageous kitsch from silver and melted Marmite jars but nobody much wanted that either.’

Hamish Keith, Native Wit. Auckland: Random House, 2008, pp.31-32.

What were the Magi if not magicians? They came to Jesus because that proximity was important to them. The gifts they brought had magical powers. Fourteen centuries later, the Florentines might be fascinated by money and material goods, but they hadn’t reached the dull point where matter is just matter, or where symbolism is merely an artistic convention whereby abstract qualities can be evoked through this or that image. No, for the people of Cosimo’s generation, a certain kind and color of dress, a particular hat, or a diamond ring still possessed powers that went beyond their being indicators of material wealth. Treated or processed in a certain way, material things could take on magical force. What was that rhinoceros horn doing in the Medici bank’s warehouse, if not waiting to be ground up in a magic potion? The bones of a dead saint were also alive with magic. Keep them close and they will work miracles. To show reverence, to encourage the miracle, you put them in an elaborate reliquary, a work of the finest craftsmanship, of Ghiberti, or Donatello. Art and magic call to each other.

But alas, saints’ bones are scarce. And rhinoceros horns even more so. When the great preacher, misogynist, and anti-Semite Bernardino di Siena died in 1444, the popular enthusiasm to possess some object that the charismatic man had touched left his poor donkey stripped of all those hairs that had rubbed the holy backside. Afterward, when the buying and selling began, how could you tell one donkey hair from another? How can you tell a real relic from a fake? The holy foreskin of our circumcised Lord is still held in one church in Italy. In 1352 the Florentine government had bought an arm of Saint Reparata from Naples, only to find it was made of wood and plaster.

But if you couldn’t find or afford the saint himself, the real thing, there was always his painted or sculpted likeness. The faithful kissed the saint’s stone feet, brushed his painted gown with theirs. They were close to him, through art. The banker Giovanni Rucellai had his tomb made in an exact likeness of the Holy Sepulchre. This mimicry could only make the passage to heaven easier. The copied image, that is, had a virtue that went beyond an aesthetic appreciation of the sensual world. It appropriated the qualities of its model. It served to create proximity to the sacred. The craftsmanship of the reliquary and the power of the relic were fused together in the fine fresco that showed, convincingly, the saints about their miracles.’

Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. London: Profile Books, 2006, pp.130-133.

I felt really international about all this, especially since I talk about this connection in the lecture I have been giving about New Zealand contemporary jewellery. (Peter McKay is my cautionary tale ending in triumph in terms of how the New Zealand jeweller deals with his or her distance from the metropolitan centre.) All was good until I realised I had been presenting Uccello’s work as a sculpture, and not as a fresco as it so obviously is. How quicky the warm glow of cosmopolitanism can turn into the blush of provincial naivete.

“One is possession – as in, with this ring, I make you mine,” Benton said. “The other is control – as in, I’m putting a shackle around your ankle. I own you.”

Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta. Great Britain: Sphere, 2008, p.214.

Design is a powerful force in shaping material culture, societal values and human behaviour. Ideas about how things should be are often embedded within the persuasive visions and forms of design and architecture. As a service profession, design typically operates “in service” to the ideas of its clients. This differentiates it from art, which has a tradition of criticizing its commissioning institutions, and craft, which has long represented a counter-culture to mainstream modes of production and consumption. However, many contemporary designers are countering conventional ideas of what design is, and what it should be about. In emerging genres of “social”, “critical” and “activist” design, practitioners question issues of gender and class, ownership and authorship, power and welfare. The critique posed is not of design, as such, but of design blindly serving historical convention or hegemonic ideologies.

I found the comment about design’s relationship to craft to be pretty interesting, and a good explanation of why contemporary design is interested in craft – and has recently staged a number of incursions into craft territory. If craft has always stood as a counterculture to mainstream production and practices, then craft references within design (think Hella Jongerius) will be very useful in shifting the position and possibilities of design, its relationship to its own history. Critical design will of course be very interested in capturing countercultural positions, just as it will be interested in drawing on the (supposed) freedom of fine art in relation to its commissioning institutions.

Yet design doesn’t want to become craft, since to transform like this would be to lose the sense of contemporaneity that design has mastered so well, and which craft has failed to capture. (Craft trails its daggy and old-fashioned roots like a shaggy wool hanging from the 1970s.) The important thing from design’s perspective is grabbing hold of signs that can stand in for the best elements of craft’s radicality, its countercultural posturing.

I’ve always been suspicious of design’s intentions towards craft, seeing it as a kind of opportunistic theft that leaves craft even worse off. It is not always positive to have more powerful neighbours become too interested in what you are doing. Trade, in this sense, tends to be very one-sided, and looking at the way design craps on craft in order to scramble up to the level of fine art is kind of depressing. Yet maybe design’s interest has been good for craft, if only because it has awoken some sense of indignation within the crafts scene. There’s nothing like a violent incursion to get the pulse racing.

Like most European jewellers that I have encountered, none of these Swedish jewellers saw themselves as making Swedish jewellery. It was as though they didn’t even understand this as a basic label for them and their work – Swedish jewellery being jewellery which is made in Sweden, or by Swedish jewellers. Instead, the only way they seemed to understand this label was as a descriptor of theme or material – Swedish jewellery as jewellery that in some way declares its Swedishness through references to national/ethnic traditions, or local or natural materials. In this sense, none of the jewellers who attended the discussion in Goteborg were Swedish jewellers, and none of them seemed to think of their work in these terms.

This issue raises a series of questions that I am keen to understand properly. Why is it that Europeans think about their jewellery without reference to nationality? What framework replaces national identity in terms of how they think about their work? What value is there in nationalising European jewellery? Does this unlock otherwise hidden meanings or dimensions of practice; does it undo the universalising claims of European jewellery? (Its claims to be global, rather than provincial?) Is this a model that should be applied to New Zealand contemporary jewellery (or any other country)? What are good and bad methods of thinking about, or relating to, national identity in jewellery? E.g. what is Swedishness in contemporary jewellery, and what value does it offer for Swedish jewellery to engage with local traditions? Or is it just a fast track to provincial irrelevance?

It is interesting that Americans seem to have no trouble applying the term American jewellery to their work, or Australians the idea of Australian jewellery. And indeed, we can easily talk about the idea of European jewellery. So perhaps part of the issue is Europe’s geographical closeness, the flow of people and jewellery between national borders. (I am currently in Geneva, Switzerland, and yesterday I went to France for brunch – a pretty unimaginable event from the perspective of my normal life in Gisborne.) Perhaps this is responsible for the greater expansiveness of Swedish (and other European) jewellery. And of course nobody – even New Zealand jewellers – finds it easy to think about national identity beyond that initial level of jewellery being New Zealand or otherwise by virtue of being made in New Zealand, or by New Zealanders.

Still, this apparent confidence on the part of contemporary jewellers living in Sweden does not necessarily translate to the culture at large. At Arlanda airport outside Stockholm there are a series of posters lining the walls of the arrival hall which advertise the famous sons and daughters of Sweden. I smiled when I saw this, because it reminded me of Gisborne, and our local campaign to remind visitors to our, admittedly much smaller, airport of all the famous people who have been born and raised in our local slice of paradise. Gisborne has to do this because we are a small, provincial city which struggles with self-confidence in the face of the rest of New Zealand. It seems, no matter what its local jewellers might seem to imply, that Sweden suffers from a similar sense of uncertainty about its identity on the international stage.