blog
Welcome to my blog. This is a place where I think out loud, show you what I’m up to in the studio, share impressions of inspiring events or everyday moments that moved me. Some entries are carefully curated essays, others are just a few thoughts, sometimes written in English and sometimes in German.
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Sea Salt & Enamels: A Teaching Experience in Murcia
An enriching teaching experience at the Escuela de Arte de Murcia in Spain.
Travelling during pandemic times is difficult, if not outright impossible. Usually, my job involves a fair amount of travelling and with that, the vibrant and joyful exchange of sharing a common passion in different cultural environments.
With those pale Covid-months stretching across a barren 2020, with no exhibitions, craft fairs, symposiums, workshops and other events to participate in, I feel almost starved of the exhilarating opportunity to exit my own bubble and taste some other reality elsewhere. Travelling, and more importantly, in-person contact with other creative minds, has become so rare that its value has increased dramatically.
So, an opportunity to teach a five-day enamelling workshop at the Escuela de Arte de Murcia this past week was a welcome and precious gift. The school, which actively encourages students to travel internationally via Erasmus exchanges and offers Erasmus staff mobilities to teachers and lecturers, focusses its jewellery course on contemporary art jewellery, especially exploring alternative materials and new techniques. In the midst of our bleak and never-ending lockdown, the jewellery department reached out to me and my partner Alvaro to travel to Murcia via an Erasmus mobility grant and teach a workshop there respectively; Alvaro’s course centring around creative wax modelling techniques for casting, and mine exploring a more experimental and perhaps intuitive approach to enamelling.
The region of Murcia is situated in Southern Spain, bordering Valencia and Andalusia, with the Mediterranean Sea to the East. Travelling to this light-bathed, unknown spot of land really did something for our souls – for both of us, there was an immediate shedding of the darkness that had muted our efforts to create something wholesome and bright during the winter.
Alvaro’s workshop explored a range of different wax-working techniques, starting with several distinct kinds of modelling wax with their own unique purpose each, and becoming more experimental with the inclusion of plastic objects and organic materials, emphasising the particular preparation of dried plant parts to enable proper casting. The workshop combined all these different wax-working techniques in a final project: creating a modern chimera, an imaginary beast, a creature of all walks of life giving voice to any pluralistic interpretation the students wished to express.
My workshop expanded on basic enamelling techniques with an experimental approach, starting with easier techniques such as dry-sifting and layering enamel, and working towards more complex techniques using vitreous enamel, foil or graphite. Finally, the course encouraged participants to create completely unique and often surprising enamel effects using sand, aluminium, fine silver, organic materials to burn in the kiln, or anything else that might cause a chemical reaction with interesting results during the firing process. The students were tasked to identity and express a particular emotion in their final pieces, one that no single word exists for and that can only be described by explaining the situation it is experienced in. The spectrum of emotions presented in the end – many of them dealing with our current Covid-19-situation – revealed just how rich and varied the scope of individual experiences can be.
To teach a alongside my partner Alvaro was a unique gift in itself. Even though we both have a history of diverse teaching experiences, this was the first time for us presenting workshops side by side, being able to discuss the studio set-up, the coherence of our planned activities, and the progress of our students. There was a sense of intense, creative flow, in unison. The tapas bar nights and extended walks through the city of Murcia were filled with conversations, ideas, plans for future projects. The unbelievable food experiences here were certainly also responsible for our enthusiasm: Tomatoes that tasted of ripe sun, and perfect olives, and the most exquisite fried octopus, sea food paella, oranges that were so fresh you could smell them from across the street, and everything augmented by the most umami sea salt (which is produced in this area of Spain near Cartagena) and toppiest top quality olive oil.
We vowed to find new way to keep chasing this positive energy and vibrant life force we felt here, not to allow others with a more negative disposition to drag us down back home.
Blätterfresser
Die Blätterfresser erzählen vom tödlichen Leben, vom lebendigen Sterben. Sie erinnern daran, dass nichts ewig ist, und doch alles immer wiederkehrt. Daran, dass auch wir Narben und Fraßspuren sammeln, die oft nur den Überlebenswillen anderer Wesen auf unseren Körpern und Seelen markieren.
Auf dem Unikampus, den ich täglich überquerte, entdeckte ich eines Tages eine Hecke mit von Insekten zerfressenen Blättern. Die löchrigen Fraßkanten bildeten ein filigranes Muster, das gleichzeitig von Leben und Tod erzählte. Manche Blätter zeigten nur ein paar verstreute Löcher wie zufällig fallen gelassene Perlen, andere waren bis auf ein Skelett abgenagt. Die Fraßspuren wurden beim längeren Hinsehen zum sich wiederholenden aber doch immer neu ausgeprägten Muster, zum Ornament.
Hier waren zwei Lebenswillen ineinander verzahnt: Ein kleines Knabberwesen auf der Suche nach Nahrung, und ein größeres Pflanzenwesen auf der Such nach Licht. Ich sah ein für unsere menschlichen Ohren stilles Drama, eine Geschichte von Geben und Nehmen und Überleben, vom Trotzen. In einer Zeit in der ich mich selber manchmal etwas un-heil fühlte, war ein Blatt, das Verletzungen wie Schmucknarben trug und doch lebte und funktionierte und photosyntierte, für mich ein starkes Symbol.
Ich schuf daraus die Kollektion Blätterfresser: Ohrringe, Broschen und Taschenglücksbringer, handgesägt aus Silber, Gold oder Kupfer, in bunt schillernden Farbtönen einzigartig emailliert. Bis heute sind viele Stücke für diese Kollektion entstanden, und jedes einzelne hat einen ganz individuellen Charakter.
Die Blätterfresser erzählen vom tödlichen Leben, vom lebendigen Sterben. Sie erinnern daran, dass nichts ewig ist, und doch alles immer wiederkehrt. Daran, dass auch wir Narben und Fraßspuren sammeln, die oft nur den Überlebenswillen anderer Wesen auf unseren Körpern und Seelen markieren.
Mit meinen hellgrünen Blätterfressern aus Gold und Emaille fühle ich mich stark. Sie erinnern daran, dass wir durch unsere löchrig gefressenen Lebensgeschichten manchmal sogar schöner, interessanter und vor allem eigener werden.
Mobilia Gallery Exhibition
Covid-19 has taught us artists and galleries to diversify our sales channels, and I am curious to see how this trend will evolve, which technologies prove to be useful and which are less helpful, which alternative methods of communication have the ability to truly touch people.
A small collection of my work is currently part of an exhibition at Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts titled JEWELLERY FROM ARCHITECTURE. The gallery has created a delightful digital catalogue to accompany their exhibition. If you are interested to see it, please contact me or email Libby and Jo Anne directly at mobiliagallery@gmail.com. Alternatively, see the online design store Mobilia has put up on their website.
Covid-19 has taught us artists and galleries to diversify our sales channels, and I am curious to see how this trend will evolve, which technologies prove to be useful and which are less helpful, which alternative methods of communication have the ability to truly touch people. To me, it seems that the digital catalogues and online collections we are creating now also function as beautiful chronicles of the work we make, perhaps a sort of 21st century florilegium to gather and curate that which emerges from our creative practices.
Here is a screen shot of the gallery’s online display, and a selection of pieces specifically created for Mobilia Gallery:
It’s winter. I cherish this white and noiseless time between the bustle of our Christmas season and the start of the new year. Since moving to Europe, it’s taken me a few years to learn to fully appreciate winter. Now, I know it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move here in the first place: I needed a real winter, I needed its pause and reflection, its going-underground, its gathering-of-forces, its quiet stripping away of the unnecessairy, its gestation for new creativity to emerge.